New Research on Chronic Anxiety and the

Transcendental Meditation Technique

An Interview with David Orme-Johnson, Ph.D.

David Orme-Johnson, Ph.D., is a leading researcher of the Transcendental Meditation technique. He has published over 100 scientific papers, edited Volumes I and V of The Transcendental Meditation Program: Collected Papers, and served as an NIH consultant on meditation research. In a recent meta-analysis published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, Dr. Orme-Johnson and Georgia Regents University researcher Vernon Barnes, Ph.D., found that the Transcendental Meditation® technique has a significant effect on reducing trait anxiety for people with high anxiety.

Due to chronic stress and the resulting chronic anxiety, many people feel sick, fatigued, or unable to cope with the demands of life. The fact is that a large proportion of our modern civilization is dealing with PTSD and chronic anxiety.

Here Dr. Orme-Johnson shares his reflections on this groundbreaking research with Enlightenment readers.

Linda Egenes: What is trait anxiety, and how big a problem is it?

Dr. Orme-Johnson: Trait anxiety is chronic anxiety, the level of anxiety that stays with a person from day-to-day, as opposed to the anxiety that comes with a specific problem but then subsides. Chronic anxiety is the most common mental health problem in the United States today, impacting 40 million US adults—and that’s about 18 percent of the population—every year. Chronic anxiety not only is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease and other chronic diseases, but it also leads to increased use of tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs when people self-medicate to reduce their anxiety.

Linda Egenes: How does anxiety relate to stress?

Dr. Orme-Johnson: Stress is the fight-or-flight reflex, which prepares the body to engage in battle or to escape when we are faced with a threatening situation. As part of the stress response, a number of physiological changes occur. The breath rate accelerates, the heart beats faster, the blood pressure increases, muscles become tense, hands and feet become cold and sweaty, and the mouth becomes dry. And what is all this for? The stress response has a valuable function. It focuses our attention and heightens our senses, which mobilizes the body for a dynamic response to a threat.

Stressful experiences will exacerbate anxiety issues that a person may already have. A person with anxiety issues will find that stressful situations increase their anxiety. Or stress may create new anxieties. A soldier almost getting blown up and seeing his buddies killed may be haunted by the experience for the rest of his life, and anxiety is a major component of that syndrome, called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Linda Egenes: So the stress response is good when it saves your life in a threatening situation, but not so good when it becomes chronic?

Dr. Orme-Johnson: Right. Stress hormones such as cortisol get elevated during this fight-or-flight reflex, and that’s a good thing for dealing with a dangerous situation. But if you are experiencing a prolonged period of stress—difficulty with your boss, or your computer crashes and you lose your critical data, or you’re a soldier on a long tour of duty—your body is continually being activated in that fight-or-flight reflex. Over time, this often results in chronic stress response and chronic anxiety, which deplete your body’s ability to respond to stress. Even a single powerful stressful experience can result in a chronic stress response and chronic anxiety.

Due to chronic stress and the resulting chronic anxiety, many people feel sick, fatigued, or unable to cope with the demands of life. The fact is that a large proportion of our modern civilization is dealing with PTSD and chronic anxiety.

Linda Egenes: How does the TM technique reduce anxiety?

Dr. Orme-Johnson: The effects of the Transcendental Meditation technique on the body are exactly the opposite of the stress response. The TM technique decreases respiratory rate, decreases heart rate, decreases blood pressure, and decreases muscle tension. The palms become dryer, as measured by the galvanic skin response, and levels of the stress hormone cortisol drop.

The interesting point is that the Transcendental Meditation technique is not only effective in reducing anxiety from short-term trauma, but is also highly effective in reducing the chronic anxiety that people experience when they have PTSD.

“I was a member of the team of TM teachers that went to Armenia in 1989 immediately after a major earthquake in which thousands of people were killed. During the first meditation, tears began to roll down people’s faces. One soldier I taught who was suffering from shell-shock could not speak. After he was instructed in the TM technique, he started talking again.”

I was a member of the team of TM teachers that went to Armenia in 1989 immediately after a major earthquake in which thousands of people were killed. The whole country was traumatized. Every person had lost a family member or a friend, or had helped dig people out of the rubble. Over a six-month period, I personally taught the Transcendental Meditation technique to 2,000 people, and our group taught well over 40,000 people.

During the first meditation, tears began to roll down people’s faces. One soldier I taught who was suffering from shell-shock could not speak. After he was instructed in the TM technique, he started talking again. One woman was so traumatized that she was afraid to come out of her room. After learning TM, she rounded up her friends to learn, because she felt such relief from her fear and anxiety.

