By Mathew Polowitz, CEO and Co-Founder of Equa
If you found us after hearing David Creswell on the Mind & Life podcast or elsewhere, welcome. You probably want to know what's actually behind the science he talks about. Fair question.
David runs the Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, and the lab has spent years chasing one question. What makes people resilient under stress? It's a different question from what makes people feel calm for a few minutes, and that difference shaped everything we built at Equa.
The problem with asking people whether it worked
Here's something most “scientific” meditation marketing won't tell you. Almost any wellness program makes people say they feel better. Expectations, attention from an instructor, a quiet half hour away from your inbox – they all help. But none of them is meditation.
So the lab's studies don't just compare meditation to doing nothing. They compare it to programs designed to feel every bit as credible, then measure what happens in the body, where expectations have a harder time hiding.
Inside the trial: building a fair fight
In one of the lab's best-known trials, 153 stressed adults from around Pittsburgh got a two-week training program on their phones. They were randomly assigned to one of three arms. The first taught mindfulness training in two core skills, monitoring and acceptance – or paying close attention to experience while meeting it with openness and curiosity. The second taught the attention part only. The third was a stress-coping program built on reflection, reframing and problem-solving, meaning it was an active control group. (There are a vast number of trials without such a control group, meaning the alternative is essentially doing nothing.)
The rigor is in the detail. All three programs used the same instructor's voice, the same lesson length and the same structure. The word "mindfulness" never came up until the study ended. And when asked, participants in every group rated their program as about equally helpful.
Then came the Trier Social Stress Test. This is a standardized laboratory procedure used to reliably induce psychological and physiological stress on its participants. Each person gave a speech, then did mental math under pressure, in front of two evaluators in white lab coats who are essentially instructed to stay cold and unimpressed all throughout.
Participants felt more or less equally stressed. But their bodies said otherwise. The full mindfulness group showed smaller spikes in the stress hormone cortisol and in systolic blood pressure. They noticed more positive moments during the test, and in follow-up papers from the same trial, they reported more positive emotion and less loneliness in daily life. The attention-only group did no better than the coping program.
Same pattern, different setting
The lab saw the same split in a very different study. Unemployed adults arrived at a residential retreat center outside Pittsburgh, handed over their phones and spent three long days in one of two programs. One taught mindfulness. The other was a carefully matched relaxation retreat with the same schedule, the same gentle stretching and the same supportive group.
Both groups reported similar levels of meaning and benefit. Only the mindfulness group showed changes in brain networks tied to self-regulation, and those changes were linked to lower levels of an inflammation marker months later.
What did we learn?
The active ingredient is acceptance. Training attention alone wasn't enough. The benefits showed up when people learned to meet their experience – the uncomfortable parts included – without fighting it. Our meditation trainers call this equanimity, and we’ve learned it can be trained like any other skill.
That's a problem for the app world. Meditation apps reach millions of people, yet fewer than 5% of users are still practicing a month in. They’re great for scale, but lacking in helping people stick with it. Plenty of apps teach breath awareness and stop there. In a 2025 review in American Psychologist, David and Simon Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin–Madison raised the concern that some apps may be "watering down" meditation training in ways that limit what it can do. Their design takeaway was direct. Apps that explicitly train equanimity skills could be more effective.
From the lab to your phone
Findings like these usually stay in journals. But once we saw the results of this type of training in the app-delivered research setting, we felt strongly about getting this knowledge into the world.
Equa is the result. Our curriculum is built on the same Unified Mindfulness framework used in many of those Carnegie Mellon trials, with equanimity at its core. And because meditation has always been hard to measure, we built a way to see it. Equa tracks your breathing through your phone's motion sensors while you practice – no extra wearable needed.
Our team published the first version of that system in 2025 with collaborators at Carnegie Mellon and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, supported by the National Institutes of Health. In that study, people who saw their breathing feedback rated the app significantly easier and more satisfying to use. A promising start.
All that research comes down to something simple. Resilience is a skill. And like any skill, it grows with practice.
Train accordingly.
Sources
Lindsay, E. K., Young, S., Smyth, J. M., Brown, K. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2018). Acceptance lowers stress reactivity: Dismantling mindfulness training in a randomized controlled trial. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 87, 63–73. doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2017.09.015
Lindsay, E. K., et al. (2018). How mindfulness training promotes positive emotions: Dismantling acceptance skills training in two randomized controlled trials. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(6), 944–973. doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000134
Lindsay, E. K., Young, S., Brown, K. W., Smyth, J. M., & Creswell, J. D. (2019). Mindfulness training reduces loneliness and increases social contact in a randomized controlled trial. PNAS, 116(9), 3488–3493. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1813588116
Lindsay, E. K., Young, S., & Creswell, J. D. (2025). Mindfulness training fosters a positive outlook during acute stress: A randomized controlled trial. Emotion, 25(4), 815–826. doi.org/10.1037/emo0001452
Creswell, J. D., & Hadash, Y. (2026, April 7). What meditation retreats really do to your mind and body. Psychology Today.
Creswell, J. D., & Goldberg, S. B. (2025). The meditation app revolution. American Psychologist. doi.org/10.1037/amp0001576
Khan, M. N. H., Creswell, D., Albert, J., O'Connell, P., Fallon, S., Polowitz, M., Xu, X., & Islam, B. (2025). Mindfulness meditation and respiration. Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 9(3), Article 95. doi.org/10.1145/3749498