Rachel Radin from the University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues conducted a randomized clinical trial and found that daily short-term meditation (mindfulness practices) using an app significantly reduced stress and work-related strain in health care workers. The study involved 1,458 adult volunteers (average age 35.54 years; 80.8 percent women) employed at a large academic medical center who experienced mild to moderate stress and did not practice meditation on a regular basis. Randomly, 728 participants were assigned to practice mindfulness meditation using an app for 10 minutes daily for eight weeks, while the rest were assigned to do no meditation at all. Results were assessed after eight weeks and four months. The results were published in the journal JAMA Network Open.
The meditation course was found to be associated with a significant reduction in stress levels on the PSS scale (Cohen’s d 0.85; 95 percent confidence interval 0.73–0.96) and improvements in additional psychological measures such as work-related strain (Cohen’s d 0.34; 95 percent confidence interval 0.23–0.46). These improvements remained significant at four months post-randomization: Cohen’s d 0.71; 95 percent confidence interval 0.59–0.84 and Cohen’s d 0.37; 95 percent confidence interval 0.25–0.50, respectively.