Contemplative Training and Psychological Stress: an Analysis of First-person Accounts

Meditation practitioners reported using humor, positive affect, combined emotion regulation strategies, and adaptive attention allocation during a stressful laboratory task, compared to non-meditators. Interviews with 25 meditators and 20 controls after the Trier Social Stress Test revealed five themes: primary experiences, reasons for stress, affect, emotion regulation, and attention allocation. The findings suggest that contemplative training may alter the subjective experience of psychological stress, offering new insights into how meditation attenuates stress responses.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract Objectives Several studies have investigated the relationship between contemplative approaches and psychobiological stress response; however, this area of research is still new, the mechanisms of the relationship between the stress response attenuation and contemplative training have not been fully delineated, and little is known about the effects of contemplative practice on the ways psychological stress is experienced. This study aimed to explore the first-person experience of psychological stress in meditation practitioners. Methods We conducted short semi-structured interviews with twenty-five meditation practitioners and twenty meditation-naïve controls immediately after they had undergone a laboratory task (the Trier Social Stress Test). A mixed-method approach was used to analyze the interviews. Thematic analysis was combined with descriptive statistics of the qualitative information that had been converted to quantitative data. Results Experiences instantiating main themes were identified as follows: (1) primary experiences encountered, describing the most salient experiences associated with the task; (2) reasons for stress, delineating the analyses of why the task was stressful; (3) affect, dealing with emotional experiences during the task; (4) emotion regulation; and (5) attention allocation describing regulatory strategies employed by the participants. Responses to subjective stress experience in meditation practitioners included use of humor, presence of positive affect, combinations of different types of emotion regulation strategies, and adaptive attention allocation. Conclusions This study elucidates particularities of meditators’ subjective experience of psychological stress, provides new insights on the mechanisms of meditation effect on the stress response, and proposes new directions for research.