A new study published in Scientific Reports has produced one of the most counterintuitive mindfulness findings of the year: a single short meditative episode made participants noticeably more willing to take risks. Researchers at the University of Aberdeen ran two experiments with 300 people each — one in the UK, one in Singapore — and found that the mindfulness group consistently chose riskier options on classic behavioural economics tasks compared to both passive controls and an active control group given an unrelated puzzle.
What Happened — The Study
The paper, “Brief mindfulness meditation increases risk-taking behavior,” was authored by Lucy B. G. Tan, Marius Golubickis and C. Neil Macrae and appears in Scientific Reports volume 16, article 6760 (2026). In each experiment, participants completed roughly ten minutes of a guided mindfulness audio, an unrelated word puzzle (the active control), or simply sat quietly (the passive control). They then completed a well-validated risk-taking task — the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) in the UK arm and the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task (BRET) in the Singapore arm.
The pattern was the same in both samples. Across UK participants, the mindfulness group averaged 31.5 balloon pumps compared with 25.8 for passive controls and 23.4 for the puzzle group, a difference the authors described as statistically robust. In Singapore, the mindfulness group opened an average of 38.2 boxes on the BRET versus 31.0 and 33.2 for the two control conditions. State-mindfulness scores predicted the size of the risk-taking effect, suggesting the meditation itself was doing the work rather than some unrelated novelty.
Inside The Numbers
The headline figures are striking, but the more interesting analysis sits underneath them. Using a computational model of decision-making, the authors broke each participant’s behaviour into a “risk estimation” component and a “loss-aversion” component. Risk estimation was untouched — participants in the mindfulness group were just as accurate at gauging how likely a balloon was to pop. What changed was loss aversion: the emotional weight of a possible loss shrank, and so the mindfulness participants kept pumping where others tapped out.
“Mindfulness reduced the emotional weighting of potential losses,” the authors wrote, “without broadly altering the estimation of task-related risk.” In other words: meditators didn’t become reckless or miscalibrated. They became less afraid of losing — which, on a task that rewards more pumps with more cash, looks like risk-taking. On a different task, the same change might look like courage, equanimity, or simply better decision-making under pressure.
Why Mindfulness Reduces Loss Aversion
The finding fits a well-established literature on what mindfulness practice actually changes in the mind. Decades of work — including the research that anchored this year’s Mental Health Awareness Month campaign — show that mindfulness reliably reduces the strength of negative emotional reactivity. When you stop bracing against a possible loss, the loss aversion bias that distorts most human decision-making weakens too.
Loss aversion is one of the most reliable findings in behavioural economics: a loss of a given size feels roughly twice as bad as an equivalent gain feels good. It explains why investors sell winners and hold losers, why people accept worse deals to avoid a confrontational negotiation, and why first-time meditators often quit before the benefits accumulate. If even a single ten-minute session can shift that bias measurably, the implications for everyday decision-making are sizeable.
This Doesn’t Mean Meditation Makes You Reckless
The authors are careful to note their results were obtained on lab tasks with small stakes — virtual balloons and virtual cash. They explicitly caution against extrapolating to bigger, real-world decisions like skydiving, financial trading, or extreme sports. The reduced loss aversion shown here may help you negotiate a salary, ask for feedback you’ve been dreading, or take a measured creative risk; it almost certainly does not mean you will be reckless on the road.
It’s also worth holding this study against the much larger body of mindfulness research showing protective effects on impulse control. A separate randomized controlled trial last month found that mindfulness boosts anxiety treatment outcomes when added to medication, and the same Aberdeen team has previously shown that mindfulness reduces emotional reactivity to social rejection. The new finding doesn’t contradict any of this — it refines it. Reduced emotional weighting cuts both ways: in some contexts, it eases anxiety; in others, it allows more measured engagement with uncertainty.
How Yoga Teachers Should Read This
For anyone teaching yoga, meditation or breathwork in a clinical or professional setting, this study is a useful counterweight to the popular framing that mindfulness simply “calms you down.” That framing implies meditation makes you safer and more cautious. The Aberdeen data suggests something more interesting: meditation alters the emotional accounting that underlies all choices. Practitioners may approach decisions — career, relational, physical — with less catastrophising about worst-case outcomes.
For students who have struggled to act on their values because the fear of getting it wrong has been disproportionate, a regular practice could be a meaningful intervention. For students whose risk-taking already worries them, the same dosing strategy may not be appropriate as a standalone tool. The cleanest reading of the data is that mindfulness gives you back something closer to the objective expected value of a decision — and most teachers will recognise students on either side of that line.
What This Means For Your Practice
The most useful takeaway for your own practice is this: notice the kinds of decisions you make after sitting. Pay attention, in particular, to the decisions you have been postponing because the possible loss looms larger than the possible gain — a difficult conversation, a creative submission, a request for a raise, an injury risk you want to evaluate honestly. The Aberdeen study does not say your judgment improves after meditation. It says the fear that distorts your judgment shrinks. That can be a powerful diagnostic tool if you let it inform what you do next.
If you teach beginner meditators, this is also a useful piece of evidence to share with students who fear “losing their edge” or becoming “passive” by practising. The lab evidence points the other way: brief mindfulness made participants more, not less, willing to engage with uncertainty. For students drawn to longer-term protocols like the recent AIIMS Alzheimer’s prevention trial, the implication is reassuring: a regular sitting practice does not produce passivity. It produces composure in the presence of risk.
Key Takeaways
- A new study in Scientific Reports (Tan, Golubickis & Macrae, 2026) found that a single short mindfulness session increased risk-taking behaviour on two classic lab tasks.
- The effect appeared in 300 UK participants on the Balloon Analogue Risk Task and in 300 Singapore participants on the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task.
- Computational modelling showed the change came from reduced loss aversion, not from inaccurate risk estimation.
- The authors caution against generalising to high-stakes real-world risks but suggest the effect may help with avoidant or anxiety-driven decision-making.
- The result is consistent with — not contradictory to — the wider mindfulness literature on emotional reactivity.
The Aberdeen team frames the result as the first computational account of how a brief meditative episode reshapes the cognitive sub-processes that drive risky choice. For yoga teachers, meditation practitioners, and anyone who has ever felt held back by their own loss aversion, that’s a more practically useful finding than the simple “meditation calms you down” headline could have been. The next decision you make after closing your sitting timer might tell you more about your practice than you expect.
