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Transcendental Meditation best againststress, study shows By Joel Shurkin A Stanford physicist, using statistical meta-analysistechniques, has found that of all forms of meditation and relaxation, TranscendentalMeditation (TM) appears the most effective against general anxiety.
Abrams at the University of San Francisco, waspublished in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, a widely accepted, peer-reviewedjournal, in November 1989. Eppley has been practicing TM for 14 years andis interested in the phenomenon of meditation. He said he and his coauthorstook considerable effort to make sure none of their expectations affectedthe results of the study. TM is a form of meditation that originated withan Indian guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and became very popular in the I970s.Practitioners are given a "mantra," usually if not always a polysyllabicword or sound in Sanskrit, that they recite mentally in order to promoterelaxation. They are generally told to practice the technique twice a dayfor about 20 minutes.
Eppley's work involved the mathematical techniqueof meta-analysis, which permits statisticians to analyze a large seriesof experiments on a certain subject even though the studies may involvedifferent variables or inconsistencies. The technique has become commonin the social sciences and medicine. Eppley and his coauthors searched the literatureon meditation and anxiety by hand and by computerized database searches.They looked at all the studies, including dissertations, from the earliestcataloged until 1982, when the meta-analysis was done. Eppley said that when meditation techniques initiallybecame popular in the 1960s, the first question scientists had was whetherany of the techniques had any effect at all. "Most people eventually believed that (meditation)did have real effects," Eppley said, and substantial scientific researchsupported that belief. The question not yet answered to everyone's satisfactionis whether one technique is better than the rest. Eppley said that many studies were reported thatshowed mixed results and the consensus grew that there were no real differences. "The thing that distressed me as I read thesestudies was the small sample sizes. I found that the conclusion of no significantdifference was often meaningless. You need a larger sample to detect differencesof the sizes that were found," he said. One study, published in theprestigious journal Science, testing TM against sleeping used only fivesubjects. Researchers were ignoring the possibility of whatis called a "Type I" error, which means to conclude that a realdifference was due only to chance. For that reason, Eppley concluded that meta-analysiswas the best technique to employ for the study. The size of any effect foundwould be independent of the sample size. To study anxiety, Eppley and his colleagues useda standard test that measured general stress, called trait anxiety, as distinguishedfrom incident-specific disquiet. (Eppley said there is more data in thisarea than on such conditions as hypertension.) The conclusions, they wrote, were unambiguous.Even after adjusting for many possible factors and potential biases, theresearchers reported: "TM was found to produce a significantly largereffect than other forms of meditation and relaxation in the reduction oftrait anxiety," they wrote in the journal article. Why TM worked better was not clear, but the researchersbelieve it is because the technique is "effortless." The subjectdoes not concentrate as such on the mantra, but rather uses it as a precipitatorof meditation. Meditation that involved explicit concentration producedthe least effect of all techniques studied. Among the possibilities eliminated by the studywere the subject's expectations or the placebo effect. Whether TM studentspay for lessons or learn for free also seems to have no effect on the results,they found. The way meditation was taught may have some influenceon the results, but it is not clear how strong that variable might be. TMinstructors spend more time with the students during the first two weeks,but less time subsequently. Nevertheless, the difference in the effect onanxiety between TM and other meditation techniques increased with time. Oddly, the study found that other techniques usingSanskrit mantras were not more effective than techniques using non-Sanskritwords. TM was the exception. "There has been some skepticism with regardto the claim by TM teachers that they can choose the optimal sounds fora particular individual, probably because no theory has been put forth toexplain the connection between particular sounds and particular results,"they wrote. "However, it is not entirely implausible thateven rough rule-of-thumb experimentation over centuries might produce moreconsistent empirical results than inventions by researchers based on onlya few years' experience." Reprinted with permission of the StanfordNews Service. Scientific chart and summary of research study on the Transcendental Meditation program and stress and anxiety. Scientific chart and summary of research study on the Transcendental Meditation program and hypertension (high blood pressure). Watch a video about the Transcendental Meditation program online! |
