2023-12-04 17:09:28
An investigation in which a meditation training of 18 months duration to evaluate how it influenced the psychological well-being of 137 healthy older adults – aged between 65 and 84 – has found that it can improve people’s awareness, their connection with others and their insight. The findings have been published in PLOS ONE.
“As the global population ages, it is increasingly crucial to understand how we can support older adults in maintaining and deepening their psychological well-being. In our study, we tested whether long-term meditation training can improve important dimensions of well-being. Our findings suggest that meditation is a promising non-pharmacological approach. to support human flourishing in late life” said lead author Marco Schlosser from UCL Psychiatry and University of Geneva.
The study was carried out in Caen, France, by the Medit-Ageing (Silver Santé Study) research group of the European Union, in which participants University College London (UCL), Inserm, University of Geneva, University of Caen Normandy, Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, University of Li-ge, Technische Universitát Dresden and Friedrich Schiller University Jena. The principal investigator, Professor Gael Chételat, led the trial.
Benefits of meditation training
The researchers compared a meditation program, which included a mindfulness module (mindfulness) of nine months, followed by a nine-month loving-kindness and compassion module, delivered through weekly group sessions (two hours long), daily home practice (at least 20 minutes), and a retreat day, with a group who underwent English language training (as a comparison group) and a control group without intervention.
The team found that meditation training had a significant impact on a global score measuring the well-being dimensions of awareness, connection and insight. Mindfulness describes an intimate, undistracted attention to one’s thoughts, feelings, and environment, which can generate a feeling of calm and deep satisfaction. Connection captures feelings such as respect, gratitude, and kinship that can foster more positive relationships with others. While insight refers to self-knowledge and understanding how thoughts and feelings participate in shaping our perception and how to transform unhelpful thought patterns related to ourselves and the world.
The benefits of meditation training for an established measure of psychological quality of life were not superior to those of English training, while neither intervention significantly affected another widely used measure of psychological well-being. The researchers suggest that this may be because these two established measures do not include the qualities and depth of human flourishing that can potentially be cultivated through long-term meditation training, thereby overlooking the benefits to consciousness, connection and knowledge.
“Our findings suggest that meditation is a promising non-pharmacological approach to supporting human flourishing in late life.”
The program did not benefit everyone equally, as participants who reported lower levels of psychological well-being at the beginning of the trial showed greater improvements compared to those who already had higher levels of well-being. “We hope that further research will clarify which people are most likely to benefit from meditation training, as it may confer stronger benefits to some specific groups. “Now that we have evidence that meditation training can help older adults, we hope that further improvements in partnership with colleagues in other research disciplines can make meditation programs even more beneficial,” said the researcher. Dra. Natalie Marchant (UCL Psychiatry), co-author of the work.
“By showing the potential of meditation programs, our findings pave the way for more targeted and effective programs that can help older adults flourish, as we seek to go beyond simply preventing illness or disease, and instead “We should instead take a holistic approach to helping people across the spectrum of human well-being,” concludes the Dr. Antoine Lutz (Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, Inserm, France), another of the main authors.
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