Benefits of Meditation for Depression: Why It Works So Well

Evidence shows that meditation is as effective as standard medical treatments for depression. Learn about helpful guided meditation resources.

No one knows for sure what causes depression.

The prevailing theories are that it’s caused by a neurotransmitter imbalance, structural or functional changes in the brain, underlying health conditions, genetic propensity, emotional trauma, and/or stressful life circumstances. 

The proven benefits of meditation for depression are especially impressive given that it brings relief regardless of the cause.

Meditation Outperforms Standard Medical Treatments for Depression

There’s an abundance of evidence that meditation is beneficial for depression.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University conducted a systematic review of human trials on meditation.

They found 47 mindfulness meditation studies with a total of over 3,500 participants and concluded that, of all the benefits of meditation, its three best uses are for depression, anxiety, and pain relief. 

Currently, the two standard medical treatments for depression are antidepressant medications and cognitive behavioral therapy. 

Research confirms that meditation can be as effective as either of these and, in some cases, even better.

Depression is a recurring disorder and up to 80% of people with depression experience a relapse at some point. 

Both antidepressants and meditation have prevented relapses in roughly half of patients who use them.

Meditation actually performed somewhat better, and without the unwanted side effects of antidepressants. 

Meditation has been found to be as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for both depression and anxiety. 

When appropriate, meditation also makes a useful adjunct to CBT.

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is a technique that integrates Eastern meditation with Western cognitive therapy.

It was developed by a team of psychologists at three prestigious universities, the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Toronto.

Research on MBCT has found it to work better than antidepressants or counseling for depression. 

Four months into one MBCT study on depression, three-quarters of the participants felt so much better that they were able to stop taking their antidepressants.

Meditation Improves Quality of Life

When you’re depressed, life can be a struggle.

Meditation can help your brain work better so that life flows more smoothly.

Regular meditation can deliver substantial improvements in mental well-being, happiness, life satisfaction, and depression symptoms. 

It helps make you more emotionally stable and resilient to stress. 

It diminishes fruitless worry and tames negative mental chatter.

“ The average person thinks roughly 70,000 thoughts per day. Ninety percent of them are repetitive and, sadly, 70% of them are negative. 

Meditation can help you think better and work smarter by enhancing your creativity, productivity, work performance, ability to focus, memory, and other cognitive skills. 

It enables you to make better decisions, which can positively impact all areas of your life. 

Meditation boosts willpower so that you’re better equipped to build healthy new habits and quit those that aren’t serving you. 

It encourages better relationships with friends, family, and co-workers. 

It can help you feel less lonely and socially isolated. 

Meditation inspires altruism and increases compassion towards both yourself and others. 

If depression has you feeling angry or aggressive, meditation can help with that as well. 

Meditation reduces suicidal thoughts and self-harming thoughts and behaviors. 

Depression is linked to a cluster of other physical and mental health issues.

Sometimes they are the byproduct of depression and sometimes they are a contributing factor.

Regardless, meditation improves the quality of life and reduces the symptoms of depression-related disorders, including: 

• anxiety disorders
• attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
• binge eating
• bipolar disorder
• cancer
• chronic pain
• depression relapse
• fears and phobias
• postpartum depression
• psychosis
• substance abuse

6 Ways That Meditation Works to Reduce Depression

Now that you know about meditation’s impressive benefits for depression, let’s take a look at the major underlying mechanisms to learn more about how meditation works.

1. Meditation Reduces Stress, a Risk Factor for Depression

Of all the health benefits of meditation, stress reduction is probably the most widely known and readily accepted by both mainstream medicine and the general public.

Stress puts us at greater risk for depression and literally causes the brain to shrink. 

One main way that meditation stops the damage of stress is by reducing the output of the stress hormone cortisol.

When life seems to be one crisis after another, the body pours out cortisol.

Chronically elevated cortisol has some serious health implications.

Excess cortisol significantly contributes to depression and many stress-related disorders, including anxiety, digestive upset, heart disease, sleep disorders, obesity, and memory loss. 

Cortisol kills existing brain cells and halts the production of new ones, thereby increasing the risk for degenerative brain diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s later in life. 

Stress creates more neural connections in the fear center of the brain, the amygdala. 

This leads to more fear, causing even more stress.

Meditation minimizes or stops cortisol production, decreasing the stress response. 

2. Meditation Balances Brain Chemicals and Hormones

Meditation can help balance our neurotransmitters, chemicals that brain cells use to communicate with each other.

There are two neurotransmitters strongly linked to depression, serotonin and dopamine.

Serotonin-based depression is usually accompanied by feelings of anxiety, while dopamine-based depression is characterized by feelings of listlessness and apathy.

Most antidepressant drugs work by increasing serotonin; a few increase dopamine instead.

Finding the right antidepressant is hit-or-miss.

But meditation can balance neurotransmitter levels whether the depression is due to serotonin or dopamine deficiency. 

Another way meditation can help depression is by increasing DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone).

DHEA is a master hormone associated with youth and vigor, and levels naturally decrease with age.

Treating depression with DHEA supplements resulted in a 50% reduction in depression symptoms in half of study participants. 

Meditation increases the body’s level of DHEA naturally. 

3. Meditation Calms Inflammation, a Root Cause of Depression

One emerging theory of depression is that it’s caused by brain inflammation.

Brain inflammation is now thought to be, at least in part, responsible for depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders. 

Inflammation is controlled in part by certain genes.

You might expect that changing gene expression could take a long time, but measurable reductions in the activity of pro-inflammatory genes has been detected after as few as eight hours of meditation. 

