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Meditation improves mind wandering in anxiety

A meditation intervention that taught mindfulness improved attention focus and mind wandering among individuals with high anxiety.

“People who are high in trait anxiety experience high levels of negative affect. However, to the best of our knowledge, no published study has investigated the effectiveness of mindfulness as a remedy for mind wandering in anxious people,” Mengran Xu, a PhD student at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues wrote. “Given anxious individuals tend to experience more off-task thoughts and have greater difficulty managing their wandering minds, it is particularly important to examine the extent to which mindfulness training is beneficial for this population. Moreover, research of this kind would provide more insight into the hypothesis that mindfulness training only has prophylactic effects for individuals experiencing high stress.”

To examine the impact of mindfulness on mind wandering, researchers randomly assigned undergraduate students with high anxiety to a meditation (n = 22) or control (n = 20) condition. The meditation intervention consisted of listening to an audio recording of “Mindfulness of body and breath,” which instructed participants to focus attention on breathing and remain open-minded. Participants in the control condition were asked to sit quietly while the first 8 paragraphs of the first chapter of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit played through speakers. Participants completed a sustained attention task at baseline and after receiving intervention. The study cohort had a mean age of 20 years.

Analysis indicated mindfulness training may only be protective for mind wandering in individuals with anxiety.

Meditation prevented increased mind wandering and improved performance disruption during off-task episodes.

Meditation appeared to promote a switch in attentional focus from internal to present-moment external, suggesting meditation may improve worrying in anxiety.

“Our results indicate that mindfulness training may have protective effects on mind wandering for anxious individuals,” Xu said in a press release. “We also found that meditation practice appears to help anxious people to shift their attention from their own internal worries to the present-moment external world, which enables better focus on a task at hand.” – by Amanda Oldt

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.