Transcendental meditation helps college students cut down their levels of stress and their risk of high blood pressure.
Psychological distress contributes to the development of high blood pressure or hypertension in young adults. To asses the effects of mind-body intervention on high BP and psychological distress in college students, researchers randomly assigned 298 healthy students with and without high blood pressure to transcendental meditation training or to a training wait list. The students, 40 percent men, were just under 26 years old on average and attended universities in and around Washington, D.C.
Among the 207 students still participating in the study 3 months later, those in the meditation group had slight reductions in blood pressure, while the wait-listed students had slight increases in average blood pressure from the start of the study. The meditating students also showed greater reductions in overall mood disturbances, anxiety, depression, anger, and hostility, and better coping skills compared with baseline measures and wait-listed students.
The researchers further assessed a subgroup of 48 meditating and 64 wait-listed students who initially had high blood pressure or were at risk for high blood pressure. In this high-blood-pressure-risk group, the meditating students had blood pressures that were lower, on average, than at the start of the study, while the wait-listed students had higher blood pressures.
It was also found that these significant reductions in blood pressure correlated with lesser psychological distress and greater coping skills.
The above findings warrant further investigations into the potential health benefits of longer-term transcendental meditation in college students.