A new study has just shown that mindfulness meditation, practiced 25 minutes a day for three consecutive days, can reduce the impression of stress.
Mindfulness meditation has become an increasingly popular practice for improving mental and physical health. This type of meditation has indeed been proven to have excellent results in reducing stress, fighting depression, improving attention and cognitive performance, and even increasing the density of gray matter in our brain!
Mindfulness meditation can be described, according to Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine at the Medical University of Massachusetts, as a way of “being careful, consciously, in the present moment, with curiosity, and without judgment “.
Until now, most of the research showing the benefits of this practice has focused on these long-term effects. A new study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University that has been published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology is the first to show that practicing mindfulness meditation for a brief period – 25 minutes for three consecutive days – relieves stress.
25 minutes for three days
For this study, J. David Creswell, associate professor of psychology at the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and his team recruited 66 people aged 18 to 30 for a three-day experiment. Some of the participants had to do mindfulness meditation training for 25 minutes for three consecutive days: these people had to do “breathing exercises to help them control their breath and pay more attention to the present moment.” The second group went through a cognitive training program in which they were asked to analyze poetry in order to improve their problem-solving skills.
Following the last exercise, all participants were asked to give a speech and solve math problems in front of a tough jury. An experience that is supposed to create stress for the participants. Each participant was then asked to describe their level of stress during this last experience, and to give a sample of saliva, in order to measure the level of cortisol (the stress hormone).
Less stress felt, but higher cortisol levels
The results support meditation: Participants who completed the mindfulness meditation training program found the speech and math test less stressful than those who took the meditation program. poetry analysis. On the other hand (and this is a more bizarre result), the group who practiced the meditation showed a higher level of cortisol, which means that while the levels of perceived stress were lower in them, their production of cortisol nonetheless. been more important.
For Creswel, “when you start practicing mindfulness meditation, you have to put in cognitive efforts, which can result in making you feel less stressful, but it can also result in physiological increased production of cortisol. ”
In any case, the team will now try to see if long-term practice of this meditation can make mindfulness more “automatic” and therefore reduce the production of cortisol.
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