Transcendental Meditation has dramatic benefits for those with PTSD

  • A month of practicing Transcendental Meditation daily resulted in 80% of military veterans with PTSD having their symptoms reduced to below the clinical level.

A pilot study involving 41 military veterans and 5 active-duty soldiers diagnosed with clinical levels of PTSD has found that one month of transcendental meditation produced dramatic benefits, with 37 (80%) having their symptoms reduced to below the clinical level, and 40 having a clinically significant decrease of more than 10 points.

A test 90 days later also showed that PTSD symptoms continued to improve, and a further three individuals had dropped to below the clinical level.

The participants learned the standard Transcendental Meditation technique, which is practiced 20 minutes twice a day. Those who practiced twice a day had greater benefits than those who practiced once a day.

The study follows on from two earlier studies involving Congolese refugees, who found a significant benefit after just 10 days of Transcendental Meditation.

Note that this is only a preliminary study, with no controls, and the participants were self-selected, responding to media advertising (89 responded — only those with clinical levels of PTSD were included in the study). However, the results certainly appear dramatic, and previous research has shown that Transcendental Meditation has a positive benefit for many of the conditions associated with PTSD, such as high anxiety, insomnia, depression, and high blood pressure.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-01/muom-vwl011018.php

Full text of the paper is available at https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article/183/1-2/e144/4781643

Reference: 

Related News

A laboratory study has found that sleeping after watching a trauma event reduced emotional distress and memories related to traumatic events. The laboratory study involved 65 women being shown a neutral and a traumatic video.

A randomized clinical trial of 268 active-duty personnel seeking treatment for PTSD has found that individual sessions of cognitive processing therapy were twice as effective as group sessions.

A pilot study involving 23 military veterans with PTSD found that those who received mindfulness training showed reduced PTSD symptoms, and brain changes that suggest a greater ability to shift and control attention.

An interesting new theory for PTSD suggests that the root of the problem lies in context processing problems.

Following previous research showing that having a smaller

Can you help protect yourself from the memory of traumatic events? A new study suggests that, by concentrating on concrete details as you live through the event, you can reduce the number of intrusive memories later experienced.

A meta-analysis of studies reporting brain activity in individuals with a diagnosis of PTSD has revealed differences between the brain activity of individuals with PTSD and that of groups of both trauma-exposed (those who had experienced trauma but didn't have a diagnosis of PTSD) and trauma-naï

A study involving 520 intensive care patients who had been put on ventilators for acute lung injury (ALI), of whom 186 patients of the 275 survivors were followed up over the next two years, found that 35% of them had clinically significant symptoms of PTSD.

It certainly sounds like pseudo-science, but that's why we do science - because the weirdness of something is not a particularly good reason to dismiss it (quantum! many-universes!).

We know that emotion affects memory.

Pages

Subscribe to Latest newsSubscribe to Latest newsSubscribe to Latest health newsSubscribe to Latest news
Error | About memory

Error

The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.