Mindfulness session improves multiple mental health measures, fails to help loneliness

Key takeaways:

• The intervention improved perceived stress, anxiety and depression after just 1 week.
• Researchers noted that the intervention is easily adoptable for a variety of contexts.

An hour-long telehealth session on mindfulness and compassion failed to achieve its primary outcome — decreased loneliness — but it did reduce depression, anxiety and perceived stress, research showed.

“Given the degree to which the COVID-19 pandemic has led to increases in loneliness and stress, it was important to consider ways to address this concern in a relatively accessible and brief way,” Mikael Rubin, PhD, an assistant professor at Palo Alto University, and colleagues wrote. “While research suggests single-session interventions may be helpful for concerns such as depression, substance use and anxiety, few studies have examined the efficacy of short-term interventions for loneliness.”

In a randomized controlled trial, 91 adults (mean age, 27 years; 60% women) were assigned to one of three arms:

• a 1-hour mindfulness-only telehealth session;
• a 1-hour mindfulness and compassion session; or
• a 1-week waitlist control.

The sessions had several components, including rapport-building, psychoeducation on loneliness and mindfulness, and practicing skills in awareness, nonjudgment and nonreactivity.

Those assigned to the mindfulness and compassion session were also taught an additional skill related to compassion.

The skill module was “presented as a method for becoming familiar with what compassion physiologically feels like to recognize one’s underlying behavioral motivations better,” the researchers explained. Participants were encouraged to think of a person, place, object or spiritual figure that invoked whatever compassion felt like to them and to focus on those sensations for 2 to 3 minutes.

The primary outcome was changes in loneliness; the secondary outcome was changes in perceived stress; and exploratory outcomes were changes in depression and anxiety. Rubin and colleagues measured the outcomes through a variety of scales and questionnaires.

At the 1-week follow-up, compared with the waitlist control, the mindfulness and compassion session led to reductions in:

• perceived stress (β = –3.75; 95% HDI, –6.95 to –0.59);
• anxiety (β = –3.79; 95% HDI, –6.99 to –0.53); and
• depression (β = –3.01; 95% HDI, –5.22 to –0.78).

There were no differences in any of these symptoms between the two mindfulness interventions, however, which “may reflect the brevity of the compassion component and the lack of longer follow-up assessments,” Rubin and colleagues suggested.

Additionally, neither the mindfulness and compassion sessions nor the mindfulness-only sessions reduced loneliness compared with the waitlist control at the 1-week follow-up.

The study was limited by its small sample size and short follow-up period, Rubin and colleagues said.

Ultimately, the intervention “offers an approach that can be easily adopted in a range of contexts,” the researchers concluded. “It is important for future research to evaluate this approach with larger samples and to examine whether changes in symptoms are maintained over longer periods of time.”