Tag: meditation and anxiety

Transcendental Meditation Technique Shown to Reduce Anxiety, Study Shows

Posted on by Tammy

Transcendental Meditation technique (TM) has been shown to have a large effect on reducing trait anxiety for people with high anxiety. Trait anxiety is a measure of how anxious a person usually is as opposed to state anxiety, which is how anxious a person is at the moment – according to a new meta-analysis published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

The meta-analysis covered 16 randomized-controlled trials, the gold standard in medical research, and included 1,295 subjects from various walks of life, age groups and life situations. TM was compared with various control groups, including treatment-as-usual, individual and group psychotherapy, and various relaxation techniques.

Studies on high stress groups, such as veterans suffering from PTSD and prison inmates, showed dramatic reductions in anxiety from TM practice, whereas studies of groups with only moderately elevated anxiety levels, such as normal adults and college students, showed more modest changes.

“It makes sense that if you are not anxious to begin with, that TM practice is not going to reduce your anxiety that much,” said lead author of the meta-analysis, Dr. David Orme-Johnson, an independent research consultant. “Groups with elevated anxiety received significant relief from TM, and that reduction occurred rapidly in the first few weeks of practice.”

Additionally, TM was found to produce significant improvements in other areas worsened by anxiety, such as blood pressure, insomnia, emotional numbness, family problems, employment status, and drug and alcohol abuse.

“Control groups who received usual treatment did not show dramatic reductions in anxiety. In fact, control groups that were highly anxious to begin with, if anything, tended to become more anxious over time,” co-author Dr. Vernon Barnes of the Georgia Prevention Center, Georgia Regents University in Augusta, Ga. Explained. “However, progressive muscle relaxation was also effective in reducing anxiety. But, it did not have the other side benefits of TM, such as increasing overall mental health, and increasing the rate of recovery of the physiology from stressors.”

 

How Meditation Can Help Relieve Anxiety

Posted on by Tammy

We’ve heard the seemingly endless benefits of meditation, including the reduction of anxiety, but now scientists identified the brain functions of how it actually does it.

A team of scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C. studied 15 healthy volunteers with normal levels of everyday anxiety who had no previous meditation experience or diagnosed anxiety disorders. Each took four, 20-minute meditation classes to learn mindfulness meditation – where they focused on their breath and body sensations – and the results showed reduced anxiety ratings by as much as 39 percent, according to the report in the journal of “Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.”

“In this study, we were able to see which areas of the brain were activated and which were deactivated during meditation-related anxiety relief. This showed that just a few minutes of mindfulness meditation can help reduce normal everyday anxiety,” Dr. Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., postdoctoral research fellow in neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist and lead author of the study said in a RedOrbit.com report.

Fadel and colleagues revealed meditation-related anxiety relief is associated with activation of the anterior cingulate cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which are areas of the brain involved with executive-level function, the report stated.

“Mindfulness is premised on sustaining attention in the present moment and controlling the way we react to daily thoughts and feelings,” Zeidan said. “Interestingly, the present findings reveal that the brain regions associated with meditation-related anxiety relief are remarkably consistent with the principles of being mindful.”