Study Confirms Mindfulness Meditation Helps Reduce Stress

Scientists were able to confirm the benefits of mindfulness meditation.

High levels of stress can be quite dangerous for the wellbeing of a person. While many people already believe and use meditation as a way to reduce stress, only now has its benefits been confirmed by science thanks to a new study.

This is not the first time that scientists were interested in confirming the impact of meditation on a person’s mental state, but testing its effectiveness in an objective manner has been quite difficult due to the subjective nature of the experiment. However, scientists were able to design a rigorous clinical trial to test the impact of mindfulness meditation.

The study was sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and was published in the journal Psychiatry Research by a team of researchers led by Dr. Elizabeth A. Hoge, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s Medical Center, the Department of Psychiatry.

For their study, the searchers recruit 89 patients diagnosed with a general anxiety disorder, characterized by chronic and excessive worrying. This type of disorders affects around 7 million people in the US alone. The researchers then randomly divided all the patients into two groups. One group took part in a mindfulness meditation stress reduction course for eight weeks. The other group participated in a stress management education course, which offered them general tips about nutrition, sleep, as well as a variety of other wellness aspects.

Previous mindfulness meditation studies compared the results to that of an untreated control group. This allowed the patients to know if they are being treated or not, and thus skew the results of the study. Furthermore, the clinical trial also involved testing the results by measuring the stress levels of patients by asking them to speak in public, while researchers monitored several blood-based markers for stress responses.

The researchers discovered that the control group experienced a modest rise in stress levels after the clinical trial, while the group which practiced mindfulness meditation had a dramatic drop in stress after the experiment. This led scientists to confirm the benefits of meditation. Therefore, scientists believe that this type of treatment can be an effective tool in combating anxiety in all types of patients.

What do you think about the study? Do you practice mindfulness meditation?

Image source: Paulding County Area Foundation

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Karen Jackson

Karen Jackson has always been passionate about technology. All the way through high-school she immersed herself in computers and web-design. Her ambitious nature helped her become a pro in Adobe Photoshop only by watching online videos and working with the program herself. This is also the program that she mostly uses in the creation of websites at her work-place. Technological innovation and gadgets that push the boundaries of what we are comfortable with have always fascinated her, so expect to see some weird gadget reviews coming from her.