Comparing the effectiveness of mindfulness-based de-stressing group therapy and cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy on reducing occupational stress and occupational procrastination

The purpose of the present study was to compare the effectiveness of mindfulness-based de-stressing group therapy and cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy on reducing occupational stress and occupational procrastination.

This research was applied and its method was semi-experimental with a pre-test-post-test design with a control group. The statistical population of all the personnel of Shahid Hasheminejad Gas Refinery in 1400 was 553 people. By using the purposeful sampling method and based on the entry and exit criteria, 45 people were selected as a sample and randomly replaced in three groups (two experimental groups and one control group) (15 people in the experimental group of stress relief treatment based on on mind-awareness, 15 people in the experimental group of cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy and 15 people in the control group). The stress reduction intervention program based on mindfulness and cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy (each) was presented to the subjects of two experimental groups (one mindfulness group and the other hypnotherapy group) in eight 90-minute sessions. The data collection tool was Esipo's occupational stress questionnaire (1998) and Safarinia and Amirkhani Razlighi's occupational procrastination questionnaire (2013). In order to analyze the data at two levels of descriptive statistics and inferential statistics, the statistical test of covariance was used in SPSS software.

The comparison of means showed that the mindfulness-based stress-relief group treatment method had a significant difference in reducing occupational stress and occupational procrastination with the control group (P<0.01). Comparing the average scores of the cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy group with the control group, a significant difference was observed in reducing occupational stress and occupational procrastination (P<0.01).

In general, the results indicated that stress relief treatments based on mindfulness and cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy both significantly reduced occupational stress and occupational procrastination in the intervention groups. However, there was no significant difference between these two treatments in reducing occupational stress and occupational procrastination, but mindfulness-based de-stressing group therapy was more effective than cognitive-behavioral hypnotherapy.