Goldberg is an assistant professor with the School of Education’s Department of Counseling Psychology, and he is an affiliate with the university’s Center for Healthy Minds.

Mind & Life notes the exceptionalism of his work, saying few researchers undertake the challenge of analyzing impacts of mindfulness across the mental health field as a whole. Goldberg and his team of researchers did just that, conducting 142 clinical trials with over 12,000 participants.

Through his arduous research process, Goldberg discovered mindfulness-based interventions were equivalent to existing evidence based-treatments in terms of effectiveness. He also discovered that mindfulness was superior to other comparisons, like no treatment and active controls. Mind & Life reports that the strongest patterns of evidence was seen in the treatment of depression, pain, smoking, and addiction.

This finding “suggest that mindfulness be considered among various psychotherapeutic options,” according to the blog post. Goldberg believes mindfulness is effective because of the way it targets emotional and cognitive mechanisms that are common in various psychiatric conditions. He says to Mind & Life, “as people develop mindfulness skills, often through meditation, they’re better equipped to break the habit of worrying and being fixated on a particular thought.”

Read Mind & Life’s blog post here, and the original study here.