A growing body of evidence shows that mindful meditation can help ease psychological stress and stress-related health problems, including anxiety, depression and pain.

While there are many different meditation techniques, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, also known as “MBSR”, emphasizes training your mind to pay attention to the present moment and letting concerns about the past or future drift away. This mindfulness practice teaches us to notice our feelings and sensations, even if they are intense and overwhelming, without judgement. A combination of mindfulness meditation, body scanning and yoga produces a relaxation response that reduces the activity of the sympathetic nervous system, which is in charge of activating our “fight-or-flight” reactions to stress. Embodied mindfulness gives us the tools to respond with self-awareness rather than react automatically to life’s many ups and downs.

A formal eight-week MBSR program was created in 1979 by American professor Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and it is now used in hospitals across the U.S. and Canada. Some studies have shown that MBSR can help people going through health problems, such as cancer patients adjusting to the psychosocial aspects of their disease, or organ transplant patients dealing with the distressing symptoms of anxiety, depression, and poor sleep. MBSR programs have also been known to quell anxiety symptoms in people with generalized anxiety disorder, which is characterized by excessive worry, sleep disturbances, and irritability. Practicing MBSR, even as a healthy person in the short term (i.e. 2.5 hours per week for 8 weeks, during classes and at-home sessions), can help reduce stress, ruminative thinking and anxiety, as well as increase empathy and self-compassion.

While Kabat-Zinn placed the concept of mindfulness in a scientific and medical context to make it more accessible to secular audiences, the practice of present-moment mindfulness derives from ancient Buddhist spiritual traditions, based on Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan meditation techniques. Kabat-Zinn himself was influenced by Zen teachers Thích Nhất Hạnh and Seungsahn.

As meditation gains more mainstream acceptance as a stress reduction technique, it’s important to remember that mastering our mental and emotional processes is a skill that requires time and patience, through lifelong growth and learning.