Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

Abstract

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is a form of mindfulness training: a structured, eight-week, manualized group program that teaches sustained nonjudgmental attention to present-moment experience as a way of changing a person's relationship to stress, pain, and illness. Developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979, it took contemplative practices out of their religious settings and placed them inside behavioral medicine, pairing formal meditation — the body scan, sitting meditation, and gentle hatha yoga — with daily home practice and an all-day silent retreat. This article sets out the program's fixed curriculum, the proposed mechanisms of attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, and reperceiving, and a meta-analytic evidence base showing moderate benefits for anxiety, depression, pain, and stress whose size depends heavily on the control condition.

Keywords: mindfulness-based stress reduction, mindfulness, meditation, stress, behavioral medicine

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, almost always abbreviated MBSR, is the program from which the entire clinical field of mindfulness-based interventions descends. Its originator defined mindfulness operationally as the awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally (Kabat-Zinn, 2003). What made MBSR consequential was not the meditation itself, which is ancient, but its packaging: a secular, time-limited, replicable curriculum that could be delivered in a hospital, studied in a trial, and taught to patients regardless of belief. Everything from mindfulness-based cognitive therapy to the workplace mindfulness industry traces back to the eight-week template Kabat-Zinn built (Crane et al., 2017).

What Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Is

MBSR is a psychoeducational and experiential training program, not a psychotherapy in the conventional sense. It originated in 1979 when Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist with a long personal meditation practice, opened the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center and began offering an eight-week course to patients whose chronic conditions — persistent pain above all — had not responded well to standard medical care (Kabat-Zinn, 1982). The first published results described an outpatient program in behavioral medicine for chronic-pain patients grounded in the practice of mindfulness meditation, and reported that a majority showed clinically meaningful reductions in pain and mood disturbance that persisted at follow-up (Kabat-Zinn, 1982); (Kabat-Zinn et al., 1985).

The defining move was secularization. Kabat-Zinn drew the core practices from Buddhist meditative traditions but stripped them of religious framing and vocabulary, presenting mindfulness as a trainable, universal human capacity rather than a spiritual attainment. This made the program teachable to patients of any or no faith and, crucially, made it a candidate for the kind of controlled evaluation that medicine demands (Kabat-Zinn, 2003). The published program manual set out the curriculum in detail and framed the whole enterprise as using the wisdom of the body and mind to face stress, pain, and illness (Kabat-Zinn, 1990).

What a participant actually learns is a set of practices for deploying attention. The aim is not relaxation as such, and not the suppression of unpleasant experience, but a particular stance toward whatever arises: to observe sensations, thoughts, and emotions as transient events, with interest and without the automatic struggle to fix or flee them. Because that stance is defined by its quality of attention rather than by its content, the same training is applied across a wide range of presentations, from medical pain and skin disease to anxiety and the everyday stress of healthy people (Grossman et al., 2004).

The Eight-Week Program

What separates MBSR from meditation in general is its standardization. The program is a fixed eight-week sequence of weekly classes, each lasting about two and a half hours, taught to groups of up to thirty or so participants by a trained instructor, with roughly 45 minutes of assigned home practice six days a week throughout (Kabat-Zinn, 1990). Between the sixth and seventh weeks sits an all-day silent session of six to eight hours. This architecture — the number of weeks, the length of classes, the daily home-practice dose, and the day-long retreat — is what makes one delivery of MBSR comparable to another and is the backbone that later mindfulness-based programs inherited (Crane et al., 2017).

Three formal practices carry the curriculum. The body scan, usually taught first, moves attention slowly and systematically through the regions of the body, cultivating sustained, nonjudgmental awareness of physical sensation. Sitting meditation develops attention to the breath and then to a widening field of sounds, thoughts, and emotions. Mindful movement, drawn from gentle hatha yoga, brings the same quality of attention to the body in motion. Alongside these, informal practice asks participants to bring mindful attention to ordinary activities — eating, walking, washing dishes — so that the training generalizes beyond the cushion into daily life (Kabat-Zinn, 1990).

