A brief digital mindfulness meditation program, compared to a waiting list, reduced perceived stress and job strain among employees of a large academic medical center. In a randomized clinical trial with 1458 adults (mostly female, average age 35.5 years), those assigned to 10 minutes of daily meditation for 8 weeks showed moderate to large improvements in stress and secondary outcomes like burnout and work engagement at 8 weeks, and these benefits persisted at 4 months. Greater daily use of the app (5 to 9.9 minutes versus less than 5 minutes) was linked to larger stress reductions. The findings suggest that a scalable digital meditation program can effectively lower stress in the workplace.
Weight stigma is widespread, but existing interventions have only modest effects. Two experiments tested a loving kindness meditation (LKM) as a novel approach. Experiment 1 examined whether LKM reduces explicit and implicit anti-fat bias and increases empathy, depending on whether the recipient is a close other or a stranger. Experiment 2 compared LKM to an empathy intervention and a control. The LKM increased empathic care but did not reduce anti-fat bias relative to control. In unadjusted analyses, LKM (but not the empathy intervention) led to greater empathy than control. Unexpectedly, participants in both LKM and empathy interventions were more likely to engage in stigmatizing behavior than those in the control. These results indicate that LKM may not effectively reduce weight stigma despite boosting empathy.