Mindfulness works wonders for women... but makes men moody
IT is extolled as the perfect remedy for stress and is fashionable with celebrities including Emma Watson and Angelina Jolie.
But while mindfulness can help women find inner calm, scientists have discovered it can actually put men in a worse mood.
The form of meditation – where subjects concentrate on their breathing and suspend judgment and criticism – appeals to women on an emotional level.
However, the periods of quiet reflection make men feel slightly worse than before they started, according to researchers at Brown University in the US. They followed 36 female and 41 male students on a 12-week course on mindfulness, including three onehour meditation sessions.
In these, they spent 30 minutes practising meditation from Buddhist traditions, followed by a tenminute reflection period and a question-and-answer session.
By the end of the course, the average student had taken part in more than 41 hours of meditation within the classroom and outside. Participants were then judged on their mood using a specially calculated point score. While women’s moods were found to improve by an average of 11.6 points, it had the opposite effect on men, whose moods deteriorated slightly.
Dr Willoughby Britton, from Brown University, said she was surprised by the results but believed it was associated with how men and women traditionally deal with their emotions.
‘The mechanisms are highly speculative at this point, but ster- eotypically, women ruminate and men distract,’ she said. ‘So for people that tend to be willing to confront or turn toward the difficult, mindfulness is made for improving that.
‘ For people who have been largely turning their attention away from the difficult, to suddenly bring all their attention to their difficulties can be somewhat counter-productive.
‘While facing one’s difficulties and feeling one’s emotions may seem to be universally beneficial, it does not take into account that there may be different cultural expectations for men and women around emotionality.’
In recent years, mindfulness has become the trendy way to improve mental health and well-being. The Department for Education announced last month that children as young as eight are to trial lessons in the art.
It follows a global study which found that the UK has the second poorest mental health well-being among pupils in the world.
Dr Britton said the findings, published in the journal Frontiers In Psychology, could be used to further treat women, who are more vulnerable to certain mental health issues.
She said: ‘The fact that a college course could teach women skills to better manage negative effects at this early age could have potentially far-reaching effects on women’s lives.’