Meditation lessons aimed at reducing stress will be made available to all 200,000 police staff in England and Wales after a trial across five forces found the practice improved average wellbeing, life satisfaction, resilience and work performance.

More than 600 officers and staff in Avon and Somerset, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire and South Wales spent six months practising mindfulness techniques – originally derived from Buddhism – as part of a randomised controlled trial overseen by the College of Policing.

The staff were divided into two groups, one using Headspace, a commercial meditation app set up by a former Buddhist monk, and the other using Mindfit Cop, a new police-focused course. A third group was asked not to use any mindfulness techniques. The researchers found that the first two groups recorded “meaningful improvements” in wellbeing as well as life satisfaction and resilience, as compared with the control group. However there was no evidence that online training in mindfulness reduced sick leave as had been hoped.

“This research has produced strong evidence that online mindfulness training can improve the wellbeing of police employees,” a report into the trial concluded. “As a result, the online training course Mindfit Cop has been made available free to all employees ... the wellbeing benefits could be reasonably expected to have knock-on effects for productivity and performance.”

The conclusion follows similar trials among police and armed forces in the US suggesting the practice has positive effects. At least 185 MPs have taken mindfulness courses provided at the Houses of Parliament and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy courses are prescribed on the NHS in some areas to prevent recurrent depression. The course reduces the likelihood of relapse by almost a third, according to an analysis of nine trials.

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But there were difficulties with the police trial too. Some of the staff said fitting the practice into an already hectic schedule increased their feelings of stress, while others said they felt embarrassed or they felt guilty about taking the time out. The cohort of officers trialling the techniques was also dominated by women, partly because there were more administrative staff than officers involved.

The report recommends that forces consider making a “quiet room” available in each station to allow for short breaks away from open-plan spaces. It also said supervisors should be briefed on the benefits of mindfulness and make clear to staff that they have permission to undertake short periods of the practice during work time.

Modern mindfulness practices emerged in the 1970s when the Boston professor Jon Kabat-Zinn took the Buddhism out of meditation to create a system to tackle pain in chronically ill patients. He then worked with others to develop mindfulness-based cognitive therapy courses to tackle mental health problems. He has defined mindfulness as “the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally”. By meditating and focusing on the breath, the idea is to cultivate attention on the body and mind as it is, moment to moment, and so help with pain, both physical and emotional.

“Nearly 8 million UK adults have now likely tried mindfulness practice, including many thousands of civil servants in Whitehall,” said Jamie Bristow, the director of the Mindfulness Initiative and secretary to the all party parliamentary group on mindfulness. “However, without evidence specific to their departments they have so far been unable to fund widespread training for their colleagues at the coalface of public services. This new research into mindfulness in policing builds on trials conducted recently in health, education, justice and defence, so we should soon see our frontline workers being offered better access to this important innovation.”