Just 15 to 20 minutes of meditation a day would be enough to reduce stress, negative emotions and improve your well-being.
- Chronic stress can be defined as a lasting state linked to various known and/or sometimes unsuspected sources of stress.
- The second medically recognized form of stress, called “acute stress”, is due to an event experienced as difficult and sudden, and results in an intense and brutal emotion.
Three out of four French working people, or 75% of them, say they are stressed at least from time to time by their work, according to a survey carried out in 2019. To reduce this feeling, everyone has their own method: sport, outings with friends, walking outdoors… But, according to several studies, meditation could also be a good way to decompress.
15 to 20 minutes
A first study carried out in the United States and published in the journal Altern Ther Health Med believes that meditation would reduce stress and negative emotions. The researchers set the ideal duration of the sessions between 15 and 20 minutes. But for the beneficial effects to be felt by the participants, you have to practice every day.
50% improvement
And the results are convincing: the more regular the frequency of the sessions, the more the psychological state – i.e. reduction of stress, anxiety and negative emotions – of the participants improves, in proportions ranging from 14% to 36% according to the authors… And even up to 50% for those who meditated daily for 15 to 20 minutes.
The stress hormone
Another study published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine claims that meditation reduces stress. During their work, the scientists observed that the practice of this activity reduced the level of cortisol present in the hair.
Cortisol is one of the stress hormones, which is released when an individual is in a stressful or distressing situation. Thus, the more the stress is chronic, that is to say repeated over time, the higher the concentration of cortisol that circulates in his body and accumulates, among other things, in the hair.
A 25% reduction
In the clinical trial, participants followed a nine-month mental training program, with meditation sessions lasting thirty minutes a day, six days a week. To measure their stress, hair samples were taken every three months from the first three centimeters of hair, starting at the scalp. Thus, after six months of training, the amount of cortisol in the participants’ hair had decreased considerably, on average by 25%… And therefore their stress level too.
