Want to dive deeper into meditation? There’s a LOT of information out there on meditation. Some of it is good, some of it is not. Finding the signal through the noise can be tricky. But there are a few tricks we’ve found to cutting through the crud and getting to the good stuff. Here’s a bevy of content and research tricks that we find useful, and we hope that you will too.

1 -The Stillside Blog – Articles, Guided Meditations, etc.

Want to learn more about meditation? You don’t need to go far! Our entire mission at Stillside is to introduce people to meditation, and to help people develop a consistent meditation practice. To achieve that goal, we have a two-pronged strategy.

The first prong is, of course, that we design, manufacture, and sell the best meditation furniture on the planet. We’re making things that don’t exist anywhere else, to make it easier to just sit still, and be comfortable doing so. But if you’re reading this, you probably already knew that.

The second way we help people to meditate is education: we want to teach how to meditate, teach how to meditate consistently, and teach why that effort is worthwhile. To do that, the Stillside Blog has a wide variety of content. You’ll find articles like the Meditation 101 series, a series of Guided Meditations, and more. Everything we publish is completely free to access, un-sponsored, and ad-free, forever. No hidden agenda or third-party “brand integration” type of stuff. Of course we might mention our own products like the Om Chair, because we designed them to be useful and awesome! But beyond helping you find Stillside itself, all the time and money we spend on the blog is strictly to help other people find the amazing benefits a regular meditation practice. So poke around the site, you may find something useful for you.

2 – Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)

DBT is a type of evidence-based therapy that has its origins in personality disorder research, but is essentially a scientifically-structured meditation practice. Many of the techniques that we discuss on Stillside, including the guided meditations we publish, are consistent with what DBT teaches. If you want to learn more, we strongly recommend “The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook” by McKay, Wood, and Brantley. That book is a great foundational text that can teach you the basics of meditation, and help you to build your own daily practice. The workbook teaches several modalities of mindfulness practices as well as emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness skills.

The efficacy of DBT is strongly supported by clinical research. For example, research shows that these practices are very effective in reducing the symptoms of depression, or even causing remission, even in cases of treatment-resistant depression. See Lynch et al. and Harley et al. and Feldman et al. Even in acute settings, and even on a short-term basis, DBT can have significant and life-saving results. Saito et al.

There are other similar evidence-based types of therapy such as Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). These therapies are much like DBT in that they are basically scientifically-based and clinically-researched meditation practices. In a nutshell, all of these types of therapy basically take the principles of meditation and render them into a consistent discipline capable of clinical observation and research. Or said differently, they make it easier for scientists to study meditation, and easier for doctors to use and prescribe meditation as a form of treatment.

3 – Clinical Research

And now, we find ourselves in the deep end. If you really want to dig into the weeds, peer-reviewed academic research is the way to go. There is a tremendous volume of research pertaining to meditation, especially as it relates to the treatment of various mental health conditions, and health generally. That body of research is active and growing. For a survey article which provides a good background on various types of meditation and the landscape of treatment, see Shen et al. That paper, written in 2013, noted that the wide variety of meditation modalities made it difficult to systematically study meditation categorically, or study more specific aspects of meditation such as its biological mechanisms. The authors, Shen et al, noted the need for some kind of clinical uniformity when it comes to studying meditation. That kind of concern is valid, and encouraged us at Stillside to focus more narrowly on Mindfulness Meditation and DBT, since they are supported by the most research compared to other modalities. By following the evidence-based research, we can be sure that Stillside is truly teaching best practices with the highest degree of efficacy.

So, what does the evidence have to say about Mindfulness Meditation? A lot, actually.

For depression and anxiety, adding mindfulness-based meditation to typical treatment methods significantly improves the chances of remission from an episode of major depression, decreases the likelihood of relapse, decreases overall anxiety, and improves mental function. See Segal et al.

For information on how meditation can physically change your brain (and slow its aging process), see Gotink et al. and Adluru et al. and Chételat et al.

Meditation can have a positive impact for people dealing with chronic pain, having significant and long-lasting effects across a variety of metrics. Cour & Petersen.

Meditation also has the ability to significantly improve sleep, not only on the length and quality of the sleep, but also how patients report feeling during the day. See Black et al. and Rusch et al.

If you want to really dig through the weeds and go through the academic research yourself, there’s a handy search tip to help find high-quality source material. Above, you might see that we linked almost exclusively to Pubmed. That’s because Pubmed itself is an academic database and search engine which only spits out scholarly research, rather than opinions or other junk. So of course, you could search directly on Pubmed itself, but using Google can be a handy adjunct because it will return only those articles which also have good pagerank on the internet writ large. That means that not only does Pubmed think the article is relevant to your query, but so do other sources on the internet according to Google’s algorithms.

So here’s the search tip: ask Google for something about meditation, but use Google’s site operator to return only results from Pubmed. For example, if I wanted to find research on meditation as it relates to stress reduction, I could write “meditation and stress reduction site:pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov” – https://www.google.com/search?q=meditation+and+stress+reduction+site%3Apubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov – that list of search results is going to be some great reading through peer-reviewed scholarly literature. You will almost always find something recent, relevant, and revalatory, right there on the first page of results.

4 – Popular Apps

One last resource before we sign off: apps! In the last few years, a couple smartphone apps have skyrocketed in popularity, and they are in fact wonderful tools to help with newcomers to meditation. Specifically, Headspace and Calm are two great apps that we can wholeheartedly recommend. Each of these apps is robust, with a vast library of content. And each one operates on a freemium model, offering users a portion of its content free of charge, then sequestering the main repositories behind different levels of paywalls. Of the two, Headspace is better known as the pure meditation app, while Calm has gained a reputation as a bit of a lullaby/sleep assistant. Calm also has the distinction of being home to a number of celebrity voices reading different scripts/meditations, if that appeals to you. If you’re going to try out just one, Headspace might be the better choice. But they are both worth a look!

Thank you for reading. Keep your eyes peeled on the Blog for more articles and info going forward, we will keep posting anything that we think could be useful or insightful.