Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-being: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

By M. Goyal, Sonal Singh, E. Sibinga, Neda F. Gould, A. Rowland-Seymour, Ritu Sharma, Zackary D Berger, Dana Sleicher, David D. Maron, H. Shihab and 5 more. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Akupunktur, 2014

2,154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ImportanceMany people meditate to reduce psychological stress and stress-related health problems. To counsel people appropriately, clinicians need to know what the evidence says about the health benefits of meditation.ObjectiveTo determine the efficacy of meditation programs in improving stress-related outcomes (anxiety, depression, stress/ distress, positive mood, mental health-related quality of life, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, pain, and weight) in diverse adult clinical populations.Evidence reviewWe identified randomized clinical trials with active controls for placebo effects through November 2012 from MEDLINE, PsycINFO, EMBASE, PsycArticles, Scopus, CINAHL, AMED, the Cochrane Library, and hand searches. Two independent reviewers screened citations and extracted data. We graded the strength of evidence using 4 domains (risk of bias, precision, directness, and consistency) and determined the magnitude and direction of effect by calculating the relative difference between groups in change from baseline. When possible, we conducted meta-analyses using standardized mean differences to obtain aggregate estimates of effect size with 95 % confidence intervals.FindingsAfter reviewing 18 753 citations, we included 47 trials with 3515 participants. Mindfulness meditation programs had moderate evidence of improved anxiety (effect size, 0.38 [95 % CI, 0.12–0.64] at 8 weeks and 0.22 [0.02–0.43] at 3–6 months), depression (0.30 [0.00–0.59] at 8 weeks and 0.23 [0.05– 0.42] at 3–6 months), and pain (0.33 [0.03–0.62]) and low evidence of improved stress/distress and mental health-related quality of life. We found low evidence of no effect or insufficient evidence of any effect of meditation programs on positive mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, and weight. We found no evidence that meditation programs were better than any active treatment (ie, drugs, exercise, and other behavioral therapies).Conclusions and relevanceClinicians should be aware that meditation programs can result in small to moderate reductions of multiple negative dimensions of psychological stress. Thus, clinicians should be prepared to talk with their patients about the role that a meditation program could have in addressing psychological stress. Stronger study designs are needed to determine the effects of meditation programs in improving the positive dimensions of mental health and stress-related behavior.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Clinical Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/101737d4f9cc02b125013681dda5074acf158e00

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Citations in the corpus

Mindfulness-based interventions for psychiatric disorders: A systematic review and meta-analysis. (2018, methodology): “Interestingly, our findings diverge from those of Goyal et al. (2014) who reported no differences between mindfulness conditions and specific active control conditions.”
Role of Physical Activity on Mental Health and Well-Being: A Review (2023, background): “Most forms of yoga that start with a focus on breathing exercises, self-awareness, and relaxation techniques have a positive effect on depression and well-being [34].”
Mindfulness Interventions. (2017, neutral): “In combination, these (Baer 2003, Goyal et al. 2014).”
Integrating Mindfulness into Positive Psychology: a Randomised Controlled Trial of an Online Positive Mindfulness Program (2016, background): “In addition, empirical reports have mainly focused on mindfulness interventions as programs that reduce psychological distress (Goyal et al. 2014).”
The Way Forward in Mindfulness and Sustainability: a Critical Review and Research Agenda (2020, background): “Several studies and metaanalyses have evidenced the positive effects of mindfulness on personal well-being (Brown and Ryan 2003; Brown et al. 2007; Carmody and Baer 2008; Keng et al. 2011; Goyal et al. 2014).”
Behavioural Brain Research (2016, neutral): “This omission reﬂects procedural differences that restrict comparisons across the two cohorts (see below ).”
Investigating the Phenomenological Matrix of Mindfulness-related Practices from a Neurocognitive Perspective (2015, background): “…emphasize methodological limitations such as the lack of randomized placebo-controlled designs, the lack of specificity on instructor qualifications, and the limitations in documenting the integrity or amount of training, including accurate record of practice time (see Goyal et al., 2014).”
Effects of Brief Mindfulness-Based Interventions on Health-Related Outcomes: a Systematic Review (2019, background): “There is a large amount of literature supporting the link between mindfulness and positive stress management (Goyal et al. 2014).”
Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Research on Mindfulness and Meditation (2015, background): “…for the poor quality of clinical trials of meditation that have appeared in the scientific literature and is one important reason why recent metaanalyses of the clinical impact of meditation have reported so few rigorous studies that are judged to be methodologically sound (Goyal et al., 2014).”
Clearing the Muddled Path of Traditional and Contemporary Mindfulness: a Response to Monteiro, Musten, and Compson (2015, background): “also omitted an important meta-analytic study on the efficacy of mindfulness meditation that was recently published (Goyal et al. 2014).”
Mindfulness Meditation for Chronic Pain: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis (2016, background): “[9], tobacco cessation [10], stress reduction [11], and treatment of chronic pain [12–14].”
Mind The Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation (2017, positive): “…to 100% of pharmacology trials (Vaughan, Goldstein, Alikakos, Cohen, & Serby, 2014), less than 25% of meditation trials actively assess AEs (Goyal et al., 2014; Jonsson, Alaie, Parling, & Arnberg, 2014), relying instead on spontaneous reporting, which may underestimate AE frequency by more…”