Stressed at work? Meditating really does work!

By MARK PRIGG

PUBLISHED: 19:24 GMT, 4 July 2014 | UPDATED: 20:35 GMT, 4 July 2014

Meditating can have an almost instant effect on reducing stress, researchers have found.

They say three consecutive days of 25 minute sessions can have a dramatic effect.

Researchers studied 'mindful meditation' - a technique developed in the 1970s, which is even available online via websites.

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Inspired by ancient Buddhist meditation, mindfulness courses were developed in the late 1970s by US doctors to combat stress.

The guiding principle is to live more ‘in the moment’, spending less time going over past stresses and worrying about future problems.

Techniques include moving the focus of attention around the body and observing sensations that arise – the so-called ‘body scan’.

A secular practice, it is said to help people recognise and overcome negative thoughts while noticing small pleasures.

'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.

For the study, Creswell and his research team had 66 healthy individuals aged 18-30 years old participate in a three-day experiment. 

Some participants went through a brief mindfulness meditation training program; for 25 minutes for three consecutive days, the individuals were given breathing exercises to help them monitor their breath and pay attention to their present moment experiences. 

Published in the journal 'Psychoneuroendocrinology,' the study investigates how mindfulness meditation affects people's ability to be resilient under stress.

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A second group of participants completed a matched three-day cognitive training program in which they were asked to critically analyze poetry in an effort to enhance problem-solving skills.

Following the final training activity, all participants were asked to complete stressful speech and math tasks in front of stern-faced evaluators. 

Each individual reported their stress levels in response to stressful speech and math performance stress tasks, and provided saliva samples for measurement of cortisol, commonly referred to as the stress hormone.

The participants who received the brief mindfulness meditation training reported reduced stress perceptions to the speech and math tasks, indicating that the mindfulness meditation fostered psychological stress resilience. 

More interestingly, on the biological side, the mindfulness meditation participants showed greater cortisol reactivity.

'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."

Creswell's group is now testing the possibility that mindfulness can become more automatic and easy to use with long-term mindfulness meditation training, which may result in reduced cortisol reactivity.