Why Do Buddhists Observe the Breath?

A person sits quietly and does something that looks almost too simple to deserve a tradition: they notice the breath. Air enters. Air leaves. Attention wanders. The practitioner notices and returns.

That basic act became one of the most durable contemplative practices in Buddhism. In Pāli it is called ānāpānasati, usually translated as mindfulness of breathing or mindfulness of in-and-out breathing. Versions of breath contemplation appear in early Buddhist texts, later Theravāda manuals, Chinese Buddhist meditation literature, modern Vipassanā movements and contemporary secular mindfulness.

Because the breath is also central to yoga and modern breathwork, it is easy to misunderstand Buddhist practice as another form of respiratory control. Historically, however, the distinction is important. Early Buddhist instructions usually begin by observing breathing as it occurs. The breath becomes a field for training awareness, calming bodily activity, recognizing mental states and ultimately cultivating insight into impermanence and release. The point was not simply to make the respiratory system perform better.

Modern neuroscience offers a different language. Breath-focused meditation can be studied as focused-attention training: sustain attention on respiratory sensations, detect distraction and return. Experiments suggest that this cycle engages attention control, meta-awareness and interoceptive processing. But those findings do not prove that early Buddhists were secretly teaching cognitive neuroscience. They show that an ancient contemplative practice happens to train processes that modern science can measure.

The breath is useful precisely because it is ordinary

A meditation object has to solve a practical problem: it must give attention somewhere to go. The breath is unusually suited to that task. It is always present while a person is alive, requires no object or sacred building, changes continuously, can be felt in several parts of the body and sits close to emotion without needing elaborate interpretation.

Unlike a visual symbol, the breath cannot be put away. Unlike a memorized phrase, it does not need literacy. Unlike deliberately controlled pranayama, natural breathing can be observed without first learning a complicated technique. These features help explain why mindfulness of breathing could travel across languages, monasteries, social classes and historical periods.

Early Buddhist texts make mindfulness—not respiratory performance—the starting point

The best-known early formulation appears in the Ānāpānasati Sutta, Majjhima Nikāya 118. The practitioner goes to a forest, the root of a tree or an empty dwelling, sits upright and establishes mindfulness. Then comes the deceptively simple instruction: mindful, one breathes in; mindful, one breathes out.

The first stages involve recognizing long and short breathing and becoming sensitive to the breathing body. The sequence then expands beyond respiration itself. The sixteen steps move through bodily experience, feeling, the condition of mind and contemplations connected with impermanence, fading, cessation and relinquishment.

This matters because modern presentations sometimes reduce ānāpānasati to “focus on the tip of the nose.” Early textual practice is broader. The breath is an entry point into a larger contemplative training rather than the final object of interest.

Observation and control are not the same practice

This distinction separates Buddhist breath mindfulness from many modern breathing exercises. In early instructions, the meditator knows when a breath is long or short. That does not necessarily mean deliberately making it long or short. The practitioner is learning to recognize what breathing is doing.

Later stages speak of calming bodily formation, and Buddhist traditions differ in how they explain the degree of intentional influence involved. But the basic contemplative stance is not “optimize oxygen.” It is awareness of a changing process.

That stance is scientifically relevant because observing breathing can train attention without requiring large physiological changes in ventilation. A person may become more aware of respiratory sensations while breathing at an ordinary rate. The main experimental target can therefore be attentional regulation rather than breath chemistry.

The sixteen steps turn one bodily process into a map of contemplative development

The structure of MN 118 is unusually sophisticated. The first four exercises concern breathing and bodily experience. The next four involve rapture, pleasure and mental formation. The third group turns toward mind itself: experiencing, gladdening, steadying and releasing it. The final group concerns impermanence, fading, cessation and relinquishment.

This progression shows why simply calling the practice “breath concentration” is incomplete. Breath awareness becomes a scaffold for noticing how body, feeling and mind change. The practitioner is not merely trying to hold attention still forever. Stability serves investigation.

The sutta explicitly links the practice to the four foundations of mindfulness and then to the seven factors of awakening. In the internal logic of early Buddhism, breath observation is valuable because it contributes to a path leading toward liberation from greed, aversion and delusion.

Why did Buddhists choose a changing process as the object?

The breath is both repetitive and never identical. Every inhalation begins, changes and ends. Every exhalation does the same. That makes it a particularly direct example of impermanence: continuity without permanence.

