Large-scale research assesses the short-term impact on stress of self-administered mindfulness exercises

Mindfulness practices, derived from ancient meditative traditions, have become increasingly popular in modern society. Previous studies have shown that these practices, which encourage people to deliberately focus their attention on the present moment, can have a host of benefits, such as reducing stress, promoting emotional regulation and improving concentration.

Researchers from Université Grenoble Alpes, Swansea University and other institutions around the world conducted a large-scale study to further investigate the effects of mindfulness exercises on stress levels. Their findings, published in Nature Human behaviorsuggest that self-administered mindfulness exercises may be beneficial for reducing self-reported stress in the short term.

“At the beginning of my PhD, we decided that a logical first step to gather evidence was to assess the quality of existing studies through a meta-analysis,” Alessandro Sparacio, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress. “Our goal was to determine whether the current evidence on self-managed mindfulness was sufficient. We found that the existing studies were of insufficient quality and that their sample sizes were simply too small.”

When they reviewed previous literature that focused on self-managed mindfulness exercises, Sparacio and his colleagues found that most studies had significant limitations. While this did not necessarily mean that mindfulness interventions were ineffective, it did reduce the certainty with which they could be considered useful.

The researchers therefore decided to conduct a new study that addressed the limitations they identified. The research conducted by them is unique of its kind as it involved a much larger number of participants recruited from various institutions around the world.

“Fortunately, I spent my first two years of my PhD at Grenoble’s CORE Lab, where my colleagues had extensive experience with ‘big team science’ projects,” Sparacio said.

“Patrick Forscher, a postdoc in our team at the time, had recently written an important theoretical paper outlining the pros and cons of big team science and was instrumental in setting up this project. In addition, a fellow PhD student, Olivier Dujols , had just set up its research infrastructure for its STRAEQ-2 study.”

To overcome the limitations of previous studies, Sparacio relied on the support of the CORE laboratory team at the Université Grenoble Alpes, where he received his Ph.D. Before conducting the actual experiment, he also surveyed many mindfulness practitioners to identify the most appropriate practices for the study.

The large-scale study spanned 37 sites, involving 61 researchers from various institutions in the US, UK, Europe and Australia. A total of 2,239 people participated in the study, an unprecedented number for mindfulness-related research.

Because the study was conducted at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, participants completed the mindfulness exercises online. The researchers assessed four of the most well-known mindfulness exercises: mindful breathing, body scan, mindful walking and loving-kindness meditation.

“For the body scan exercise, participants mentally scanned different parts of their bodies, refocusing on each part when their thoughts wandered,” Sparacio explained.

“In mindful breathing, participants focused on their breathing without trying to change it, gently returning their attention to their breath when distracted. In loving-kindness meditation, participants focused feelings of loving-kindness toward themselves and expanded these feelings then out to others. During mindful walking, participants walked in a quiet, distraction-free environment, focusing on the physical sensations of walking and the contact of their feet with the ground.

The study participants were asked to complete a questionnaire about their stress levels via a link provided to them, both before and after the mindfulness exercise. Their answers were compared with those of a control group, who had instead listened to randomly selected stories of the same duration as the exercises.

“Each participant took part in a 15-minute mindfulness meditation session at home, previously recorded by Christoph Spiessens, a certified instructor,” Sparacio said. “This approach allowed participants to practice mindfulness in a familiar and comfortable environment, which was especially important during the pandemic when minimizing stress was crucial.”

Sparacio and colleagues’ large-scale study specifically assessed the short-term effects of mindfulness exercises on stress levels, as participants shared their feedback immediately after the exercise. The team found that the exercises significantly reduced subjective stress levels, with most participants reporting feeling less stressed after completing them.

“This has been an intense but rewarding project, and I am truly grateful to everyone who contributed directly or indirectly to it,” said Sparacio. “As a mindfulness practitioner, I was initially disappointed with the outcome of our meta-analysis, hoping to see high-quality evidence supporting self-managed mindfulness. However, our multi-site research at least partially confirmed my belief that self-managed mindfulness can help. ” be effective.”

Overall, the results of this multinational collaborative study suggest that self-applied mindfulness exercises can help reduce stress levels in the short term. Given the large sample size and the team’s efforts to overcome previous limitations, this could increase confidence in some short-term benefits of these practices.

“Although I was biased in favor of mindfulness, one of my supervisors, Dr. Rocha IJzerman, was skeptical and therefore kept me on my toes to provide high-quality evidence,” Sparacio said. “Yet he now also admits that the evidence we have gathered has shifted his perspective to the belief that mindfulness works.”

While the team’s results highlight the benefits of mindfulness, Sparacio believes you should remain cautious when using it to make practical recommendations. This is because it still does not address some of the limitations of mindfulness research.

“While this study provides the best evidence we have to date, there are still limitations that need to be addressed,” he said.

“Does the effect apply to people with a lower income, for example? Aren’t the observed effects simply due to the ‘expectancy effect’? How do different personality types influence effectiveness? And what happens with long-term engagement with mindfulness? While we can assume that self-managed mindfulness is generally effective, individuals who want to implement mindfulness in their own lives should do so carefully and keep these questions in mind.”

Sparacio and his colleagues in Singapore are currently designing a multi-site follow-up project focused on self-managed mindfulness exercises. This project, which could include 17 of the sites where the previous research was conducted, could overcome further experimental limitations while assessing long-term and physiological effects.

© 2024 Science X Network