The fixed dose is not incidental. Because the program specifies how much practice it expects, the relationship between the amount of practice a participant actually does and the benefit they report becomes an empirical question rather than an assumption, and home-practice adherence is one of the moderators studies examine when they ask why outcomes vary (Grossman et al., 2004). The standardization also carries a cost that the field has had to confront: a program defined by its structure can be delivered in form while losing the quality of attention it is meant to teach, which is why defining what makes a program genuinely mindfulness-based has become its own line of work (Crane et al., 2017).

How It Works

MBSR is defined by a practice rather than by a theory of change, so its mechanisms have been reconstructed after the fact and remain partly open. The most influential synthesis proposes four interacting components: attention regulation, the capacity to sustain and redirect attention at will; body awareness, a heightened and more accurate contact with internal bodily sensation; emotion regulation, including both reappraisal and a willingness to expose oneself to difficult experience rather than avoid it; and a change in perspective on the self, a loosening of identification with a fixed self-concept (Hölzel et al., 2011). On this account the benefits of MBSR are not a single effect but the convergence of several distinct processes that regular practice strengthens together.

A complementary model names the pivotal process reperceiving, or decentering: a fundamental shift in which a person steps back from the contents of consciousness and observes their own moment-to-moment experience as a stream of passing events rather than as the literal truth about themselves and the world. On this view reperceiving is a meta-mechanism that in turn drives the others — self-regulation, value clarification, cognitive and behavioral flexibility, and exposure — so that the quality of attention MBSR trains changes behavior by first changing the vantage point from which experience is seen (Shapiro et al., 2006). The operational definition of mindfulness that the field converged on captures the same two-part structure: the self-regulation of attention toward present experience, held in an orientation of curiosity, openness, and acceptance (Bishop et al., 2004).

Underneath the psychological account lies a physiological one. The program's early medical credibility rested on the relaxation response, the coordinated drop in sympathetic nervous-system arousal — lowered heart rate, respiration, and oxygen consumption — that Herbert Benson had shown meditation reliably elicits, the bodily mirror of the fight-or-flight reaction (Benson et al., 1974). That the practice has measurable biological consequences was later reinforced by evidence that an eight-week MBSR course produced leftward shifts in frontal brain activity associated with positive affect and strengthened the antibody response to an influenza vaccine, tying the training to both neural and immune outcomes (Davidson et al., 2003). Together the psychological and physiological strands frame MBSR as acting on the appraisal of stressors and on the body's reactivity to them at once.

The Evidence Base

MBSR has been studied for four decades, and successive meta-analyses have reached a consistent, carefully qualified verdict: the program produces moderate benefits across a range of conditions, with the size of the effect depending on what it is measured against. Before the meta-analytic era, early uncontrolled studies had already reported durable gains: a meditation-based stress reduction program delivered to patients with anxiety disorders produced significant reductions in anxiety and panic symptoms that were largely maintained at three-year follow-up (Kabat-Zinn et al., 1992). An early and influential meta-analysis of health benefits concluded that MBSR yields moderate effect sizes, of roughly half a standard deviation, on measures of both mental and physical health across clinical and nonclinical samples (Grossman et al., 2004). A meta-analysis confined to healthy individuals found that MBSR reduced stress, anxiety, depression, and distress and improved quality of life, with moderate pre-post effects (Khoury et al., 2015).

The most consequential constraint on these claims is the comparison condition, and the most rigorous review drove the point home. Commissioned to assess meditation programs for psychological stress, it restricted itself to randomized trials with active control conditions and found that mindfulness programs produced only moderate evidence of small-to-moderate reductions in anxiety, depression, and pain, and low or insufficient evidence of effects on other outcomes, with no evidence that meditation programs outperformed active treatments such as drugs, exercise, or other therapies (Goyal et al., 2014). The lesson is not that MBSR fails but that much of the impressive effect seen against waitlist controls reflects nonspecific factors — attention, expectancy, group support — that any credible active comparator also supplies.