For Buddhist contemplative systems, this is philosophically useful. A practitioner can observe experience arising and passing without needing an abstract lecture on transience. The body demonstrates it repeatedly.

Modern psychology may describe the same exercise differently—as sustained attention to a dynamic interoceptive stimulus—but that description captures only part of the historical purpose. The Buddhist interpretation concerns the nature of experience and attachment, not merely attentional fitness.

Later Theravāda tradition made the technique more methodical

By the time of Buddhaghosa’s fifth-century Visuddhimagga, mindfulness of breathing is presented within a highly systematic meditation manual. Beginners may use counting to stabilize attention. The text describes stages such as counting, following or connection, contact and fixing, eventually moving beyond counting once mindfulness remains established.

The counting method is revealing because it demonstrates historical adaptation. Counting is not the essence of the early sutta formula, but later teachers found it useful as a support for distracted beginners. The tradition developed pedagogical technology around the older practice.

Modern breath-counting experiments therefore have a genuine historical analogue, but the scientific task and the traditional task are not identical. Researchers may use counting accuracy as a behavioural measure of mindfulness; Buddhaghosa uses counting as a temporary aid toward deeper concentration.

Breath counting is a tool, not the destination

A modern study involving more than 400 participants validated breath counting as a behavioural measure related to mindfulness. Better breath-counting performance was associated with more meta-awareness, less mind-wandering and better mood. In one randomized component, four weeks of breath-counting training reduced mind-wandering relative to comparison groups.

This result is important because meditation research often relies heavily on questionnaires. Counting gives researchers an observable task in which losing track provides some evidence that attention wandered.

Yet even accurate counting is not identical to Buddhist mindfulness. A person can become excellent at keeping numbers while missing the wider qualities of ethical awareness, equanimity and insight valued by the tradition. The experiment isolates one trainable component.

The practice also travelled beyond the Pāli Theravāda world

Mindfulness of breathing was not confined to one surviving Buddhist school. Sanskrit, Chinese and other Buddhist meditation traditions preserved related respiratory contemplations. Comparative scholarship shows that later manuals sometimes placed greater emphasis on counting or tightly focused attention than the broader sixteen-step early Buddhist scheme.

Anālayo’s historical work notes that the Visuddhimagga recommends counting between five and ten breaths, while a meditation manual associated with Kumārajīva and preserved in Chinese also recommends counting to ten. Similar practical solutions therefore appear in distinct textual environments.

This development reminds us that “Buddhist breath meditation” is not one frozen technique. Different lineages emphasize concentration, insight, breath counting, nostril sensations, abdominal movement, whole-body awareness or effortless observation.

Modern Vipassanā movements simplified and globalized breath awareness

In the twentieth century, Buddhist meditation was increasingly taught to laypeople on mass scales. Breath awareness became a common entry practice because it is simple to explain and does not require prior mastery of doctrine.

Modern Vipassanā teachers have used ānāpāna practice to stabilize attention before broader observation of bodily sensations or mental processes. Other teachers present mindfulness of breathing as a complete practice in itself. Secular mindfulness programs then adapted related techniques again, often removing explicitly Buddhist goals.

Each translation changes emphasis. “Observe the breath to cultivate liberating insight,” “observe the breath to stabilize concentration,” and “observe the breath to reduce workplace stress” can involve similar behaviour but belong to different systems of meaning.

Focused-attention science gives us a useful—but partial—modern model

Contemporary researchers often classify breath meditation as focused-attention meditation. The experimental model is straightforward: place attention on the sensations of breathing; notice when attention has wandered; disengage from the distracting thought; return to the breath.

This creates a repeated training cycle involving sustained attention, conflict monitoring, attentional switching and meta-awareness. Unlike a one-time concentration test, meditation repeats the recovery from distraction again and again.

A 2025 scoping systematic review of EEG and MEG studies concluded that focused-attention meditation has been extensively studied but that neurophysiological findings remain heterogeneous. Participant experience, task definitions and analytic methods differ substantially. The field supports measurable neural effects, but not a single universal “meditation brainwave.”

Mind-wandering is not failure—it is part of the training loop

Beginners commonly assume that successful meditation means never becoming distracted. From both Buddhist and cognitive perspectives, that is unrealistic. The important event is often recognizing distraction.

