Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
This paper is a meta-analysis of more than 300 studies in humans that looked at links between psychological stress and measures of the immune system. It found that very short, acute stressors (minutes) were tied to increases in some natural (innate) immune measures and decreases in some specific (adaptive) immune…
This meta-analysis looked at randomized trials to see if deliberate breathing practices (breathwork) reduce self-reported stress. Across 12 trials with 785 adults, breathwork was linked with a small-to-medium drop in stress compared with non-breathwork controls (g = -0.35). Similar small-to-medium effects were seen for anxiety and depression. Most included studies…
