Meditation

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.