Study: Mindfulness Meditation Can Lower Anxiety-Induced Stress Levels
A new study has found that an ancient meditation technique may help in combating one of the world's newest psychological problems.
Anxiety is a psychological disorder that affects 40 million people in the U.S. alone. And one of the biggest side-effects of anxiety disorder is high stress levels in those it affects -- which in turn increases the risk of heart diseases and strokes in the patient.
In an attempt to treat this widespread problem, a team of researchers investigated the positive physiological effects of a rather old therapeutic practice -- mindfulness meditation. Steeped in Buddhist culture (but not in any way religious), mindfulness meditation is a psychological practice in which the participants actively focus on their present internal and external experiences.
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The researchers discovered that people with anxiety disorder who took a two-month course in mindfulness practices displayed drastically lowered stress-hormone and inflammatory responses to a stressful situation. They also discovered that the patients who undertook a conventional stress-management courses displayed significantly worsened responses.
The study, published January 24 in the journal Psychiatry Research, definitively proves the physiological benefits of meditation as a therapeutic practice. While it has been preached for a long time as helpful for lowering stress levels, this is the first time any tangible evidence of the effects of meditation on the human body has been recorded.
"There's been some real skepticism in the medical community about meditation and mindfulness meditation," says lead author Dr. Elizabeth Hoge, associate professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center. With her team's findings however, mindfulness meditation can be recognized as a "relatively inexpensive and low-stigma treatment approach" for the treatment of anxiety disorders.
For their study, the researchers selected 89 participants diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and randomly assigned them to either take a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course or a conventional stress-management course that emphasized good nutrition, healthy sleep habits and time managements as methods to reduce stress.
The participants were subjected to the Trier Social Stress Test – a standard lab experiment designed to induce a stress response – before and after their training courses and their responses were measured. The researchers also recorded blood-based biological stress markers, including the stress hormone adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and inflammatory proteins IL-6 and TNF-alpha.
Based on their findings, the team discovered that the participants who underwent the MSBR course showed a reduction in stress-level markers while those who underwent the other course actually displayed a higher amount of inflammatory markers. This also shows the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation in long-term stress management.
"We were testing the patients' resilience because that's really the ultimate question -- can we make people handle stress better?" says Dr. Hoge. "It really is strong evidence that mindfulness meditation not only makes them feel better, but helps them be more resilient to stress."
Mindfulness meditation, already gaining popularity in hospitals across the country, can soon be a viable treatment for people with anxiety disorders who don't want to take medication or undergo psychotherapy. But while the current research is promising, further studies are needed to look at the effect of meditation on "real-life" stress scenarios, rather than laboratory generated ones, before it becomes a viable medical treatment.
