Difficulty of letting go of old, habitual and non-adaptive ways of responding for the sake of better ones may underlie many of our everyday difficulties

Doing the same thing in the same way doesn't always work, whether it be trying to get out of a bout of depression or solve a dispute with a friend or colleague. Turns out, mindfulness meditation can help a person to steer clear of such mental traps that drag out problem solving, suggests a study published online May 15, 2012, in the journal PLoS ONE. After just a few weeks of mindfulness training, volunteers were better at switching strategies for problem-solving than volunteers who were not taught the technique.

"This difficulty of letting go of old, habitual and non-adaptive ways of responding for the sake of better ones may underlie many of our everyday difficulties," said study researcher researcher Jonathan Greenberg Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Greenberg added, "A married couple that repeatedly gets into the same quarrels and arguments may be able to break the cycle and look at things in a fresh perspective," Greenberg suggested. "Clinicians may be better able to offer new ways of looking at a clinical situation. Negotiators may be better at finding novel ways to settle disputes. Managers may be better able to think 'out of the box' and replace existing non-adaptive procedures with new and improved ones."