Online and Traditional Mindfulness Programs for Stress in University Students: A Meta-Analysis (Wang et al., 2026)
University students report poorer psychological wellbeing than other people their age, and stress is linked to poor sleep, physical health problems and difficulties with study. Universities increasingly offer mindfulness programs, and many have moved them online, but an app or a recorded course may not work as well as a classroom. A systematic review and meta-analysis by Yangzhen Wang, Weiguo Qu and colleagues in Frontiers in Psychology asked whether the format matters.
The authors registered the review in advance and searched four databases for randomized trials published from 2010 to mid-2025. Sixteen trials with 1,393 students were pooled. Six tested online mindfulness delivered through apps, websites, audio or virtual reality, and ten tested traditional in-person courses, usually built around elements of mindfulness-based stress reduction such as the body scan and mindful breathing. Programs lasted anywhere from five days to ten weeks, and about half of the trials involved medical or nursing students. Every trial compared mindfulness with a passive control, such as a wait-list, usual care or no intervention. Because none compared the two formats directly, the review judged each against its own controls.
Both formats lowered perceived stress by a moderate amount, and the size of the benefit was similar for online and in-person programs. Mindfulness scores rose too, though less strongly than stress fell. The findings held when the authors set aside the trials at highest risk of bias. In exploratory analyses, shorter daily practice of about ten to twenty minutes seemed to work better than one long weekly session, and audio-based online programs looked slightly better than apps or e-books, but these differences did not reach statistical significance and rest on very few studies.
Confidence is tempered by the quality of the evidence. Only one trial was rated at low risk of bias, mainly because participants could not be blinded and some outcome data were missing. The two formats were compared only indirectly, many subgroups were small, and only English-language papers were searched. Most participants were women, many were healthcare students, and most trials were run in Western, high-income settings, so the results may not carry over to other student populations.
The takeaway is encouraging for universities with limited counselling capacity: a well-designed online program may be a reasonable first option for reducing student stress. Head-to-head trials, longer follow-up and more diverse student samples will be needed to confirm that online delivery is truly equivalent.
Reference and link: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1755245
