Background: Generalized anxiety symptoms are highly prevalent among university students and are associated with academic impairment, reduced quality of life, and elevated risk of comorbid depression ^[¹²^]. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) are both empirically supported approaches, yet head-to-head comparisons within student populations remain limited ^[³⁴^].

Objective: This study compared the relative effectiveness of an 8-week mindfulness-based program and an 8-week CBT-based program against a waitlist control on self-reported generalized anxiety symptoms among undergraduate students.

Method: A three-arm, parallel-group design was used with 120 participants (n = 40 per arm). This study uses a simulated dataset created for academic training purposes; all participant scores, group means, and statistical outputs were generated to reflect plausible response patterns consistent with the published anxiety-intervention literature and do not represent data collected from real participants. Anxiety symptoms were assessed using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale (GAD-7) at baseline and weekly across the 8-week intervention period.

Key Results: Mean GAD-7 scores declined from 57.6 to 41.3 in the mindfulness group and from 58.9 to 38.7 in the CBT group, compared with a modest decline from 58.2 to 56.1 in the waitlist control. A mixed-design ANOVA simulated for this dataset indicated a significant group × time interaction (p < 0.001), with both active interventions outperforming control, and the CBT group showing a marginally steeper decline than the mindfulness group in the later weeks of the program.