Mindfulness Meditation for 25 Minutes key to getting rid of stress

Meditation is one of the mental practices that have stood through the time and various tests. Time and again it has proven to be the best practice for overcoming depression and stress. On the other hand it improves an individual’s cognitive performance as well as attention by increasing the count of grey cells in the brain. A new Psychoneuroendocrinological study has stated that a mindful meditation even for a small duration of time pays you in the long run and especially it helps in calming down the mind in stressful and depressing situations. So this is not a bad time to begin practicing meditation.

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Founder of MBSR (mindfulness based stress reduction) program – Jon Kabat-Zinn at university of Massachussetts describes mindfulness as the awareness of sensations in body, feelings, thoughts and environment at each moment. He says with mindfulness our thoughts get tuned to our present moment rather than being in the past or future. A research at the Carnegie Mellon University showed that such a meditation if practiced 3 days in a row for 25 minutes can alleviate stress related to psychological issues. The study was carried out on 66 18 – 30 years old individuals in good health.

The participants were divided into two groups who were then made to prepare for some stress inducing activities by means of 2 techniques. The first group consisting of 31 people practiced mindfulness meditation for 25 minutes for 3 days. They were asked to follow breathing exercise for monitoring their breath and focusing on the present moment. The second group went under a 3 – day cognitive training consisting of critical poetry analyzation as a means of enhancing problem – solving skills. After 3 days, both the groups were given logic and math problems to solve sitting them in front evaluators with a stern face.

After the test, their stress levels were rated based up on the amount of cortisol hormones (helps body in handling high stress situations) in their saliva. Based upon the result, they concluded that the participants who did meditation brought down their stress levels to math and speech problems. This means they had high cortisol reactivity. The next step in this research is to determine if the continued practice of mindfulness can make it more automatic in reducing the stress levels. Other benefits of doing meditation are that you become more self – aware and satisfied.