Reviews that pool the broader mindfulness-intervention literature reach the same shape of conclusion. A meta-analysis of mindfulness-based interventions for psychiatric populations found small-to-moderate effects that were stronger against inactive than active controls and that were maintained at follow-up (Goldberg et al., 2018), and a mindfulness-based approach to anxiety and mood problems more generally showed a robust effect on those symptoms (Hofmann et al., 2010). A systematic review of 44 separate meta-analyses — an unusually comprehensive audit of the whole field — concluded that the strongest support exists for depression, chronic pain, and anxiety, while cautioning that methodological weaknesses still limit confidence in many domains (Goldberg et al., 2022). Applied to the high-stress occupation of health care, MBSR has been found to reduce anxiety, depression, and stress in clinicians, though again with the caveat that trial quality is uneven (Kriakous et al., 2021). The through-line is that MBSR is a genuinely effective program whose honest effect size is modest and comparator-dependent, not the panacea its popular reputation sometimes suggests.

Table 1

Representative meta-analyses of MBSR and the comparator dependence of their effects

Note. The reported effect falls as the comparator strengthens, the central interpretive caution of the literature.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in Motion

The three demonstrations below make the program's logic manipulable. The first runs the dose-response relationship between home practice and benefit that the fixed curriculum turns into an empirical question. The second varies the comparison condition in an efficacy estimate, showing why the same program can look strong or weak depending only on what it is tested against. The third separates the two physiological routes — a lower resting arousal and a flatter reactivity slope — by which mindfulness is held to blunt the stress response.

Interactive: the practice dose-response curve

MBSR assigns a daily dose of home practice. Set the minutes practiced per day and the number of weeks completed, and watch the cumulative hours and the modeled symptom improvement, which rises along a saturating curve.

The earliest hours of practice buy the most change: a participant doing a third of the assigned dose still captures well over half of the benefit available at full adherence, while the final hours add little. That diminishing return is the signature of a saturating dose-response.

The dose-response demonstration builds the relationship between practice and benefit. Setting the minutes of daily home practice and the number of weeks completed computes the cumulative hours of practice and the modeled symptom improvement, which follows a saturating curve. It makes concrete why MBSR specifies a daily dose, and why the returns diminish: the first hours of practice buy the largest change, so a participant who does a third of the assigned practice captures well over half of the available benefit, while pushing from full adherence to still more yields little.

Interactive: the same program, three comparators

An effect size is uninterpretable until you name what the program was tested against. Pick a comparison condition and read the standardized effect size as the share of control participants the average treated participant exceeds.

The treated distribution is the grey control curve shifted right by d. As the comparison is strengthened from an inactive waitlist to an established treatment, d shrinks and the two curves converge — the overlap toward 50% that means no difference. The program never changed; only the yardstick did.

The efficacy demonstration makes the comparator problem visible. Choosing the condition MBSR is tested against — an inactive waitlist, a nonspecific active control, or an established active treatment — sets a standardized effect size and translates it into the share of control participants the average treated participant exceeds. It shows how a headline claim of effectiveness can shrink toward the midpoint as the comparison is made more stringent, which is exactly the interpretive issue that the strongest reviews of the program have pressed.

Interactive: two routes to a calmer stress response

Set the intensity of a stressor and the level of trained mindfulness. The bar splits the resulting arousal into its two parts: a resting baseline the relaxation response lowers, and a reactive response the decentering of appraised threat flattens.

Raising mindfulness lowers arousal by two independent routes: it trims the resting baseline (the relaxation response) and, more substantially, it flattens the reactive response by reducing the appraised threat (the decentering effect). The larger share of the total reduction comes from the flatter reactivity slope.

The reactivity demonstration separates the two physiological mechanisms. Setting the intensity of a stressor and the level of trained mindfulness computes the resulting physiological arousal as the sum of a resting baseline and a reactive response to the stressor's appraised threat. Raising mindfulness lowers the arousal by two independent routes: it drops the resting baseline, the relaxation response, and it flattens the reactivity slope by reducing the appraised threat, the decentering effect. The display shows how much of the total reduction comes from each, making clear that the program acts both on background arousal and on reactivity to specific stressors.

