Guided mindfulness meditation as a priming strategy for reducing anxiety and facilitating motor skill learning.

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Mindfulness meditation (MM) is a promising cognitive strategy that may facilitate motor learning by improving attention and reducing anxiety. Our study aimed to investigate the effects of guided MM on motor learning in healthy young adults. The study was conducted as randomised controlled trials where 24 meditation-naive participants underwent either a 10-min MM session or seated rest (CT) before performing circle tracing tasks using their (1) trained (dominant) hand, (2) untrained (non-dominant) hand, and (3) untrained hand to trace with an inverted screen display (a novel motor task). Post-learning, they performed a Parametric Go/No-Go (PGNG) cognitive test. Anxiety level was assessed via heart rates, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory - State subscale and Visual Analogue Scale-Anxiety (VAS-A). Heart rates were lowered during guided MM (F 3.3,36.6 = 3.495, p = 0.022) with reduction in VAS-A scores (p = 0.012) after a single session of MM, indicating lowered anxiety. Only the MM group demonstrated learning effects for the trained hand task (+4.2% in accuracy; p < 0.001) while no differences were observed for the untrained hand and novel motor learning tasks. PGNG test results revealed that cognitive functions such as inhibitory control, sustained attention, and processing speeds remained unaltered between groups. Our findings suggest that a brief guided MM session reduced anxiety levels and facilitated the learning of simple motor tasks. Future studies may explore the use of extended MM sessions and/or regular meditation practice to elicit cognitive benefits for facilitating novel or complex motor learning.