Meditating while anticipating stress: to focus on the body or on doctrinal tenets?
Summary
Meditations derived from Buddhist traditions attracted significant interest from stress researchers. Both long-term meditation practice and—to a lesser extent—short meditation-based interventions have been linked to the attenuated psychobiological response to psychological stress. However, most studies focused on mindfulness-based techniques, which used decontextualized forms of meditation and largely ignored philosophical tenets of the original traditions. Analytical meditation, which engages doctrinal tenets or philosophical ideas of a chosen tradition, remains almost entirely unexplored. In this study, we propose to test the stress-attenuated effects of such a meditation (administered before social stress) and compare its effects to the widely used meditation, which focuses on body sensations.