Scientific American News: Control Your Urges with a Ride on the Mindbus

Scientific American online posted an article on 3rd September 2013 in their Mind & Brain :: Mind Matters section titled: Control Your Urges with a Ride on the Mindbus.

Here are some quotes:

"Writing in the British Journal of Health Psychology, researchers from Swansea University and City University London present the results of an experiment in which individuals who resisted sweets by using mindfulness — a purposeful way of paying attention to the present moment — consumed less of them.
[...]
For cognitive “defusion,” a term which means to change one’s relationship with one’s thoughts, participants were instructed to view one’s self as different from one’s thoughts. They were given a strategy often used by mindfulness practitioners — the “mindbus” metaphor. An individual can be seen as the driver of a bus, and thoughts as the passengers. They were then given a bag of chocolate to carry around with them at all times over the next five days, and instructed to think of the mindbus whenever they were tempted to eat a chocolate.

In the acceptance group, participants were told that an effective way of dealing with food cravings was to simply accept these uncomfortable feelings, rather than spending effort trying to control them. They were told about “urge surfing,” in which participants were told to try acknowledge and ride out the urges, rather than controlling or giving in to them."