Attention
Is breath counting a valid measure of mindfulness?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Tracking breath counts offers an objective, reliable behavioral measure of mindfulness that avoids the biases of self-report questionnaires.
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Practice is the reliable effect in these designs; the intervention often is not.
Attention-related performance improves substantially with practice, which is large enough to mask an intervention. Four weeks of breath-counting training significantly improved accuracy on the task, and in a sustained-attention study both ADHD and control groups got faster and more accurate across sessions regardless of whether stimulation was active or sham.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
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Is breath counting a valid measure of mindfulness?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
Counting breaths from 1 to 9
We instructed 120 participants to “be aware… of the movement of breath” and count their breaths from 1 to 9 repeatedly.
18-minute breath counting task
Following a 6 min resting baseline, participants counted breaths from 1 to 9 repeatedly for 18 min.
Key findings
Breath counting accuracy correlated with self-reported trait mindfulness (r = 0.20 on the MAAS and r = 0.21 on the FFMQ). Long-term meditators demonstrated significantly higher accuracy than novices, suggesting the task captures mindfulness expertise. Crucially, 4 weeks of breath counting training significantly improved accuracy and trait mindfulness while reducing mind wandering, whereas working memory training did not.
Methodology
Across multiple experiments, researchers evaluated whether counting breaths from 1 to 9 could serve as a behavioral measure of mindfulness. In Study 1, participants completed an 18-minute breath counting task. Study 3 compared 14 long-term meditators to 25 novices on breath counting accuracy. In Study 4, participants completed a 4-week training to see if breath counting selectively improves with training.
Limitations
While promising, the breath counting task is not process pure, meaning factors other than mindfulness likely influence accuracy. The study also had a relatively small sample for its randomized training trial, with only 22 participants completing the breath training and 20 completing the working memory training. Additionally, more research is needed to determine how self-judgment and negative feedback about counting errors might skew performance.
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