4. Meditation Quiets Depression’s Negative Mental Chatter

The average person thinks roughly 70,000 thoughts per day.

Ninety percent of them are repetitive and, sadly, 70% of them are negative. 

Unsurprisingly, all this negative mental chatter does your mental health no good.

Meditation can quiet the mind and help control the negative thoughts that fuel depression.

Meditation can even stop the cycle of depression and rumination in those with lifelong mood disorders. 

5. Meditation Builds a Healthier Brain

A healthy brain is the first line of defense against depression.

Here are the most notable ways in which meditation optimizes the function and structure of the brain.

Meditation increases circulation to the brain. 

Blood flow delivers the nutrients, energy, hormones, neurotransmitters, and oxygen the brain needs to function.

Meditation induces a desirable brainwave state, enhancing the ability to learn, improving focus and concentration, inspiring creativity, and producing a state of deep relaxation. 

Meditation supports the brain’s ability to regenerate new brain cells and new neural connections.

It measurably increases brain volume, especially in the hippocampus (the seat of memory) and in the cortex (the area of the brain associated with attention). 

People who meditate have stronger neural connections between various areas of the brain.

Their brains show less atrophy due to age and have more neural synapses — a healthy sign. 

Brain scans reveal that meditators have reduced activity in the amygdala, the brain’s fear center, even when they’re not meditating. 

6. Meditation Helps Depression-Related Insomnia

One common symptom of depression is insomnia.

No one feels their best when they can’t sleep and lack of sleep can certainly make depression symptoms worse. 

It’s well established that chronic insomnia contributes to depression and anxiety disorders. 

Lack of sleep can leave you feeling stressed out, easily angered, and mentally exhausted.

It destroys optimism, skews judgment, and makes you less social.

Insomnia undermines the long-term health and function of the brain since it’s during sleep that the brain washes away toxins and metabolic debris, repairs itself, consolidates memories, and creates new brain cells. 

Meditation improves both the quality and quantity of sleep. 

It induces a brainwave state similar to sleep, shuts down mental chatter, and naturally increases the sleep hormone melatonin. 

Sources of Guided Meditations for Depression

An easy way to find free guided meditations for depression is with the music streaming service Spotify.

Begin by searching for “meditation for depression” or “loving kindness meditation,” which is widely considered one of the most effective kinds of meditations for depression. 

You’ll find plenty of meditations there to get you started.

Guided Meditation Apps for Depression

There are numerous meditation apps, but few offer meditations specifically for depression.

One exception is InsightTimer.

Whether you are new to meditation or a seasoned meditator, you can’t go wrong with this extremely popular app.

It’s the #1 free meditation app for both Android and iOS.

It gives you access to over 100,000 free guided meditations by some of the most well-known names in meditation, including Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, and Thich Nhat Hanh.

InsightTimer offers playlists for numerous categories of meditations, organized by benefits.

These include boosting or managing stress, sleep quality, resilience, wisdom, compassion, patience, happiness, and just about any other positive trait you might aspire to improve.

This app also offers a huge selection of guided meditations, music tracks, talks, and courses created specifically to help alleviate depression.

Buddhify and Headspace are two other popular apps that have meditations on depression-related topics such as stress, compassion, and insomnia.

Meditation Courses for Depression

Udemy is the world’s largest marketplace for online educational courses.

A quick search for “meditation for depression” reveals thousands of results.

Some are free, but most are in the $15 – $20 range.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, is the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), a precursor of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. 

He founded the University of Massachusetts Medical School Center for Mindfulness which now offers MBCT 8-Week Online Live.

This program is not inexpensive, but is particularly beneficial for anyone suffering from recurrent depression.

A more affordable option is to pick up a copy of The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness.

Dr. Kabat-Zinn is one of this book’s co-authors.

The core of this book outlines an 8-week program that uses mindfulness to control negative thought patterns that fuel depression, cutting the risk of depression relapse in half.

The feedback for this program on Amazon.com is overwhelmingly positive.

Is Meditation Right for Everyone With Depression?

You may question whether everyone with depression can benefit from meditation.

Meditation professionals and researchers agree that there are times that meditation could make depression worse.

It’s best not to start a meditation practice while in the middle of a bout of extreme depression.

According to Bodhipaksa, a Buddhist teacher, author, and founder of the popular website Wildmind Buddhist Meditation, there are two reasons meditation can be problematic.

First, learning to meditate can be hard and when you’re very depressed, you have few inner resources for support.

It’s easy to feel like a failure which can fuel negative thoughts and more feelings of depression.

Also, people who are depressed are prone to ruminate and meditation can inadvertently provide another opportunity to do so.

It’s easy to go through the motion of meditation but instead use that time to dwell on what’s wrong with life. 

Lastly, be aware that meditation is not a quick fix.

Ideally, you should start meditating when you feel like you’ve got adequate emotional reserves to be:

• Patient. It generally takes up to eight weeks to experience any positive changes. 
• Persistent. You must meditate regularly to reap the benefits.
• Compassionate towards yourself. Meditation is not always easy and being hard on yourself will be counterproductive.

Finding Professional Meditation Help for Depression

If you are not certain meditation is right for you, seek professional guidance.

There are many mental health care professionals who use meditation in their practice.

You can find mindfulness-based psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, counselors, support groups, and treatment centers in the United States and Canada using Psychology Today’s Find a Mindfulness-Based (MBCT) Therapist directory.

Recommended: Upgrading brain health is key to making your brain work better.

Brain supplement can help you:

• Improve your mental clarity and focus.
• Boost your memory and your ability to learn.
• Increase your capacity to think critically, solve problems, and make decisions.

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