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This Active Ingredient in Mindfulness Improves Your Social Life
Loneliness devastates our mental health because humans crave social support and interaction. And yet, in the modern world, many of us find it difficult to meet new people. Social awkwardness, shyness, and judgment, are all threats that harm our self-esteem and prevent us from forging valuable friendships. A new study, published in February 2019, suggests that mindfulness may provide a way out of these self-sabotaging cycles.
The researchers recruited 153 adults in Pittsburgh who suffered from high levels of stress. They split these participants into three groups, and each group was prescribed a separate behavioral intervention. All interventions were delivered via a smartphone app, and all had the same basic structure of 14 training sessions, each containing a 20-minute audio lesson and some practice exercises. The only important difference between these groups was the content of the lessons.
The lessons for the first group emphasized the monitoring and acceptance principles of mindfulness: monitoring is the capacity to focus our attention on our present-moment experiences, while acceptance teaches us to appreciate those experiences without judging or overthinking them. Unlike the first group, the lessons for the second group emphasized only the monitoring aspects of mindfulness, and the lessons for the third…
