Effects of meditation

The psychological and physiological effects of meditation have been studied. In recent years, studies of meditation have increasingly involved the use of modern instruments, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography, which are able to observe brain physiology and neural activity in living subjects, either during the act of meditation itself or before and after meditation. Correlations can thus be established between meditative practices and brain structure or function.^[1]

Since the 1950s hundreds of studies on meditation have been conducted, but many of the early studies were flawed and thus yielded unreliable results.^[2][3] Another major review article also cautioned about possible misinformation and misinterpretation of data related to the subject.^[4][5] Contemporary studies have attempted to address many of these flaws with the hope of guiding current research into a more fruitful path.^[6]

However, the question of meditation's place in mental health care is far from settled and there is no general consensus among experts. Though meditation is generally deemed useful, recent meta-analyses show small-to-moderate effect sizes. This means that the effect of meditation is roughly comparable to that of the standard measures of self-care like sleep, exercise, nutrition and social intercourse. Importantly, it has a worse safety profile than these standard measures (see section on adverse-effects).^{[7][8][9][10][11]} A recent meta-analysis also indicates that the increased mindfulness experienced by mental health patients may not be the result of explicit mindfulness interventions but more of an artefact of their mental health condition (e.g., depression, anxiety) as it is equally experienced by the participants that were placed in the control condition (e.g., active controls, waiting list). This raises further questions as to what exactly meditation does, if anything, that is significantly different from the heightened self-monitoring and self-care that follows in the wake of spontaneous recovery or from the positive effects of encouragement and care that is usually provided in ordinary health-care settings (see section on the difficulties studying meditation).^[12] There also seems to be a critical moderation of the effects of meditation according to individual differences. In one meta-analysis from 2022, involving a total of 7782 participants, the researchers found that a higher baseline level of psychopathology (e.g., depression) was associated with deterioration in mental health after a meditation intervention, and thus was contraindicated.^[13]