Who Benefits Most From Mindfulness Training for Sleep

Two hundred adults aged 65 and older were randomly assigned to either an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction course or a wait-list control, with sleep quality measured at the start, immediately after the eight weeks, and again at six months. Among participants who began with a meaningful level of sleep disturbance, the mindfulness group showed a small but statistically significant improvement in overall sleep quality compared with the wait-list group. Notably, the benefit scaled with how disturbed sleep was at baseline: those with the most severe sleep problems at the outset showed the largest improvement, a medium-sized effect, while those with milder disturbance saw a smaller one.

As a secondary analysis rather than a trial purpose-built to study sleep, and with a modest overall effect size even in the group that benefited most, this isn't a dramatic result, and a wait-list control doesn't rule out the effect of simply doing a structured, attentive programme of any kind. Its most useful finding is arguably the dose-dependent pattern: mindfulness training for sleep may do the least for people who already sleep reasonably well, and the most for those whose sleep is genuinely struggling, a sensible, non-oversold way to think about who it's actually worth trying for.