Abstract
Healthy stress is about healthy balance. When life becomes difficult, however, it is easy to get out of balance, either getting completely caught up in the stress and ignoring everything else in life or avoiding stress and pretending nothing is wrong which can allow difficult situations to get worse. Buddhist approaches of mindfulness and living the middle way teach us to engage with life stress in a healthy and balanced way. By learning to be mindful, we learn to be with our life experiences as they occur. By learning to live the middle way between over-engagement and avoidance, we learn to address our life difficulties in a healthy, balanced way. In this chapter, we begin by discussing the importance of coping effectively with stress, how the stress response works, and the importance of physiological balance, and then, we address mindfulness approaches to stress reduction, specifically mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.
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Steffen, P.R., Fox, S., Brown, B. (2020). Mindfulness and the Middle Way of Stress Reduction. In: Steffen, P.R. (eds) Mindfulness for Everyday Living. Mindfulness in Behavioral Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51618-5_1
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