Mindfulness Meditation Equips Individuals to Handle Stressful Situations: Study

Doing mindfulness mediations for 25 minutes helps relieve stress and psychological distress, finds a study.

Yoga and meditation are practiced widely around the world for mental and physical wellbeing. Mindfulness meditation has its roots in Buddhist meditation and its practice increases one's awareness of the present surroundings, thoughts, physical sensations and emotions. Researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University found half hour sessions of mindfulness meditation carried out for three continuous days curb stress and keeps psychiatric conditions at bay.

 Their study involved 66 healthy individuals aged between 18 and 30 of whom a few practiced 25 minutes of meditation training program that included breathing exercises and paying close attention to the present moment  for three consecutive days. The rest of the subjects were placed in cognitive training program and asked to provide their reviews on poetry to note their problem-solving techniques.

After completing the therapy sessions all participants had to perform stress tasks of giving a speech and solving a difficult math test. These had to be done in front of rigid and tough looking examiners to evaluate the stress levels experienced by the volunteers. In addition, the experts also collected their saliva samples to record the amount of stress hormone, cortisol, released while performing the tasks.

It was observed that people who received mindfulness meditation therapy exhibited less stress while doing the speech and math tasks than those on cognitive training program. Their saliva samples showed higher cortisol reactivity. Mindfulness meditation reduces stress level and also promotes resilience while in stressful situations, believe the authors.

"More and more people report using meditation practices for stress reduction, but we know very little about how much you need to do for stress reduction and health benefits," said J. David Creswell, study author and associate professor of psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences in a news release.

"When you initially learn mindfulness mediation practices, you have to cognitively work at it especially during a stressful task. And, these active cognitive efforts may result in the task feeling less stressful, but they may also have physiological costs with higher cortisol production," said Creswell.

The authors are yet to test new methods that employ simple and long-term mindfulness meditation therapy program that may decrease cortisol reactivity.

More information is available online in the journal Psychoneuroendochrinology.