Mindfulness has become a hot topic over the last couple of years. Managers, athletes, and even the military engage in mindfulness practice for its positive effects on stress, well-being and performance.
Inevitably, the hype around mindfulness resulted in significant changes to original mindfulness practice protocols, which are pretty long and can be a struggle to implement in our daily lives. Many mindfulness classes offered to healthy people, such as managers and employees, are therefore much shorter, whether it be in face-to-face settings, online or through phone apps. So the main question is: are shorter mindfulness classes also effective? And do some people benefit more from those shorter mindfulness classes than others?
That is something I wanted to find out in my PhD research. In cooperation with the New Zealand Defence Force, we investigated whether short mindfulness training with a weekly mindfulness class over 4 weeks can help to reduce distress in young unemployed adults. The answer is, yes it can, but not all our participants benefited equally. We found that the short mindfulness training reduced distress for those participants who were more mindful at the start.
This tells us that short mindfulness classes can help us to feel less distressed, but we might only feel positive effects if we were already quite mindful before. For those of us that are rather mindless, mindfulness training can still be beneficial, but we should consider longer mindfulness classes. In either case, it is important to remember that mindfulness is like a muscle that needs to be trained continuously – a mindfulness class can help you to get started, like a class at the gym. But in order to keep reaping the benefits, continuous practice is important.
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