Conference Spotlight: Mindfulness Sessions for Self-Care

Ever feel overwhelmed, anxious or burned out? Ever feel like you spend so much time taking care of others that you can’t focus on yourself? Does your daily stress lead to unhealthy habits?

At #NORDP2019 in Providence, you can choose from a range of activities for a healthy start to your mornings. Every day of the conference at 6 am, as we have in past years , we are offering opportunities for an invigorating walk, run or bike with fellow conference-goers. And a new option this year is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction sessions, for relaxation and focus. (Each of these activities is seeking volunteers to help facilitate: sign up here to lead a walk/bike route, or here to help with Mindfulness.)

Further, we are thrilled to offer a presentation from renowned expert Judson Brewer, MD, PhD. Dr. Brewer is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and Associate Professor in Psychiatry at the Brown University School of Medicine. He also is a research affiliate at MIT.

See Dr. Brewer during Concurrent Session I:

How to Hack Our Craving Minds for Better Health

Tuesday, 8:30-9:30 am
Providence Rooms II & III
How do habits form, and why are they so hard to break? In 2014, Time magazine declared a “mindful revolution” due to its growing popularity and research suggesting that mindfulness may help to treat a number of health-related problems from anxiety to addiction. However, little is known about how (and how well) it works. In this talk, Dr. Brewer, a world-renowned expert in behavior change, will map how our minds form habits, and how we can use mindfulness training to hack this same learning process to break out of unhealthy habits ranging from emotional eating to anxiety. He will highlight the scientific research underlying behavior change using examples from clinical studies of app-based mindfulness training for smoking (Craving to Quit), eating (Eat Right Now) and anxiety (Unwinding Anxiety), as well as brain imaging studies from his lab. He will also show how we can tap into our reward-based learning systems to build our natural capacities of awareness, kindness, and curiosity.

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#NORDP2019 start Monday, April 29, in Providence, RI. For more information about the conference program, visit http://www.nordp.org/conferences. Follow @NORDP_official on Twitter for all the latest #NORDP2019 updates.