Worked Example

Begin with the dose-response curve the first demonstration builds. Cumulative practice in hours is H = (minutes per day × 6 days × weeks) ÷ 60, and modeled improvement follows a saturating function I = I_max × (1 − e^−kH) with a ceiling I_max = 0.55 standard deviations and a rate k = 0.035 per hour. A participant who does the full assigned 45 minutes a day for all eight weeks accumulates H = (45 × 6 × 8) ÷ 60 = 2160 ÷ 60 = 36 hours, for an improvement of 0.55 × (1 − e^−0.035×36) = 0.55 × (1 − e^−1.26) = 0.55 × (1 − 0.2837) = 0.55 × 0.7163 = 0.39. A participant who manages only 15 minutes a day accumulates H = (15 × 6 × 8) ÷ 60 = 12 hours, for 0.55 × (1 − e^−0.42) = 0.55 × (1 − 0.6570) = 0.55 × 0.3430 = 0.19. One-third of the assigned practice captures roughly half of the full-adherence benefit — the signature of a saturating dose-response, in which the earliest practice is the most valuable.

Now the comparator problem. A standardized effect size (Cohen's d) can be read as the fraction of control participants the average treated participant exceeds, U₃ = Φ(d), the standard-normal cumulative distribution evaluated at d. Against an inactive waitlist an illustrative d = 0.55 gives Φ(0.55) = 0.71, so the average MBSR participant does better than about 71% of controls — a substantial-looking effect. Against a nonspecific active control an illustrative d = 0.30 gives Φ(0.30) = 0.62, and against an established active treatment an illustrative d = 0.15 gives Φ(0.15) = 0.56, barely above the 50% that means no difference at all. The program has not changed across the three rows; only the comparison has, which is why the strongest reviews insist an effect size is uninterpretable until its comparator is named (Goyal et al., 2014). (The values illustrate the arithmetic, not any single trial's exact figures.)

Finally the two routes of the reactivity model. Appraised threat is P = S × (1 − 0.6m), where S is stressor intensity on a 0-to-10 scale and m is the trained-mindfulness level from 0 to 1; physiological arousal is A = B₀(1 − 0.4m) + g × P, with resting baseline B₀ = 2.0, reactivity gain g = 0.8, so that mindfulness lowers both the baseline term and the appraised threat. For a novice meeting a strong stressor, S = 8 and m = 0.1: P = 8 × (1 − 0.06) = 7.52 and A = 2.0 × 0.96 + 0.8 × 7.52 = 1.92 + 6.02 = 7.94. For an experienced practitioner facing the identical stressor, S = 8 and m = 0.8: P = 8 × (1 − 0.48) = 4.16 and A = 2.0 × 0.68 + 0.8 × 4.16 = 1.36 + 3.33 = 4.69. The same objective stressor produces arousal of 7.94 for the novice and 4.69 for the practitioner, a 41% reduction, of which the lowered baseline (1.92 to 1.36) supplies a small part and the flatter reactivity slope (6.02 to 3.33) the larger part — the relaxation response and decentering working together, with decentering carrying the most weight.

Discussion

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction occupies a singular place in the history of clinical psychology: it is the bridge by which a contemplative practice crossed into evidence-based medicine. Its importance is as much methodological as therapeutic. By fixing the curriculum — eight weeks, three formal practices, a specified daily dose, a day-long retreat — Kabat-Zinn turned meditation into something that could be manualized, replicated, and subjected to the randomized trial, and in doing so created the template that every subsequent mindfulness-based program adopted (Kabat-Zinn, 2003); (Crane et al., 2017). The program's reach into psychology is largely a story of that template propagating.

On outcome, the fair summary mirrors the one that mindfulness research has reached across the board: MBSR helps, moderately, and most clearly for anxiety, depression, pain, and stress, but its advantage over credible active comparators is smaller than its popular reputation implies (Goyal et al., 2014); (Goldberg et al., 2022). This is not a weakness peculiar to MBSR; it is the ordinary situation of psychological interventions, whose effects are easy to demonstrate against doing nothing and hard to demonstrate against an equally plausible alternative. The honest conclusion is that MBSR is a real and useful intervention whose effect size should be stated in the same breath as the comparison it was measured against.

The deeper open question is mechanistic. Because the program was built from a practice rather than a theory, its proposed mechanisms — attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, reperceiving — were assembled to explain effects already observed, and the evidence that these are the active ingredients, rather than the nonspecific benefits of a supportive group and a plausible rationale, is still being assembled (Hölzel et al., 2011); (Shapiro et al., 2006). Settling which processes do the work, and which are incidental, is the task that would convert MBSR from a program known to help into a program understood to help.