A thought appears, attention follows it, and at some point the practitioner realizes: “I am no longer with the breath.” That moment is meta-awareness—awareness of the state of one’s own attention. Returning to breathing then exercises attentional switching.

Laboratory studies support this model. Breath-counting skill correlates with lower mind-wandering, and fMRI experiments distinguish neural states associated with breath attention, self-related thought and spontaneous mind-wandering. Meditation may therefore train not only staying on task but detecting when the mind has left it.

Brain imaging can distinguish breath attention from wandering—but cannot read enlightenment

Researchers have used fMRI pattern classification to identify periods in which participants attend to the breath versus engage in mind-wandering or self-referential thinking. Other studies find reduced activity in parts of the default mode network during mindful attention compared with wandering.

These are useful findings because they show that the subjective distinction practitioners describe has measurable neural correlates. They do not establish that one network is the “ego centre,” that reduced default-mode activity equals spiritual awakening, or that Buddhist liberation has been localized in the brain.

Every mental state has neural activity. The scientific question is how patterns differ between tasks and practitioners, not whether a scan can validate Buddhist metaphysics.

A 2026 EEG study adds detail, not a final answer

A 2026 high-density EEG study of 22 experienced practitioners examined microstate dynamics during focused attention to natural breathing. Meditation reduced one microstate pattern and increased others associated by the authors with attentional stability and internal monitoring.

The result is interesting because it captures moment-to-moment organization of brain activity rather than simply averaging one frequency band. But 22 experienced meditators are not humanity, and microstate interpretation remains an active research area.

Tradivior therefore treats such work as mechanism evidence, not proof that ānāpānasati has one neurological signature across traditions, skill levels and stages of practice.

Breath attention trains interoception because the object is inside the body

Interoception refers to how the nervous system senses and interprets signals from within the body. Breathing provides unusually accessible internal signals: movement at the abdomen and chest, airflow at the nostrils, pressure, temperature and rhythm.

A 2025 meta-analysis of 29 randomized controlled trials involving 2,191 participants found a small-to-medium improvement in self-reported interoceptive awareness across relevant interventions, with mindfulness-based programs showing the largest subgroup effect. Improvements were also related to reduced psychological distress.

This supports the idea that repeated attention to internal sensations can change the way people experience their bodies. But most studies examine broader mindfulness programs, not pure ānāpānasati. The evidence therefore supports a general mechanism more strongly than a claim unique to Buddhist breath meditation.

Better interoception is not simply “feeling more”

More attention to internal sensations can be helpful or harmful depending on how they are interpreted. Someone prone to panic may notice a heartbeat or breath change and interpret it catastrophically. Mindfulness training attempts to pair sensitivity with non-reactivity and clearer observation.

This difference matters clinically. The Buddhist training is not merely “pay more attention to your body.” It includes learning not to chase every sensation, suppress discomfort or identify every passing experience as “me” or “mine.”

Modern interoception questionnaires capture parts of this relationship, but not the entire philosophical training.

Does breath meditation improve sustained attention?

Several experiments suggest that focused breath training can improve aspects of attention. A randomized proof-of-concept trial in older adults found that four weeks of breath-focused meditation improved sustained-attention performance compared with an active music-listening condition.

Other small studies report improvements in working-memory or attentional measures after focused-attention practice. These results fit the training mechanism: repeatedly returning to one object should exercise attentional control.

But effect size, durability and generalization remain important questions. Becoming better at maintaining breath attention does not automatically make someone better at every cognitive task. Transfer beyond the trained context must be demonstrated rather than assumed.

One session can change state without proving long-term transformation

Short laboratory studies can detect immediate shifts after 10 or 15 minutes of focused meditation. Such studies are useful for identifying mechanisms because fewer life changes occur during a brief session.

Yet acute state effects are not the same as durable traits. Feeling calmer after one sitting, showing altered EEG power or performing slightly better on one task does not establish permanent cognitive restructuring.

Traditional Buddhist training assumes repetition over months and years, usually embedded in ethics, community and philosophical study. Laboratory convenience compresses that tradition into minutes. Both scales can be studied, but they answer different questions.

Why natural breathing matters scientifically

If participants deliberately slow or deepen their breathing, physiological effects such as altered heart-rate variability or carbon dioxide can become major confounders. Natural-breath observation allows researchers to focus more directly on attention and awareness, although breathing may still change spontaneously as the person settles.

