25 Minutes of Mindfulness Meditation Helps Reduce Stress

A new research has identified a novel way to reduce mental stress: 25 minutes of mindfulness meditation for three consecutive days.

Mindfulness meditation has gained worldwide popularity as a unique technique to manage mental as well as physical health. There is growing scientific evidence that mindfulness meditation has several benefits and makes people happier and healthier. Despite this, most of the research supporting its benefits has focused on lengthy, weeks-long training program.

Stress is faced by all in daily lives. Longer the bodies are in stress, more likely are they to face disabling symptoms or disorders. One of the effective ways to lower stress, as suggested by researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University, is Mindfulness Meditation. The study investigated how mindfulness meditation affects people's ability to stay resilient under stressful conditions.

"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 lead author J. David Creswell, associate professor of psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

The researchers conducted a study on 66 healthy individuals aged between 18-30 years. They were made to take part in a 3-day experiment. Some of the participants randomly took part in mindfulness meditation training program for 25 minutes, for three consecutive days. They were also given a few breathing exercises that helped the researchers monitor their breath and also pay attention to their current moment experiences.

Another group of participants were made to complete a three-day cognitive training program in which they were asked to critically analyze poetry in order to boost their problem solving skills.

After the last training session, the participants were made to complete stressful speech and math tasks in the presence of stern-faced evaluators. Each participant reposted their stress level in response to the stressful speech and math performance stress tasks. They were also asked to provide their saliva samples in order to measure the cortisol levels, a stress hormone.

Those who received mindfulness meditation had reduced stress perceptions towards the speech and math tasks, suggesting mindfulness meditation helps lowering psychological stress resilience and they had greater cortisol reactivity too.

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

The study was documented in Psychoneuroendocrinology.