Chronic stress has been shown to impact long-term emotional and physical health. When nearly three-quarters of Americans report stress at levels that exceed what they consider healthy, there is a desperate need to understand factors that contribute to effective stress regulation. This work seeks to develop a measure tied to awareness and acceptance of stress that has shown promise as a predictor of multiple markers of mental and physical well-being, understand how it relates to awareness of the body, and explore whether it can be trained to alleviate suffering and promote well-being. This study aims to 1) Conceptually replicate and extend previous findings linking greater stress-physiology coherence to higher well-being. 2) Assess whether awareness of physiology is associated with stress-physiology coherence. 3) Explore whether stress-physiology coherence can be trained through a brief mindfulness training intervention.
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
BASIC_SCIENCE
Masking
DOUBLE
Enrollment
120
Brief audio recordings discussing mindfulness or guided mindfulness practices.
Participants will record each day how much time they estimate they spent on their smart phone in the past 24 hours.
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Change in subjective stress-heart rate coherence
Within-participant association between repeated measures of subjective stress (1-100 Visual Analog Scale rating) and heart rate over the course of a stress-induction paradigm. Stronger positive associations indicate higher stress-heart rate coherence.
Time frame: Baseline and post-test, separated by 4 weeks
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