This gives ānāpānasati an interesting scientific advantage over controlled breathwork. It can manipulate where attention goes while trying not to prescribe a respiratory dose.

That does not mean breathing remains physiologically identical. Attention, posture and relaxation can change it indirectly. Researchers should measure respiration when claiming that neural or psychological effects arise purely from attention.

The breath becomes calmer—but “calming the breath” is not the same as forcing it

In the early Buddhist sequence, the practitioner trains in calming bodily formation. Traditional interpretation identifies in-and-out breathing as a bodily formation. A modern reader can easily turn this into an instruction to manipulate respiratory rate directly.

Yet meditation can also calm breathing indirectly. As movement decreases and attention stabilizes, ventilation may naturally become quieter. The practitioner observes and participates in the calming process without necessarily imposing a rigid rhythm.

This difference is subtle but important. Buddhist breath meditation can influence physiology while remaining fundamentally observational.

Buddhist breath meditation was not historically invented to reduce cortisol

Modern mindfulness culture frequently frames breath meditation as stress reduction. Stress reduction can be valuable, but it is not the central historical explanation for why Buddhists cultivated ānāpānasati.

Early Buddhist sources place the practice inside a path concerned with suffering, craving, impermanence, concentration, awakening and liberation. A calmer nervous system may support that work, but the goal is not equivalent to becoming more comfortable while leaving one’s relationship to craving unchanged.

Retrofitting cortisol language onto the Buddha’s teaching therefore narrows rather than modernizes the history.

Stress reduction can still be a legitimate modern use

A practice can acquire new purposes without becoming fraudulent. Modern people may use breath awareness before sleep, during psychotherapy, in schools or at work. Those settings differ radically from a forest monastery, yet the basic attentional operation can remain recognizable.

The editorial requirement is simply to label the shift honestly. “This ancient practice is now used for stress management” is defensible. “Ancient Buddhists designed it to lower modern stress biomarkers” is not supported.

Emotion regulation may emerge from changing the relationship to distraction

Breath meditation does not necessarily remove difficult thoughts. Instead, it can train a sequence: notice that attention has been captured, refrain from continuing the thought automatically, and return to a chosen object.

That skill can plausibly transfer to emotion regulation. A person who notices anger earlier may have more opportunity to choose what happens next. A six-week randomized focused-meditation study found improvements in attention and emotion-regulation measures compared with control conditions, although the technique used a secular breath-counting approach rather than a full Buddhist protocol.

This is best interpreted as evidence for a trainable cognitive mechanism shared with some Buddhist practice, not validation of every traditional claim.

Breath awareness can expose discomfort rather than eliminate it

Popular instructions often promise immediate calm, but close attention to breathing can initially reveal restlessness, anxiety, boredom or bodily discomfort. A person who has rarely observed the mind may discover how little control attention actually has.

Traditional meditation systems expect obstacles. Buddhist lists of hindrances include desire, aversion, dullness, restlessness and doubt. The presence of distraction is therefore not evidence that the technique has failed.

This traditional realism is useful for modern practice. If every unpleasant session is framed as failure, people may force concentration or blame themselves. A more accurate model treats recognition of distraction as part of the exercise.

Meditation is not risk-free simply because breathing is natural

Mindfulness of natural breathing is generally low risk, but meditation as a whole can produce difficult experiences in some practitioners. Anxiety, dissociation, traumatic memories, insomnia or destabilizing perceptual changes have been reported in the broader meditation literature, especially during intensive practice.

Breath focus itself can also be uncomfortable for people with panic symptoms, respiratory trauma or intense health anxiety. Being told to “just watch the breath” may amplify sensations they already fear.

Clinical use should therefore allow alternative anchors—sound, touch, movement or visual objects—rather than treating breath attention as universally appropriate.

A preliminary Anapanasati brain study shows why sample size matters

A PET/CT and EEG study specifically labelled as Anapanasati meditation reported changes in regional cerebral glucose metabolism during practice. It involved only six participants, whose meditation experience ranged widely.

Such a study can generate hypotheses, but it cannot define the neural mechanism of an entire tradition. The small sample makes individual variation especially important.

This is a recurring problem in contemplative neuroscience. Highly experienced practitioners are rare, while large studies are easier to conduct with beginners whose practice may barely resemble the advanced state researchers want to understand.

