A 31-day web-based mindfulness meditation training, compared to a health training condition, increased mindfulness and reduced stress-eating, emotional-eating tendencies, and food cravings in 66 meditation-naïve adults who tend to stress-eat. These behavioral improvements were accompanied by changes in resting-state functional connectivity between the hypothalamus, reward regions, and default mode network areas, as well as between the insula and somatosensory areas. Additional connectivity changes occurred in brain regions linked to emotion regulation, awareness, attention, and sensory integration. The correlations between connectivity and behavioral changes suggest neural mechanisms underlying mindfulness effects on stress-eating.
A 31-day web-based mindfulness meditation training reduced perceived stress and anxiety and improved overall reaction time on an attention test, though no specific attentional components were affected. The training also increased flow experiences. Brain imaging showed increased activity in the superior frontal gyrus, posterior cingulate cortex, and right hippocampus during an alerting task, and decreased stress and anxiety correlated with right hippocampus activation. Increased flow correlated with activity in all those areas. Diffusion imaging revealed improved white matter microstructure in the right uncinate fasciculus, linking the right hippocampus to frontal areas. An active control group showed no significant changes.