Starting Younger –
March 5, 2018 – As society faces mounting pressures and distractions, mindfulness has emerged as a widespread phenomenon; its benefits have been widely touted from lower school classrooms to the boardrooms of multinational corporations.
While the roots of mindfulness can be traced to early Buddhist philosophy, the practice was made mainstream in the 1970s by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn founded the UMass Medical School Center for Mindfulness, along with Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction therapy (MBSR), all with the intention of making mindfulness a secular practice of evidence-based science. Today, MBSR is used in more than 200 medical centers across the United States. A growing body of research points to the benefits of mindfulness for conditions including post-traumatic stress disorder, adolescent ADHD, and chronic pain management.
Over the past several decades, mindfulness approaches increasingly have been applied to substance abuse treatment and intervention programs. Additionally, according to recent research, mindfulness can also play a practical role in preventing use. Mindfulness can be a powerful protective tool, keeping healthy kids who do not use alcohol and other drugs protected from use through:
