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Mindfulness Meditation Effectiveness Essay

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Mindfulness Meditation Effectiveness Essay
The Effectiveness of Mindfulness Meditation and Adult Coloring on Anxiety and Mood Over the 20th century Americans have experienced a surge in levels of anxiety and neuroticism (Twenge, 2000). These phenomena are particularly well documented among college students. Specifically, a meta-analysis of college students found a strong correlation between self-reported anxiety and time, such that students in the late 20th century were much more anxious than students in the mid 20th century (Twenge, 2000). In fact, mean self-reports of anxiety have risen nearly an entire standard deviation in 40 years (Twenge, 2000). The degree of increased prevalence of anxiety among college students makes it important to determine positive, effective methods of coping with anxiety that are easily accessible and affordable. Thus, the goal of the current study is to compare the effectiveness of two popular coping techniques (mindfulness meditation, adult coloring) in decreasing …show more content…
In fact, a meta-analysis of studies using healthy adults found evidence that mindfulness meditation has a significant nonspecific effect when compared to an inactive control group (Chiesa & Serretti, 2009). More specifically, mindfulness meditation decreases depressive symptoms and rumination while increasing mindfulness, emotion regulation, self-control (Chambers, Lo, & Allen, 2008; Costa & Barnhofer, 2016; Tang, Tang, & Posner, 2016). Thus, mindfulness meditation improves psychological well-being (Krygier et al., 2013). In addition to the psychological benefits, there are several physiological benefits to using mindfulness meditation. For example, mindfulness meditation has been associated with decreased blood pressure and cardiovascular reactivity (Chen, Yang, Wang, Zhang, 2013; Steffen & Larson, 2015). Overall, mindfulness meditation has shown to be a positive means of coping with stress and

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