Current Directions

The most active current work is a sustained push to raise the evidentiary bar. The comprehensive audit of 44 meta-analyses did more than tally positive findings; it documented how much of the literature still rests on small samples, weak comparators, and inconsistent reporting, and it framed the field's task as replacing that base with larger, better-controlled trials rather than accumulating more of the same (Goldberg et al., 2022). The call has shifted the question from whether mindfulness programs beat waitlists — a question now considered settled and uninformative — to whether and for whom they beat genuine active alternatives.

A second line concerns definition and fidelity. As MBSR's structure propagated into countless adaptations, the field confronted the problem that a program can carry the name while losing the substance, which prompted explicit attempts to specify what the essential and variable features of a mindfulness-based program are — the warp and the weft that any faithful delivery must preserve (Crane et al., 2017). This matters directly for interpreting the evidence, because a meta-analysis pools trials only as comparable as the programs they tested.

A third strand extends the program into the populations and delivery formats that stand to gain most, while testing whether its effects survive the move. Work on health-care professionals, among the most stressed of occupational groups, has asked whether MBSR can be delivered feasibly in demanding clinical settings and still reduce burnout and distress (Kriakous et al., 2021). Alongside it, continued attention to mechanism — the neural and physiological correlates of practice, and the search for the processes that mediate outcome — aims to put the program's proposed mechanisms on a firmer footing than the retrospective reconstruction they began as (Hölzel et al., 2011).

Common Misconceptions

MBSR is a relaxation technique.

Relaxation is a frequent by-product, not the goal. MBSR trains a particular quality of attention toward whatever is present, including unpleasant experience; aiming at relaxation and treating other states as failures would contradict the nonjudgmental stance the program teaches (Kabat-Zinn, 2003).

MBSR is a religious or Buddhist practice.

Kabat-Zinn deliberately secularized the practices, removing religious framing so the program could be taught to anyone and evaluated medically. Its practices have contemplative roots, but MBSR itself is presented as training a universal human capacity, not a faith (Kabat-Zinn, 1982).

MBSR works dramatically better than conventional treatments.

The best evidence does not support that. Effects are moderate and clearest against inactive controls; against established active treatments MBSR has not been shown to be superior (Goyal et al., 2014).

Attending the weekly class is enough, without home practice.

The program assigns about 45 minutes of daily home practice precisely because benefit tracks practice. The weekly class teaches the practices; the change the program aims at is built in the hours of practice between classes (Kabat-Zinn, 1990).

Glossary

All-day session.

The six-to-eight-hour silent retreat held between the sixth and seventh weeks of the standard MBSR curriculum, giving participants an extended period of continuous formal practice.

Attention regulation.

The capacity to sustain attention on a chosen object and to redirect it at will when the mind wanders; the first of the four mechanisms proposed to underlie mindfulness training.

Behavioral medicine.

The interdisciplinary field that integrates behavioral and biomedical knowledge in the treatment of illness, and the clinical home within which MBSR was developed and first tested.

Body awareness.

A heightened and more accurate contact with internal bodily sensation, cultivated especially by the body scan and proposed as one of the mechanisms through which MBSR works.

Body scan.

A foundational MBSR practice in which attention is moved slowly and systematically through the regions of the body, cultivating sustained nonjudgmental awareness of physical sensation.

Decentering.

The capacity to observe one's own thoughts and feelings as transient mental events rather than as literal truths about reality; closely related to reperceiving and proposed as a core mechanism of mindfulness training.

Dose-response.

The relationship between the amount of practice a participant completes and the benefit they obtain; the fixed MBSR home-practice assignment turns this into a testable quantity.

Emotion regulation.

The processes — including reappraisal and a willingness to approach rather than avoid difficult experience — through which mindfulness practice is held to change a person's response to emotion.

Formal practice.

The structured meditation exercises of MBSR — the body scan, sitting meditation, and mindful movement — undertaken as a deliberate, time-set activity, as distinct from informal practice.

Informal practice.

Bringing mindful attention to ordinary daily activities such as eating, walking, or washing, so that the quality of attention trained in formal practice generalizes into everyday life.

Mindful movement.

