I studied whether sound and stillness move the numbers. Here's what they actually said.
For my doctoral scholarly project I ran a six-week quality improvement pilot at an outpatient psychiatric–mental health wellness clinic. Seven adults. Guided meditation and crystal singing bowls, one hour at a time. Stress, anxiety, depression, and self-care measured before, during, and after.
Some of it held up. Some of it didn't. Both are on this page.
Jeremy Edwards, DNP, APRN, PMHNP-BC · Doctor of Nursing Practice scholarly project, 2025. Educational summary — not medical advice.
Why I looked at this
Medication helps. It was never meant to be the whole answer.
Fourteen years inside behavioral health settings — outpatient, residential, rehab, detox, IOP, PHP — taught me that most people need more than a prescription. They need something to reach for at 2 a.m., after the prescription has already been taken and the night is still long. Breath. Attention. Sound. Structure. Tools with no refill and no side-effect profile.
The evidence base for those tools is thinner than it should be. So I added a small piece to it.
What the pilot involved
- Design. Quality improvement pilot. Convenience sample. No control group.
- Participants. Seven adults — five women, two men. Mean age 38, range 25 to 48.
- Setting. An outpatient psychiatric–mental health wellness clinic.
- Duration. Six weeks.
- Each session. One hour. A 10-minute guided meditation — intention setting, breath work, a body scan — followed by sound from seven quartz crystal singing bowls.
- Measures. PSS-10 for perceived stress, GAD-7 for anxiety, PHQ-9 for depression, and the Self-Care Inventory. Collected at baseline, week 3, and week 6.
- Framework. Orem's Self-Care Deficit Nursing Theory.
- Oversight. Reviewed and approved as a quality improvement project by the sponsoring university's Institutional Review Board. Data were de-identified before participants completed any instrument.
What changed
| Measure | Result | p |
|---|---|---|
| Perceived stress (PSS-10) | Significantly lower than baseline by week 3, and still lower at week 6 | .001 |
| Self-care, overall (SCI) | Significantly higher at week 6 than at baseline | .005 |
| Self-care maintenance (SCI subscale) | Significantly higher at week 6 than at baseline | .003 |
Stress moved first, and it moved most. By week three it had already dropped, and it stayed down through week six.
What didn't
| Measure | Result | p |
|---|---|---|
| Depression (PHQ-9) | No statistically significant change. Scores improved and did not worsen. | .13 |
| Anxiety (GAD-7) | No statistically significant change. | .33 |
| Self-care management (SCI subscale) | No statistically significant change. | .07 |
| Self-care monitoring (SCI subscale) | No statistically significant change. | .09 |
I want to be plain about this, because the easier version of this page wouldn't be.
Stress and self-care held up statistically. Depression and anxiety scores moved in the right direction but not far enough to separate the effect from chance. With seven people over six weeks, that is close to what you would expect. Small samples are honest about how little they can prove.
Context before conclusions.
The limits, stated plainly
Seven participants. No control group. Six weeks. A convenience sample. Every outcome self-reported.
This was a pilot. It was built to ask whether the intervention was feasible and worth studying further, and the answer to that was yes. It was not built to prove that sound reduces depression, and it does not.
Anyone who tells you a seven-person pilot proves something large is selling you something.
What I carried into practice
Stress is a lever. Perceived stress responded before anything else did. When someone is underwater, the load often shifts before the diagnosis does — and that early movement can be the thing that makes the rest of treatment possible.
Self-care is a skill, not a personality trait. The subscale that improved was maintenance: the daily, unglamorous keeping-up. That is teachable. It shows up in how I structure a visit.
Non-drug tools belong beside medication, not instead of it. I prescribe. I also think a plan that stops at the prescription is an incomplete plan.
To be clear: sound healing is research I conducted, not a service this practice offers. Storms & Stillness provides psychiatric evaluation and medication management over telehealth.
An educational note
This page summarizes a completed quality improvement project and is provided for educational purposes only. It is not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for individualized psychiatric care. Findings from a seven-person pilot may not apply to you or to anyone you know.
If you or someone you love is in immediate danger, call 911. For 24/7 crisis support, call or text 988 — the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available around the clock.
If this is how you want your patients thought about
Storms & Stillness is a virtual psychiatric practice for patients located in Arizona, Idaho, or Oregon. Credentialing is in progress. The practice is not open yet.
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Therapists, pediatricians, primary care, and treatment programs: if you send patients out for medication, this page is a fair sample of how I think before you ever pick up the phone.