They found that both interventions worked equally well in reducing debilitating anxiety symptoms.Elizabeth Hoge, director of the Anxiety Disorders Research Program at Georgetown University Medical Center, and other researchers wanted to find out whether mindfulness could work as well as the drugs.Joy Harden Bradford, a psychologist in Atlanta who hosts the podcast Therapy for Black Girls, says she was "surprised but not shocked" that the meditation treatment works as well as the medicine, and is excited that a new avenue of treatment might become more widely available.And "there is plenty of existing evidence that MBSR can benefit a wide variety of folks, so there's not much reason to doubt the generalizability," says Mrazek.Many people may not have the time or money required to participate in an eight-week guided program, and scrolling meditation apps or trying out a free course at the YMCA is not exactly comparable."