Physiological and Psychological Effects of Daily Hasta Mudra Practice: A Randomized Controlled Trial on Stress, Sleep Quality, and Autonomic Balance

Resumen

Background. Evidence specific to isolated hand-mudra practice remains sparse, while broader yoga studies report heterogeneous effects on stress, sleep, and heart rate variability. A rigorous design must distinguish finger configuration from structured quiet rest, attention, expectancy, and respiratory influences.

Objective. To present an eight-week randomized active-control framework for a standardized three-mudra sequence and to illustrate the planned analysis using a fully synthetic dataset, with perceived stress as the primary outcome and sleep quality and resting cardiac vagal modulation as secondary outcomes.

Methods. Thirty synthetic records (15 per arm) represented adults assigned to Hasta Mudra or time- and attention-matched quiet sitting. Both conditions were specified as 25 minutes daily for 56 days. The PSS-10 was the primary endpoint; PSQI, resting RMSSD, heart rate, and blood pressure were secondary or exploratory endpoints. Week-8 outcomes were analyzed using baseline- and sex-adjusted ANCOVA; RMSSD was analyzed on the natural-log scale.

Results. In the synthetic worked example, the adjusted PSS-10 difference was -3.28 points (95% CI, -5.11 to -1.45; P = 0.001). The adjusted PSQI difference was -0.78 points (95% CI, -1.83 to 0.28; P = 0.143), and the adjusted RMSSD ratio was 1.05 (95% CI, 0.91-1.21; P = 0.501). Thus, the constructed example shows a stress-score difference without corresponding evidence of a sleep or RMSSD difference.

Conclusion. The framework shows how an isolated hand-mudra sequence could be evaluated against an active control while avoiding overinterpretation of HRV. Because every record and outcome in this manuscript is synthetic, the numerical findings are illustrative only and cannot establish efficacy, safety, feasibility, clinical importance, or a mudra-specific physiological mechanism.