Gentle hatha-yoga postures performed with mindful attention to bodily sensation and breath, one of the three formal practices of the MBSR curriculum.

Mindfulness.

The awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally; the trained capacity that MBSR exists to cultivate.

Relaxation response.

The coordinated reduction in sympathetic nervous-system arousal — lowered heart rate, respiration, and oxygen consumption — reliably elicited by meditation, the physiological counterpart to the fight-or-flight reaction.

Reperceiving.

A proposed meta-mechanism of mindfulness: a shift in perspective in which experience is observed as a passing stream rather than identified with, held to drive self-regulation, flexibility, and exposure.

Sitting meditation.

A formal MBSR practice developing attention first to the breath and then to a widening field of sounds, thoughts, and emotions observed as they arise and pass.

Stress Reduction Clinic.

The clinic Kabat-Zinn founded at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979, where MBSR was created and first delivered to patients with chronic conditions.

Key Researchers

Herbert Benson

. Harvard cardiologist who described the relaxation response, the physiological counterpart to the fight-or-flight reaction that gave MBSR its medical rationale and placed meditation inside behavioral medicine a decade before Kabat-Zinn's clinic opened. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Richard J. Davidson

. Professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, whose 2003 trial with Kabat-Zinn tied an eight-week MBSR course to leftward shifts in prefrontal brain activity and a stronger antibody response to influenza vaccine, supplying the program's first biological evidence. ORCID - Wikipedia - Wikidata

Simon B. Goldberg

. Associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose meta-analyses of mindfulness-based interventions — the 2018 psychiatric-disorders review and the 2022 synthesis of 44 meta-analyses — define the current evidentiary picture of where the programs do and do not outperform active controls. ORCID - Google Scholar

Jon Kabat-Zinn

. Professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who founded the Stress Reduction Clinic in 1979 and created Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, the eight-week secular program from which the entire field of mindfulness-based interventions descends. Wikipedia - Wikidata

Saki F. Santorelli

. Executive director of the UMass Center for Mindfulness from 2000 until his 2017 retirement and co-author of the published MBSR curriculum guide, who standardized teacher training and the program's eight-week architecture. Faculty page

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction?

It is a standardized eight-week group program, created by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979, that trains mindfulness — purposeful, nonjudgmental, present-moment attention — through meditation and gentle yoga as a way of relating differently to stress, pain, and illness (Kabat-Zinn, 2003).

Who created MBSR and when?

Jon Kabat-Zinn developed it in 1979 at the Stress Reduction Clinic he founded at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, initially for patients with chronic pain who had not responded well to standard medical care (Kabat-Zinn, 1982).

What happens in the eight-week program?

Participants attend weekly classes of about two and a half hours, practice at home roughly 45 minutes a day, and learn three formal practices — the body scan, sitting meditation, and mindful movement — with an all-day silent retreat between the sixth and seventh weeks (Kabat-Zinn, 1990).

How is MBSR thought to work?

The leading account proposes four interacting mechanisms — attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, and a shift in perspective on the self — while a complementary model treats reperceiving, or decentering, as the pivotal process that drives the others (Hölzel et al., 2011); (Shapiro et al., 2006).

Is MBSR a religious practice?

No. Kabat-Zinn deliberately secularized the contemplative practices it draws on, presenting mindfulness as a trainable universal capacity so the program could be taught to anyone and evaluated medically (Kabat-Zinn, 2003).

Does MBSR actually work?

Meta-analyses find moderate benefits for anxiety, depression, pain, and stress, but the effect is clearest against inactive controls and smaller against established active treatments, so its effectiveness is best stated relative to the comparison used (Goyal et al., 2014); (Goldberg et al., 2022).

How much home practice does MBSR require, and does it matter?

The program assigns about 45 minutes of practice six days a week, and benefit tends to track the amount of practice completed, which is why adherence is one of the moderators studies examine when outcomes vary (Grossman et al., 2004).

How does MBSR differ from mindfulness-based cognitive therapy?

MBSR is a general stress-reduction program for mixed populations, whereas mindfulness-based cognitive therapy grafts MBSR's practices onto a cognitive-therapy framework aimed specifically at preventing depressive relapse (Crane et al., 2017).

References