Only 25 minutes of mindfulness meditation is needed to alleviate stress, according to a recent study.

While investigating how mindfulness meditation affects people's ability to be resilient under stress, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania found that brief mindfulness meditation practice -- 25 minutes for three consecutive days -- alleviates psychological stress.

"More and more people report using meditation practices for stress reduction, but we know very little about how much you need to do for stress reduction and health benefits," said J. David Creswell, lead author of the study and associate professor of psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

For the study, researchers recruited 66 healthy individuals between the ages of 18 and 30 to participate in a three-day experiment.

Some participants went through a brief mindfulness meditation training program, for 25 minutes for three consecutive days, the individuals were given breathing exercises to help them monitor their breath and pay attention to their present moment experiences. A second group of participants completed a matched three-day cognitive training program in which they were asked to critically analyze poetry in an effort to enhance problem-solving skills.

After the final training activity, the study participants were asked to complete stressful speech and math tasks in front of "stern-face evaluators." Each individual reported their stress levels in response to stressful speech and math performance stress tasks, and provided saliva samples for measurement of cortisol, commonly referred to as the stress hormone.

Based on their findings, participants who received the brief mindfulness meditation training had reduced stress perceptions to the speech and math tasks. Researchers said this indicates that the mindfulness meditation fostered psychological stress resilience. The mindfulness mediation participants also showed greater cortisol reactivity.

"When you initially learn mindfulness mediation practices, you have to cognitively work at it - especially during a stressful task," said Creswell. "And, these active cognitive efforts may result in the task feeling less stressful, but they may also have physiological costs with higher cortisol production."

The findings were recently published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.