Meditation Lowers Stress in Anxiety Disorder

Half of the people in the study went through a mindfulness meditation training course called MBSR , short for mindfulness-based stress reduction. "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. "The holy grail is to show that patients can do better under stress," Hoge says. In the MBSR course, people were taught the elements of meditation that have the most scientific evidence behind them for helping stress. Now, there's fresh evidence in favor of mindfulness practices—not just sitting cross-legged in meditation—to help ease stress and anxiety.

Mindfulness Meditation Helps You Handle Stress Better

The scientists noted that future studies should look at the effect of meditation on "real-life" stress, rather than stress created during a lab experiment. After the course, participants in the meditation group showed reductions in their levels of ACTH, IL-6 and TNF-alpha during the stress test, compared with their levels before they took the course. [Mind Games: 7 Reasons You Should Meditate]Importantly, the study also involved a comparison group of people who took a course in stress management that did not involve meditation. However, many previous studies of meditation compared groups of people who meditated to groups of people who did nothing. In contrast, the participants who took the stress-management education course showed an increase in levels of these markers on their second stress test, compared to the first.

Study: Mindfulness Meditation Can Lower Anxiety-Induced Stress Levels

Meditation is the ideal treatment for high stress levels. The stress levels were measured and tests were taken to ascertain that the group members underwent what is known as general adaptation syndrome. They say that the benefits of this sort of meditation may simply be because of the placebo effect. In a recent study, individuals who were quite anxious began a mindful meditation course for the time span of two months. The control group which didn't take to any meditative practice failed to show any improvements in stress and inflammation.


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