TOPLINE:
One session of a telehealth intervention combining mindfulness and compassion significantly lowered self-perceived stress and symptoms of depression and anxiety compared with a waitlist control group, results of a new trial showed.
METHODOLOGY:
- The randomized clinical trial (RCT) included 91 participants aged 18-70 years recruited from the community and the University of Texas at Austin and followed from 2020 to 2021.
- To be included in the trial, participants had to be sheltering at home during the pandemic and endorse loneliness as one of the top issues affecting them.
- Participants were randomized to one of three groups that received single-session online interventions. These included mindfulness-only (MO), mindfulness and compassion (MC), and a waitlist control (WL) group.
- During the compassion component, participants were instructed to focus on a person, place, object, or spiritual figure that evoked feelings of warmth, love, and kindness in them. The primary outcome was self-reported loneliness and secondary outcomes were self-reported stress, depression, and anxiety.
TAKEAWAY:
- At 1-week follow-up, the MC group led to reductions in perceived stress (b = −3.75), anxiety (b = −3.79), and depression (b = −3.01) but not loneliness compared with control individuals.
- Compared with the MO group alone, the MC group had no meaningful differences in perceived depression (b = −1.08) or anxiety (b = −1.50), and the same was true at the 2-week follow-up.
- Researchers speculated that the lack of difference between outcomes in the two mindfulness groups probably meant that the MC group may have only been effective in reducing self-perceived symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression compared with the control group.
IN PRACTICE:
“This brief single session mindfulness intervention offers an approach that can be easily adopted in a range of contexts. 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,” the researchers wrote.
SOURCE:
Mikael Rubin, PhD, of Palo Alto University in Palo Alto, California, led the study, which was published online in PLOS ONE.
LIMITATIONS:
The study was limited by its small sample size and short follow-up period.
DISCLOSURES:
There was no funding listed for the study nor were there any reported disclosures.
A version of this article appeared on Medscape.com.