Mindfulness has been studied in the treatment of certain anxiety complaints, with some promising results. In meta-analyses carried out by Baer in 2003 and Bishop in 2002, it was found to reduce distress across a number of anxiety disorders, including Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). This is perhaps not surprising because neurobehavioural research has found that the orbital frontal cortex in the brain is involved in people making emotional assessments and judgements about danger in their environment. This part of the brain can be overactive in people with obsessive compulsive disorder, with the increases in metabolism giving a heightened feeling that something is wrong. Because mindfulness trains a person to observe inner experiences with calm and without immediately responding to them, it can assist people to learn different behaviours in response to their anxious feelings. For people with OCD, this means that they can notice what is happening at a certain moment rather than automatically engaging in a ritual or compulsive behaviour.
These finding were supported by a small study conducted on a student population by Hanstede, Gidron, and Nyklicek, published in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in 2008, which found that mindfulness had a significant effect on OCD symptoms, letting go, and thought-action fusion.