Experienced practice and beginner practice are different exposures

A first-time meditator may spend most of a session repeatedly forgetting the breath. An experienced practitioner may stabilize attention quickly and then use breath awareness within a much broader field of observation. Treating both as the same intervention obscures dose and skill.

Traditions recognize this problem through staged training. Modern studies should do the same by reporting lifetime practice, retreat history, technique and teacher lineage rather than using the label “meditator” as a single category.

The eyes-closed laboratory image is not universal Buddhist practice

Modern research often asks participants to sit with eyes closed because it simplifies experimental conditions. Buddhist contemplative practice is more diverse. Some traditions meditate with eyes partly or fully open; walking meditation is common; mindfulness may be cultivated during ordinary activity.

Breath awareness therefore belongs to a broader training in how attention relates to experience, not to one standardized laboratory posture.

Why did the breath survive when so many meditation objects exist?

Buddhist traditions use many objects: loving-kindness, recollection of death, bodily anatomy, visual devices, sounds, compassion, sacred figures and philosophical contemplation. Breath awareness nevertheless became exceptionally portable.

Its advantages are practical. The breath is culturally neutral enough to teach across communities, yet rich enough to support concentration and insight. It is rhythmic but changing, bodily but not usually visually distracting, intimate but not necessarily emotionally charged.

Those properties can explain much of its survival without invoking hidden supernatural technology.

Modern mindfulness changed the meaning of the word “mindfulness”

In contemporary psychology, mindfulness often means nonjudgmental present-moment awareness. Early Buddhist sati carries a more complex history involving memory, recollection, ethical context and sustained awareness within a path.

Focused attention on breathing can be part of both systems, but the surrounding framework differs. A secular participant may practice to improve wellbeing; a Buddhist practitioner may use the same breath as part of a path toward insight into impermanence and non-attachment.

Scientific evidence for the secular intervention should therefore not be used to make blanket claims about the entire historical Buddhist construct.

Neural change does not automatically mean improvement

Brain imaging language can make any difference sound beneficial. More activation, less activation, greater connectivity or lower entropy can all be described positively if the story is written after seeing the result.

A responsible interpretation begins with behavioural function. Does the person attend more reliably? Do symptoms improve? Does the effect persist? Does it generalize? Neural data can help explain those outcomes, but should not replace them.

The 2025 scoping review’s finding of substantial neurophysiological heterogeneity is therefore useful restraint. Focused attention affects the brain; science is still resolving exactly how those effects depend on method and expertise.

What does the tradition claim that science cannot test directly?

The early Buddhist sequence ultimately points toward awakening and freedom. These concepts include philosophical, ethical and experiential dimensions that cannot be reduced to reaction time or EEG.

Science can study whether breath meditation changes stress, attention or brain activity. It cannot decide through those measures alone whether craving has been uprooted in the Buddhist sense, whether insight into non-self is correct or whether nirvāṇa is a metaphysical reality.

That is not a reason to ignore the traditional claims. It is a reason to classify them correctly.

The strongest convergence is attentional, not metaphysical

Early Buddhist texts plainly treat sustained mindful awareness as trainable. Modern experiments independently show that breath-focused attention can be trained, that mind-wandering can be measured, and that practice changes behavioural and neural markers associated with attention.

That is a meaningful convergence. It supports the practical observation that attention is not fixed and that repeatedly returning to one object can change attentional habits.

It does not show that cognitive neuroscience has proved the Four Noble Truths, nor that ancient monks possessed fMRI-level knowledge. The historical achievement is impressive without those claims.

What survives scrutiny?

• Mindfulness of in-and-out breathing is securely documented in early Buddhist texts and has remained an important contemplative practice across later traditions.
• MN 118 presents a sixteen-step path extending from breathing and bodily awareness to feeling, mind, impermanence and relinquishment.
• The historical goal was awakening and liberation within Buddhist practice, not merely modern stress reduction.
• Later manuals introduced structured pedagogical aids such as breath counting and concentrated attention at the point of respiratory contact.
• Modern focused-attention research supports measurable changes in attention, mind-wandering, meta-awareness and brain activity during breath meditation.
• Breath-counting training can reduce mind-wandering and provides a useful behavioural measure of some mindfulness skills.
• Mindfulness-based training produces small-to-moderate average improvements in self-reported interoceptive awareness, though that evidence is broader than ānāpānasati alone.
• Neuroimaging findings are heterogeneous and do not support one universal “Buddhist meditation brain state.”
• Natural breath observation is scientifically different from deliberately controlled breathing such as pranayama.
• Modern therapeutic benefits can be genuine without proving that those benefits were the original historical purpose of the practice.

