Why are more mindful people less depressed and anxious?
People who were more mindful had fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety, and this link ran largely through worrying and ruminating less.
Source
Mindfulness and Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety in the General Population: The Mediating Roles of Worry, Rumination, Reappraisal and Suppression
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Online questionnaire survey analysed with structural equation modelling of mediation paths, with bootstrapped indirect effects
- N
- N=1151 · 1151 adults without a reported psychiatric diagnosis retained from 1494 respondents; 491 reported practising mindfulness meditation
- Population
- English- and Spanish-speaking adults from many countries (mostly Spain, Canada and the US), mostly women
- Outcome
- Depression and anxiety symptoms (HADS), with worry, rumination, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression as mediators
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
The researchers surveyed 1151 adults online who had not been diagnosed with a mental disorder, measuring mindfulness, depression and anxiety symptoms, worry, rumination, and two emotion-regulation habits: reappraising situations and suppressing emotional expression. They also estimated each person's lifetime hours of mindfulness meditation. They then fitted a single structural equation model testing whether the four regulation processes carried the association between mindfulness and symptoms.
What they found
Mindfulness was linked to fewer depression and anxiety symptoms both directly and indirectly. For depression, all four processes acted as mediators; for anxiety, worry, rumination and reappraisal did but suppression did not. Worry and rumination made the largest contributions to the model, reappraisal and suppression smaller ones. Meditation practice was associated with higher mindfulness but had no direct link to depression or anxiety once mindfulness was accounted for, with Bayes factors favouring no association.
The limits
What it doesn't show
All data came from a single online survey at one time point, so the 'mediation' paths are a statistical model of correlations; they cannot show that mindfulness causes lower worry or that worry causes symptoms, and the reverse direction is equally consistent with the data. Participants were self-selected volunteers, mostly women, and diagnosis status and meditation hours were self-reported estimates. The model was also adjusted using statistical significance and modification indices, which risks fitting this particular sample.
Key terms
- Mediation
- A statistical pattern in which the association between X and Y is partly carried through a third variable M (X relates to M, which relates to Y).
- Rumination
- Repetitive, hard-to-control thinking about past negative experiences and their causes and consequences.
- Worry
- A chain of negative, relatively uncontrollable thoughts about uncertain future outcomes.
- Cognitive reappraisal vs. expressive suppression
- Reappraisal changes how a situation is interpreted to change the emotion; suppression hides the outward expression of an emotion without changing the feeling.
- Structural equation modelling (SEM)
- A technique that tests a whole set of hypothesised paths among variables at once and reports how well the model fits the data.
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Quiz yourself
Which pair of mediators made the largest contribution to the model?
Common questions
Does this show that meditating reduces depression?
Not directly. Meditation practice was linked to higher mindfulness, but once mindfulness was in the model, meditation hours had no separate relationship with symptoms. And because the data are cross-sectional, causal direction cannot be established.
Why exclude people with a psychiatric diagnosis?
The authors wanted to study how mindfulness relates to everyday, often subclinical, symptoms in the general population rather than in clinical samples.
Why does it matter that direct effects remained?
Even with all four mediators included, mindfulness still predicted symptoms, meaning these regulation processes explain only part of the association.
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