New research provides evidence that different types of meditation can effectively reduce symptoms of depression and feelings of threat to personal identity. The findings suggest that focusing attention on breathing and engaging in introspective self-inquiry both offer significant mental health benefits, although they operate through slightly different mental pathways. The research was published in the journal Mindfulness.
Depression involves rigid and negative ways of thinking about oneself and the world. A major factor in depression is feeling an identity threat, which refers to the perception that a person’s self-concept or self-esteem is being attacked or devalued by others.
Individuals who hold dysfunctional attitudes tend to view these perceived threats through a highly negative filter. Dysfunctional attitudes are maladaptive beliefs that people hold about themselves, such as thinking they are a complete failure if they make a single mistake at work. These rigid beliefs reinforce feelings of distress and worsen depressive symptoms over time.
The study was conducted as part of doctoral research by first author Céline Stinus, a psychology researcher at the University of Navarra in Spain. The research was completed under the supervision of her co-author, Professor Sophie Berjot from the University of Reims Champagne Ardenne.
“I came to this study through a simple question: what if vulnerability to depression is not only about negative thoughts or low mood, but also about the way we relate to ourselves?” Stinus explained to PsyPost. “My background is in clinical psychology, and I have long been interested in why some people experience their own self, their failures, emotions, identity, or life story, as something fragile, threatening, or constantly in need of protection.”
“At the same time, I became increasingly interested in contemplative practices that do not only aim to calm the mind, but to transform the way we experience the self,” Stinus continued. “This led me to deconstructive forms of meditation, which are still much less studied than attention-based practices. They are fascinating because they invite people to examine the sense of ‘me’ itself.”
In the study, the authors explore “selflessness” as a way to relieve psychological distress. “In this study, I use the term ‘selflessness’ to describe this more flexible relationship to the self, not the absence of a self, but a self that is less rigid, less defensive, and less constantly experienced as under threat,” Stinus explained. “For me, the central question became whether cultivating this kind of relationship to the self could be one pathway toward reducing vulnerability to depression.”
Meditation is not a single practice but rather a broad family of techniques designed to train the mind. The authors focused on two specific types of meditation: attentional and deconstructive. Attentional meditation involves focusing the mind on a specific object, like the rhythm of breathing.
Deconstructive meditation asks practitioners to actively question their thoughts and feelings. This process, often called self-inquiry, encourages people to observe a mental event and ask where it comes from or why they identify with it. While attentional meditation is common in modern clinical settings, deconstructive practices are much less studied by science.
“The main takeaway is that meditation is not just one thing. Different practices may train different psychological skills,” Stinus said. “Some practices, such as breath meditation or body scan, can help stabilize attention, calm the body, or regulate emotions.”
“Deconstructive meditation goes one step further by inviting people to look directly at the sense of ‘me’: the inner story of who we are, how we judge ourselves, and how we react when we fail, succeed, feel criticized, or compare ourselves to others,” Stinus noted. “This matters because vulnerability to depression is often not only about having negative thoughts, but also involve experiencing the self as fragile, inadequate, or constantly under threat.”
“Our findings suggest that deconstructive meditation may help loosen this rigid relationship to oneself, allowing people to relate to their thoughts, emotions, and identity with more flexibility and less self-criticism,” Stinus said. To test this, the researchers recruited 147 adult participants for the experiment. They screened the volunteers to exclude experienced meditators, individuals taking psychiatric medications, and people with existing clinical depression diagnoses.
They randomly assigned the eligible participants into three equal groups of 49 people each. One group practiced focused-attention meditation, the second practiced self-inquiry meditation, and the third served as a wait-list control group. Participants in the control group were simply told they were on a wait-list due to high enrollment.
The meditation programs lasted for four weeks. Participants in the two active groups attended a weekly online group session that lasted sixty minutes. The primary author led these sessions, which included guided practices and time for group discussion.
Participants were also asked to practice at home for twenty minutes a day, five days a week, using audio recordings provided in a digital brochure. The focused-attention group practiced observing their breath and performing body scans. The focused-attention participants also practiced a daily exercise called “Train Your Attention Muscle.”
This required them to notice when their mind started wandering to uncomfortable topics and to quickly redirect their focus back to their breath. The self-inquiry group practiced a slightly different daily exercise called “STOP, I Contemplate.” This self-inquiry exercise asked participants to pause during their day to observe a current thought or emotional narrative, instructing them to reflect on the origin of the thought and question its absolute truth.
To measure the effects, participants filled out extensive questionnaires before and after the four-week period. The data provides evidence that both meditation styles are broadly beneficial for mental health. Both the focused-attention group and the self-inquiry group experienced greater reductions in depressive symptoms compared to the wait-list group.
The authors found no significant difference between the two meditation styles in reducing depressive symptoms or identity threat. Both styles proved similarly effective for improving these specific outcomes. The focused-attention group experienced significantly greater reductions in dysfunctional attitudes than both the self-inquiry group and the control group.
During the process, some unexpected patterns emerged regarding participant comfort. “What struck me was the gap between what I expected people to find most useful and what they seemed to find most comfortable,” Stinus said. “I was personally very drawn to deconstructive practices because they target something we all struggle with in daily life: being caught in our thoughts, self-judgments, emotional reactions, and stories about who we are.”
“But many participants seemed more at ease with practices such as breath meditation or body scan, which are closer to the common image of meditation as calming down or reducing stress,” she added. “This points to an important misunderstanding about meditation. Meditation is often presented as a way to feel better or escape discomfort.”
