Mindfulness Meditation- Palliative Care for Anorexics

What does Anorexia Feel like?

Living with anorexia can feel like being suffocated: suffocated by food limitations, suffocated by a wish to achieve the ‘ideal’ weight, and suffocated by the fear of condemnation from family and friends. Many people who suffer from anorexia are perfectionists. They might be quite critical of their bodies and frequently suffer from low self-esteem.

According to one study, people with anorexia are more likely to have low self-directedness or adaptability. For example, if you have anorexia, you may have a more difficult time dealing with change than others (1^✔ ✔Trusted Source
An investigation of indirect effects of personality features on anorexia nervosa severity through interoceptive dysfunction in individuals with lifetime anorexia nervosa diagnoses

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Unfortunately, many family members, acquaintances, and celebrities have suffered from anorexia nervosa, or AN, a severe mental condition characterized by excessive worries about weight, form, and self-esteem. An eating disorder, dietary restriction, purposeful vomiting, and acute emaciation are all symptoms of AN.

Mindfulness meditation has already become a widely accepted treatment for AN. Its usefulness in clinically treating neurogenic emaciation, on the other hand, had not before been investigated.

Anorexia-related behavior patterns may also be present in your daily life. These tendencies can harm your emotional health and isolate you from those you care about.

Mindfulness Meditation and Anorexia, a Link

The mindfulness meditation method used by the team resulted in a considerable reduction in obsessive thoughts about the test subjects' self-image and brain activity connected with related emotions.

"Our results suggest that the participants in the study became better at accepting their anxiety as it is," says lead author Tomomi Noda.

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Mindfulness and meditation complement each other. The former teaches practitioners to sharpen their awareness of their current experience as well as their ability to accept rather than critique their circumstances. The latter is the method for approaching awareness (2^✔ ✔Trusted Source
Meditation and Yoga can Modulate Brain Mechanisms that affect Behavior and Anxiety-A Modern Scientific Perspective

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A 4-week mindfulness intervention program used tasks designed to provoke weight-related anxiety to investigate brain changes. The researchers subsequently reduced the patients' anxiety by assisting them in accepting their current events and experiences at face value rather than avoiding them.

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The researchers examined attention management concerning eating disorders using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. The study's findings corroborate the researchers' subjective perceptions, although it was surprising to them that certain worldwide events, including the COVID-19 epidemic and the Russo-Ukrainian war, were significant causes of patients' anxieties.

"We anticipate practical implications of our results in clinical psychiatry and psychology and broader research into mitigating suffering through mindfulness, using the strategy of self-acceptance to regulate attention," concludes group leader Toshiya Murai.

References:

1. An investigation of indirect effects of personality features on anorexia nervosa severity through interoceptive dysfunction in individuals with lifetime anorexia nervosa diagnoses - (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/eat.23008)
2. Meditation and Yoga can Modulate Brain Mechanisms that affect Behavior and Anxiety-A Modern Scientific Perspective - (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26929928/)

Source-Medindia