Meditation Practice in Pediatric Healthcare Professionals

Rationale: Healthcare professionals face a growing burden of responsibilities and work overload which may cause psychological suffering expressed by burnout, depression and other negative psychological variables. Personal behavioral strategies may facilitate the coping process. To maintain these positive characteristics, it is necessary that one decouples from automatic thoughts, habits and patterns of unhealthy behaviors, leading to behavioral and physiological regulation, through mindfulness techniques. More specifically, Yoga is an ancient Indian philosophical and practical system and its ultimate goal is to calm the human mind, and increase vital capabilities. In addition to the ethical precepts of Yoga, practices involve asanas (postures), pranayama (breathing exercises) and dhyana (meditation). Many studies have shown the positive effects of Yoga and meditation on psychometric variables, however, there are few which address the effectiveness of Yoga on improving psychometric variables of health care professionals. Thus, aiming to reduce the symptoms that health care professionals experience when they are under burnout, this study intends to use Yoga meditation, which may enable the professional to experience decoupling of harmful feelings, improving, firstly, one's own inner self-relationship and therefore, with patients and their families. Objective: To investigate the effects of a 8-week yoga meditation program on psychometric and physiological variables of Pediatrics health professionals. Methods: randomized controlled clinical trial. Participants: 60 health professionals from the Pediatrics Department of a tertiary hospital from Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) will be randomized to meditation or control (waiting list) groups. Subjects of the meditation groups will have 2 30 min classes a week. Evaluations: Psychometric and physiological variables will be accessed at study entry (baseline) and after its completion (8-weeks). Statistical Analys