“But some forms of meditation are not designed simply to make us comfortable,” Stinus explained. “They invite us to turn toward patterns that are usually automatic or avoided. That can be uncomfortable at first, but also deeply liberating, because it helps us see that we do not have to be so identified with every thought, emotion, or story about ourselves.”
The self-inquiry practice had unique effects on feelings of connection to the outside world. Exploratory analyses suggest that only the self-inquiry group showed significant increases in feeling connected to humanity and feeling connected to nature. This suggests that questioning the self might help people feel more bonded to their environment and peers.
The researchers used statistical models to see exactly which mental changes explained the drop in negative symptoms. For the focused-attention group, increased cognitive decentering primarily explained the drop in depressive symptoms and dysfunctional attitudes. In the self-inquiry group, increased feelings of connection to humanity helped explain the reduction in identity threat.
Readers should be cautious not to view one method as superior. “One potential misinterpretation would be to read the study as saying that one type of meditation is simply ‘better’ than another,” Stinus said. “I do not think this is the right conclusion. The goal was not to rank meditation practices, but to better understand their specific effects and mechanisms.”
“Different practices may serve different psychological functions,” Stinus continued. “When someone feels overwhelmed, anxious, or unable to stabilize attention, practices such as breath meditation or body scan may offer grounding and regulation. Deconstructive practices may be especially relevant when the central difficulty is being strongly identified with painful thoughts, self-judgments, or stories about who we are.”
“So I would not think of meditation practices as a hierarchy from basic to advanced, or from weak to powerful,” she noted. “I would think of them more as different tools that may be more or less appropriate depending on the person, the moment, and the psychological process we are trying to work with. In practice, the goal is probably not to choose one practice and discard the others, but to combine them in a more precise and personalized way.”
When interpreting the study’s impact, the context of the intervention matters. “Readers should keep in mind that psychological effects are never completely isolated,” Stinus explained. “Even in a randomized controlled trial, we are not studying a meditation technique in a vacuum.”
“People enter an intervention with their own history, expectations, emotional state, relationships, habits, and life context,” she added. “The structure of the program also matters: regular practice, guidance from an instructor, and sometimes sharing the experience with others can all contribute to change.”
“That said, I see the findings as meaningful,” Stinus continued. “Beyond the statistical effect sizes, this study is a preliminary step toward a different way of understanding and preventing depression. The results suggest that people at risk for depression may begin to become less identified with painful thoughts and more flexible in the way they relate to themselves.”
“This is clinically relevant because many people do not only struggle with difficult experiences, thoughts, emotions, social interactions, social roles, or memories, but with the feeling that these experiences define who they are,” Stinus said. “Meditation may therefore be a valuable preventive or complementary tool, not as a replacement for therapy, but as a way to support people in working with self-critical and threatening patterns in daily life.”
The study has several limitations that should be noted when interpreting the findings. The sample was predominantly female, which means the results might not perfectly represent how all people respond to these techniques. The authors also relied entirely on self-reported questionnaires, which can sometimes be influenced by a participant’s desire to give a good impression.
A high number of participants in the wait-list group dropped out of the study before the second assessment. This high dropout rate could potentially create statistical biases when comparing the active groups to the control group. The study also did not include a long-term follow-up assessment, leaving it unknown whether the mental health benefits would last months or years later.
The authors also suggest that the completely secular nature of the program might explain the unexpected results regarding dysfunctional attitudes. Deconstructive practices in traditional settings often rely on deep spiritual frameworks that were intentionally removed for this scientific trial. Without that spiritual context, the self-inquiry practice might lack some of the depth needed to alter deeply ingrained negative beliefs during a short four-week period.
“One thing I would add is that meditation is not only a method. It is also a worldview in action,” Stinus noted. “The same exercise can become something very different depending on how it is framed.”
“Following the breath can be taught as relaxation, attention training, a clinical skill, a spiritual discipline, or a way to investigate the nature of the self,” she explained. “From the outside, the practice may look similar. From the inside, it may not be the same practice at all.”
“For me, meaning is not just a cultural ‘add-on’ to meditation. It shapes what people expect, how they interpret what happens during practice, how they deal with discomfort, and why they continue,” Stinus said. “This may be especially important for deconstructive practices, where the goal is not only to feel better, but to transform how we relate to thoughts, emotions, and the sense of ‘me.’”
“So I do not think the future question is simply whether meditation should be secular or spiritual,” she added. “The deeper question is: what kind of meaning framework helps people practice safely, sustain the practice, and make sense of what they experience? This is precisely the direction of some of my current work, so stay tuned.”
Exploring these meaning frameworks is a next step for the researchers. “My long-term goal is to continue studying what meditation can reveal about the mind, the self, and psychological suffering,” Stinus said. “We are still at a very early stage in understanding the transformative potential of meditation, especially when it comes to advanced meditation, deconstructive practices, and self-related processes.”
“At the same time, there is a very practical challenge that researchers need to take seriously: how do we help people actually start meditating, and keep going over time?” she asked. “It is not enough to show that meditation can be beneficial if it remains accessible only to a small minority of highly motivated people.”
“For me, the future is not only about showing that meditation ‘works.’ It is about developing more precise, realistic, and personalized meditation-based programs that people can sustain in real life,” Stinus concluded. “If we want meditation to have transformative and potentially liberating effects, we need to understand not only its mechanisms, but also how to make it compatible with the realities of people’s daily lives.”
The study, “Preventing Depression through Selflessness: Effects and Mechanisms of Attentional vs. Deconstructive Meditation in a Three-Arm Randomized Controlled Trial“, was authored by Céline Stinus and Sophie Berjot.
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.