Linda Egenes: After doing research on the TM technique for so many years, that must have been a moving experience, to see the effects first-hand in such a dramatic situation.

Dr. Orme-Johnson: Yes, it was incredibly fulfilling. And the interesting thing is that by stepping out of chronic stress and anxiety, the person gains more physiological reserves to deal with future stress. For example, if you measure the resting levels of breath rate, heart rate, and blood pressure in TM practitioners, they are lower than in the control subjects. Many studies have also shown that meditators have lower baseline levels of cortisol outside of meditation. This means that when the stressful situation happens, the TM meditators actually have a greater cortisol response—a faster increase in cortisol when needed.

In the first study that I ever did, published in Psychosomatic Medicine in 1973, we found that with the practice of TM, subjects not only responded more vigorously to a stressor, but with repeated stimulation from repeated stressors, the meditators recovered faster than the control groups. And their autonomic nervous systems—that part of the nervous system involved in emotions and motivation—were more stable. This is a physiological correlate of decreased anxiety.

Linda Egenes: Let’s talk about your new meta-study. Can you explain why the results were greater for highly stressed populations, such as prisoners?

Dr. Orme-Johnson: Well, if you are not anxious to begin with, it won’t change much with meditation. TM balances the system, so it will balance what’s out of balance, which may be different for different people. We already knew from research that the Transcendental Mediation technique gives relief from stress due to the physiological changes taking place during meditation. And in looking at the studies on prisoners and other people who are highly anxious, we have found that within a few days, or within a couple of weeks, trait anxiety decreases dramatically.

This finding was based on combining the results of 16 randomized-controlled trials, the gold standard in medical research, to determine an overall effect. There were a total of 1,295 subjects in the studies.

As a result of practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique, individuals with anxiety levels in the 90th percentile—higher than 90 percent of the rest of the adult population—showed dramatic reductions in anxiety. Their anxiety levels dropped to the 57th percentile, slightly above what is considered average.

Linda Egenes: What about people with less anxiety—did their anxiety levels go down too?

Dr. Orme-Johnson: Yes. The groups in the study that started in the 60th percentile, a little above average, showed more modest reductions, to the 48th percentile, which is a little below average.

The meta-analysis also found that the TM technique produces significant improvements in other areas impacted by anxiety, such as blood pressure, insomnia, emotional numbness, family problems, employment status, and drug and alcohol abuse. And prisoners showed decreased recidivism and rule infractions.

In addition, research shows that the TM technique improves clarity of thinking, creativity, and brain functioning, as shown by increased EEG coherence. All of these factors have the effect of reducing anxiety. A lot of anxiety is produced when we don’t know what to do in a situation. The rest that TM produces is not just physiological rest. TM makes your thinking clearer, and then you are not so anxious because you can see how to deal with a problem and solve it.

“The rest that TM produces is not just physiological rest. TM makes your thinking clearer, and then you are not so anxious because you can see how to deal with a problem and solve it.”

Linda Egenes: So people with low anxiety may benefit in other ways from practicing the Transcendental Meditation technique?

Dr. Orme-Johnson: Yes. For example, the group that showed the least change in anxiety was a group of coronary heart patients who had metabolic syndrome. In this group, anxiety was a secondary concern compared to their heart disease. Because their anxiety levels weren’t high to begin with, their anxiety levels didn’t change as dramatically. But their metabolic syndrome improved, and the study concluded that TM had a statistically significant effect on other important measures, such as improved metabolic syndrome, decreased systolic blood pressure, decreased insulin resistance, and heart rate variability.

So even if a person is not highly anxious to begin with, whatever health issues they do have are going to be balanced out, because during the practice of TM the physiology normalizes itself.

Linda Egenes: How does that happen?

Dr. Orme-Johnson: Everybody knows that when you get sick, probably the most important part of the treatment is that you rest. The body has its own self-regulating mechanisms—we call it your homeostatic feedback system—which are constantly trying to perfect your system and to balance it out to its most ideal state. During rest those mechanisms come into play, and the body repairs itself.

The TM technique produces a unique level of coherent deep rest, which allows your body to normalize itself. So whatever imbalances are there, TM is going to help rebalance them. And that is what the research shows.

Linda Egenes is co-editor of Enlightenment: The Transcendental Meditation® Magazine. She is the author of five books, including Super Healthy Kids: A Parent’s Guide to Maharishi Ayurveda, co-authored with Kumuda Reddy, M.D.