The Tradivior Evidence Profile

Historical Authenticity — Strong. Mindfulness of breathing is extensively documented in early Buddhist discourses and later meditation manuals, with multiple textual witnesses and long-standing practice traditions.

Original-Purpose Evidence — Strong. The early sources explicitly place breath mindfulness within training toward concentration, the four foundations of mindfulness, awakening factors, insight and liberation.

Scientific Mechanism — Strong for attention and interoceptive training. Sustained attention, distraction monitoring, attentional switching, meta-awareness and internal sensory processing provide well-supported mechanisms for modern breath-focused meditation.

Experimental Evidence — Moderate to Strong. Behavioural, EEG and neuroimaging research supports measurable effects of focused-attention meditation, while substantial methodological heterogeneity and differences in expertise limit universal conclusions.

Cross-Cultural Evidence — Strong within Buddhism, Moderate outside it. Related breath-observation practices spread through multiple Buddhist traditions and cultures. Breath attention also appears in secular contemplative systems, though ānāpānasati remains specifically rooted in Buddhism.

Modern Relevance — Strong. Breath mindfulness is widely used in Buddhist practice, secular mindfulness, clinical programs, education and research, making both its benefits and limitations highly relevant.

The Tradivior Conclusion

Evidence Supported—with historical qualifications. Buddhist traditions observed correctly that attention to breathing is a trainable practice that can stabilize attention, expose mind-wandering and alter the way people relate to internal experience. Modern research supports those mechanisms and finds measurable behavioural and neural effects. What science does not establish is the full Buddhist claim that breath mindfulness culminates in awakening or liberation, nor does it show that early practitioners understood modern neuroscience. The strongest conclusion is that ānāpānasati is a historically authentic contemplative technology whose attentional mechanisms survive modern scrutiny while its ultimate religious aims remain philosophical and experiential claims rather than laboratory outcomes.

Continue investigating

• Why Did Indian Traditions Develop Pranayama?
• Why Do Humans Meditate?
• Why Do Humans Pray?

Sources and further reading

• Ānāpānasati Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 118), early Buddhist discourse on mindfulness of breathing.
• Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta (Majjhima Nikāya 10), including mindfulness of breathing within contemplation of the body.
• Buddhaghosa. Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification), Chapter VIII, mindfulness of breathing.
• Anālayo. Mindfulness of Breathing: A Practice Guide and Translations. Windhorse Publications; 2019.
• Anālayo. Comparative scholarship on developments in Buddhist meditation traditions and the historical transformation of mindfulness of breathing.
• Levinson DB, Stoll EL, Kindy SD, Merry HL, Davidson RJ. “A mind you can count on: validating breath counting as a behavioral measure of mindfulness.” Frontiers in Psychology. 2014;5:1202. PMID: 25386148.
• Lieberman JM, McConnell PA, Estarellas M, Sacchet MD. “Neurophysiological mechanisms of focused attention meditation: A scoping systematic review.” Imaging Neuroscience. 2025. PMID: 40800838.
• “Microstate Dynamics of Focused Attention Meditation.” 2026. PMID: 42029842.
• “Focus on the Breath: Brain Decoding Reveals Internal States of Attention During Meditation.” 2020. PMID: 33005138.
• “Internal and external attention and the default mode network.” 2017. PMID: 28110087.
• Treves IN, et al. “A meta-analysis of the effects of mindfulness meditation training on self-reported interoception.” Scientific Reports. 2025. PMID: 41198766.
• “Neurobehavioural Exploration of Breath-counting & Breath-awareness in Novice Indian Meditators: A Naturalised Ānāpānasati-based Paradigmatic Approach.” 2025. PMID: 39850443.
• “Alterations of regional cerebral glucose metabolism … during mindfulness breathing in Anapanasati meditation: A preliminary analysis.” 2021. PMID: 34703396.
• “Four weeks of meditation training improves sustained attention in community-dwelling older adults: a proof-of-concept randomized controlled trial.” 2024.
• “The Improvement of Emotion and Attention Regulation after a 6-Week Training of Focused Meditation: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” 2013.