Abstract
ObjectivesThe goal of the present study was to probe the effects of mindfulness practice in a naturalistic setting as opposed to a lab-based environment in the presence of continuous heart rate variability (HRV) measurements. The specific experimental goals were to examine the effects of a brief 10-day online-based mindfulness intervention on both chronic and acute HRV responses.MethodWe conducted a fully randomized 10-day longitudinal trial of mindfulness practice, explicitly controlling for practice effects with an active-control group (music listening) and a non-intervention control group. To assess chronic cardiovascular effects, we asked participants in the 3 groups to complete 2-day HRV pre- and post-intervention measurement sessions. Using this experimental setup enabled us to address training effects arising from mindfulness practice to assess physiological impact on daytime as well as nighttime (i.e. assessing sleep quality) on the underlying HRV response. To assess acute cardiovascular effects, we measured HRV in the 2 active intervention groups during each of the 10 daily mindfulness or music sessions. This allowed us to track the development of purported training effects arising from mindfulness practice relative to the active-control intervention in terms of changes in the HRV slope over the 10-day time-course.ResultsFirstly, for the acute phase we found increased HRV during the daily practice sessions in both the mindfulness and active-control group indicating that both interventions were effective in decreasing acute physiological stress. Secondly, for the chronic phase we found increased HRV in both the day- and nighttime indicating increased sleep quality, specifically in the mindfulness group.ConclusionThese results suggest causal effects in both chronic and acute phases of mindfulness practice in formerly naïve subjects and provides support for the argument that brief online-based mindfulness interventions exert positive impact on HRV.
Highlights
Mindfulness practice has been framed as a technique that may promote well-being, which to some extend has been scientifically demonstrated through studies showing reduced selfreported stress (e.g. [1,2,3]) and improved self-reported sleep quality [4,5,6,7,8]
These results suggest causal effects in both chronic and acute phases of mindfulness practice in formerly naïve subjects and provides support for the argument that brief online-based mindfulness interventions exert positive impact on heart rate variability (HRV)
Heart rate variability is enhanced during mindfulness practice of changes in the HRV slope over the 10-day time course
Summary
Mindfulness practice has been framed as a technique that may promote well-being, which to some extend has been scientifically demonstrated through studies showing reduced selfreported stress (e.g. [1,2,3]) and improved self-reported sleep quality [4,5,6,7,8]. Mindfulness has increasingly come under scrutiny in terms of difficulties with defining mindfulness, and for lacking important methodological issues for interpreting results from investigations of mindfulness and its purported effects [9] In line with this criticism, the majority of studies on the issue of stress reduction and sleep quality have assessed mindfulness using self-report measures [10]. There have been some, but limited, research (for reviews see [16, 17]) showing that mindfulness exerts beneficial effects on the cardiovascular system [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28] The majority of these studies have focused on acute changes from being in a ‘mindful state’, while some studies cited above have investigated changes in resting baseline HRV between long-term mindfulness practitioners and novices (i.e. chronic changes)
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