Meditation to Help with Anxiety

Back in 2007, the National Institutes of Health found that roughly 9 percent of people in the United States said they meditated. Only about 1 percent treated it as a form of medicine or therapy. One misconception keeps coming up: that meditation means sitting still and doing nothing at all. Dr. Madhav Goyal pushed back on that in an email to Reuters Health. He described it instead as active training for the mind, a way to build awareness, with different programs going about it in their own ways.

Mindfulness meditation trains the brain to stay with what is happening right now. Instead of getting pulled backward into regret or shame over the past, or forward into worry about the future, the practice is about noticing the present moment. Ashley Turner, who teaches yoga and meditation in California, puts it bluntly. The point is not to silence your thoughts, she says, because thinking, analyzing and sorting things into boxes is simply what a mind does. An overactive head is normal. If you are catching stray thoughts and hearing sounds around you while you sit, you are not failing at it. That is actually the practice working. What you are building is focus.

Goyal and his colleagues pulled together the evidence and found 47 studies covering more than 3,500 participants that fit their standards. Once they combined the numbers, people who practiced mindfulness meditation showed somewhere between a 5 and 10 percent improvement in anxiety symptoms compared with people who spent that time on a different activity. For depression, the gap was wider, roughly 10 to 20 percent. Goyal pointed out that this falls in the same range other researchers have measured for antidepressants in comparable groups of people.

The team saw hints that meditation might help with stress and general mental health too, but the quality of that evidence was low. Claims about mood, attention, substance use, eating, sleep or weight all still need firmer studies before anyone can say much. Goyal's advice for doctors was modest: be ready to discuss meditation with patients as one option for psychological stress, especially while symptoms are still mild.

So the picture is mixed. There does seem to be real benefit in using mindfulness to ease anxiety and depressive symptoms, possibly on par with medication. Yet some results conflict, the effect has not always reached statistical significance, and more rigorous work is needed. Andrew Seaman, reporting on the research, noted Goroll's position as a professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Goyal added a reminder that meditation was never designed as a cure for any specific condition. He called it a path you walk to grow more aware and to understand your own life better. Gaining that insight, he wrote, is the real reason to do it. Any improvement in your health is a side benefit, and it helps to treat it that way. (JAMA Internal Medicine, published online January 6, 2014.)

Future research could test whether longer or different kinds of training produce stronger results. With anxiety and depression on the rise, alternatives are worth pursuing. Mindfulness costs almost nothing, can be done at home or at work, and offers something for people who would rather not rely on medication. Noted by Kim B.

One reader, Bergen, shared something personal. I often feel anxious for no reason I can name, this person wrote. I lose track of what I was even doing. You know the feeling. Living in the moment does not come naturally when you are already bracing for the next ten moments, or the next fifty. A lifelong planner, this reader described racing ahead to the next day, week, meeting or event, sometimes faster than anything could actually happen, and struggling to finish one plan before starting the next.

Life has a way of slowing a person down anyway. It can grind to a halt without warning, and a loss will often stop you in your tracks. A job gone. A friend or relative. A relationship ending. Freedom, or health. Each of these feeds anxiety, and looking over that list, this reader recognized it as a deeply personal one, drawn from losses either suffered directly or by close family. Everyone gets tested by that kind of stress. Staying in the moment and riding it out is what builds strength. When I sit and focus, or meditate, it keeps me present. It stops me from missing something I need to live through or learn, and it reminds me that even the hardest stretches hold a few good moments along the way.

Reference: Seaman, Andrew M. (January 6, 2014). Meditation may help with anxiety, depression and pain. Reuters.