Nurses can benefit from ‘mindfulness’ intervention: study

Columbus, OH – Intensive care nurses can lower their workplace stress through “mindfulness-based intervention,” according to recent research from the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

For eight weeks, 32 nurses from the center’s surgical intensive care unit underwent the intervention. They participated in mindfulness, yoga, meditation, light stretching and listening to music at work. Researchers measured “psychological and biological markers of stress” one week prior and one week after the intervention to examine if it helped lower stress. They found that levels of salivary (alpha)-amylase – referred to as “the fight or flight response” – were 40 percent lower in participants who underwent the intervention while the control group had no variation, according to a university press release.

“The changes in the levels of salivary alpha-amylase suggest that the reactivity to stress was decreased after the eight-week group intervention,” lead study author Dr. Anne-Marie Duchemin said in the press release.

The study was published in the April issue of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.