Positive Psychological States in the Arc from Mindfulness to Self-Transcendence: Extensions of the Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory and Applications to Addiction and Chronic Pain Treatment
Current Opinion in Psychology January 14, 2019 E. Garland, B. Fredrickson 131 citations
The Mindfulness-to-Meaning Theory (MMT) describes how mindfulness promotes health and resilience through positive emotion regulation. This review extends the MMT to show that mindfulness fosters self-transcendence by triggering upward spirals of decentering, attentional broadening, reappraisal, and savoring. Savoring is key for inducing absorptive experiences of oneness between subject and object, amplifying the object's salience and imbuing perception with affective meaning. New evidence indicates that inducing self-transcendent positive emotions and nondual states through mindfulness-based interventions may restructure reward processing, producing therapeutic effects on addictive behavior, such as opioid misuse, and chronic pain syndromes.