Guided mindfulness meditation as a priming strategy for reducing anxiety and facilitating motor skill learning.
Frontiers in Psychology January 1, 2026 Merwyn Yu Xian Lee, Megan Wan Ting Tay, Meng Leong Chia et al.
A brief 10-minute guided mindfulness meditation session reduced anxiety and improved accuracy on a simple motor task in healthy young adults who had never meditated before. In a randomized controlled trial, 24 participants either meditated or rested before tracing circles with their dominant hand. The meditation group showed a 4.2% increase in tracing accuracy with their trained hand, while no improvement occurred for the untrained hand or a novel inverted-screen task. Heart rates and self-reported anxiety decreased during meditation, but cognitive functions like attention and inhibitory control did not differ between groups. The authors suggest brief meditation may aid simple motor learning by lowering anxiety, but longer or regular practice might be needed for complex tasks.