Integrative Body-Mind Training Reduces Stress in Five Days

Undergraduate students at the University of Oregon (UO) are currently being taught an attention-changing and stress-reducing body-mind technique that was adapted in the 1990s in China from ancient medicinal practices. The method, called integrative body-mind training (IBMT), can yield visible results in little more than five days, and is entirely based on techniques devised by ancient Chinese medicine practitioners, most likely the same people that invented acupuncture some 6,000 years ago.

In a study published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2007, researchers Yi-Yuan Tang, a UO professor, and Michael Posner, a UO psychologist, showed that doing IBMT for a few minutes before a math test contributed to significantly reducing the amounts of the stress hormone cortisol in students in the test group, as opposed to control subjects. Lower levels of anxiety, depression, anger and fatigue were also recorded in the test group.

“The previous paper indicated that IBMT subjects showed a reduced response to stress. Why after five days did it work so fast?” Tang said recently. He argued that practicing IBMT altered blood flow and electrical activity in the human brain, and that the technique also changed the breathing quality and even skin conductance. This allowed for “a state of ah, much like in the morning opening your eyes, looking outside the grass and sunshine, you feel relaxed, calm and refresh without any stress, this is the meditation state,” the expert added.

“We were able to show that the training improved the connection between a central nervous system structure, the anterior cingulate, and the parasympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system to help put a person into a more bodily state. The results seem to show integration – a connectivity of brain and body,” Posner explained about the new study, which appears in a new paper, published online ahead of print in PNAS as well.

“Life is full of stress, and people need to learn methods to handle stress and improve their performance. There is physical training but we wanted to see about mental training. This method appears to have benefit for the modern society where the pace is fast,” Tang shared about the benefits brought forth by the new relaxation technique. IBMT “reflected less effort exerted by participants and more relaxation of body and calm state of mind,” the researchers wrote in the PNAS paper. A “successful inhibition of sympathetic tone and activation of parasympathetic tone [in the autonomic nervous system] also appeared,” they pinpointed, adding that the sympathetic tone was most active when people were stressed out.