Mindfulness meditation: a more effective anti-stress remedy than antidepressants?

The mindfulness meditation is increasingly popular. It consists of focusing your attention on the present moment by welcoming your thoughts with kindness. And it would be so beneficial, that it would even act on the anxiety disordersaccording to a recent study.

Created in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts, mindfulness meditation is increasingly popular with people who suffer from stress. Its effects are such that an American study looked at its effects on anxiety disorders. To do this, researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center studied 276 patients, aged 18 to 75, with social anxiety, trgeneralized anxiety disorderpanic disorders or of agoraphobia. The participants were separated into two distinct groups. For eight weeks, the first received a treatment based on escitalopram, an antidepressant, while the other applied a guided meditation program compound ” breathing exercisegentle movement meditation and body scanning,” the study details.

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At the end of the study, the conclusions of which were published in November 2022, in the journal JAMA Psychiatrythe researchers found that “the mindfulness-based stress reduction was a well-tolerated treatment option with comparable efficacy to first-line medication for patients with anxiety disorders,” the academics explain. Both groups of patients experienced a 30% reduction in their complaints.

The benefits of meditation on psychological well-being and even on physical pain have been studied for several years. But these benefits are only visible after a certain number of hours of practice. A study conducted in January 2014 and relayed by the WebMD specialized siteindicates that it is necessary to count between 30 and 40 hours of meditation before seeing the results on depressive syndromes.

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When practiced regularly, it “can help relieve anxiety because anxiety disorders are often characterized by problematic habitual thought patterns such as worry. And mindfulness meditation helps people to