Gatehouse blog - Mindfulness
Mindfulness is not just for your mind – it’s also good for your heart
Mindfulness has been a buzz word in mental health and self-help circles for some time now. At its core, mindfulness simply means paying full attention to the present moment by having a non-judgemental awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and the environment around us. Focusing on the present moment is helpful because we can get trapped in unhelpful thought cycles when we continuously think about what has happened in the past or worry about something that might happen in the future.
As well as helping with our thought patterns, recent research suggests that mindfulness may also have physical health benefits. This is incredibly important, particularly in relation to Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). The World Health Organisation tells us that CVDs are the leading cause of death globally, and data from the British Heart Foundation shows that in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough alone, 113,000* people are living with a CVD, and someone dies from a CVD every 5 hours. CVDs are a group of disorders of the heart and blood vessels and include coronary heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, rheumatic heart disease and other conditions. More than four out of five CVD deaths are due to heart attacks and strokes, and one third of these deaths occur prematurely in people under 70 years of age.
A scientific paper published in the journal Brain Sciences finds that mindfulness can play an important role in reducing your risk for, and recovery from, CVDs. In a review of dozens of studies, researchers concluded that mindfulness leads to benefits for several factors associated with heart disease and should form part of a CVD care plan. Mindfulness based interventions have a positive influence on psychological CVD risk factors such as anxiety and depression, and also improve physiological fitness by reducing blood pressure, heart palpitations and heart rate.
"Not only can mindfulness improve how your heart functions, but a regular mindfulness practice can support your resilience and help you to maintain many heart-healthy behaviours, such as getting enough sleep," says Dr. Adele Pacini, Project Lead for the Mindfulness for Later Life Program at Gatehouse Charity. “We have delivered this project online over the past few years and our outcomes show that participants consistently reduce their depression and anxiety levels, increase their resilience, and improve their sleep.”
With funding from Cambridgeshire and Peterborough ICS Health Inequalities Challenge Prize, we are piloting the Mindfulness for Later Life Program for local residents, and taking a particular look at outcomes for people with CVDs. To find out more about the program or to make an application to attend, please visit our website.
* British Heart Foundation figure (Cambridgeshire / Peterborough) based on BHF estimates of the latest GP prevalence data from NHS England and latest health surveys with CVD fieldwork; NHS England.