An
increasing number of people are suffering from anxiety symptoms like
restlessness, insomnia, and stress as they try to cope up with the demands of
modern-day life. Some find psychiatric medications useful, while many are on the
lookout for additional ways to cope with the symptoms.

Now a new
study has found mindful meditation is as effective as the common medication in
managing anxiety. Scientists, for the first time, compared patients who
underwent an intensive eight-week mindful mediation program to patients who
were administered escitalopram, a common drug used to treat depression and
anxiety, and sold under brand names like Cipralex and Lexapro.

As part of
the study that was published in the JAMA Psychiatry, a monthly peer-reviewed
medical journal published by the American Medical Association, the researchers
took in a total of 208 patients and divided them into Mindfulness group (102) and Anti-depressant group.

One group was
asked to practice mindfulness under the guidance of experts for two-and-a-half
hours weekly, while the participants in the other group took the antidepressant
drug, 10 to 20 mg daily dose of Lexapro.

They were
evaluated at the end of eight weeks using the same clinical scale. Both groups
showed almost the same marginal decrease in symptoms.

“In this
study, mindfulness-based stress reduction was found to be a well-tolerated treatment
option. The results from the randomized clinical trial comparing a standardized
evidence-based mindfulness-based intervention with pharmacotherapy for the
treatment of anxiety disorders found that mindfulness-based stress reduction
was non-inferior to escitalopram,” the report said.

“The fact
that we found them to be equal is amazing because now that opens up a whole new
potential type of treatment,” said study author Elizabeth Hoge, director of the
Anxiety Disorders Research Program at Georgetown University Medical Center.