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Meditation
Mental Health · Moderate evidence
Evidence
65
Impact
45
Formal meditation practice and its effects on stress physiology, blood pressure and brain structure.
- Studies
- 10
- RCTs
- 2
- Meta-analyses
- 7
Research summary
- A 2014 JAMA Internal Medicine meta-analysis of meditation programs found moderate evidence for improvements in stress, anxiety and depression symptoms, with effect sizes generally small-to-moderate — a conclusion echoed by later meta-analyses of blood pressure outcomes and brain morphometry.
- Two independent randomized controlled trials specifically testing Transcendental Meditation in high-cardiovascular-risk Black patients found reduced blood pressure and cardiovascular risk markers, offering some of the more rigorous causal evidence in this literature, and meditation also shows benefit for post-traumatic stress symptoms in meta-analysis.
- Because many studies in this field use small samples, heterogeneous protocols, and inactive control groups, the overall evidence is best described as moderate rather than strong: consistent small-to-moderate benefits are well replicated, but sizable causal effects on hard health outcomes are less firmly established.
Mood & StressCardiovascular Health
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