Het effect van mindfulness meditatie, actief bewegen en hrv biofeedback op het psychologisch welbevinden (2014)

Several self-help interventions that focus on stressmanagement are known to promote psychological well-being and to limit symptoms such as depression and rumination, of which three are investigated in the present study: mindfulness meditation, physical exercise and HRV biofeedback. A total of 76 participants with stress has been randomly assigned to one of the three interventions, after which they performed daily exercises belonging to their intervention varying from 10 to 20 minutes for five consecutive weeks. Psychological well-being was assessed using repeated measures (pre-intervention, post intervention and follow-up) of depression, fear, stress, psychological well-being and self compassion. All three interventions appeared effective and the effect appeared to be larger if the participants performed the interventions for at least half of the intended duration of the intervention. The effects also remained significant on the long term. The interventions were compared in terms of their effectiveness in improving psychological well-being through multiple analyses of variance (MANOVA) with repeated measures, but no statistically significant differences were found. Future research should validate these results with a larger sample size in order to be able to detect smaller differences between the interventions, to see whether it is indeed true that there are no differences between the effects of the three interventions on psychological well-being.