Topic
Mindfulness research, explained
12 open-access mindfulness studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Do women and men get different benefits from meditation training?
After a semester of meditation classes, women's negative mood dropped while men's did not, even though both improved in mindfulness and self-compassion.
- Do different types of meditation train different mental skills?
Different meditation practices target and improve distinct mental capacities—such as attention, compassion, or perspective-taking—rather than producing a single, uniform effect.
- 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.
- Does mindfulness training help college rowers sleep and perform?
Female college rowers who took a mindfulness course reported better well-being, sleep and coping, and rowed a test distance faster, while a comparison group of teammates did not show these changes.
- Does meditation training improve young children's attention?
Young schoolchildren who did an 8-week meditation programme were rated by their teacher as less inattentive afterwards, an improvement not seen in a class that spent the same time reading and discussing a book about emotions.
- Does time feel slower to experienced meditators?
Experienced mindfulness meditators felt that time passes more slowly and that recent weeks lasted longer, yet they were no more accurate than non-meditators at lab timing tasks.
- Did an online mindfulness course help people cope with lockdown?
People who took an online mindfulness course during the first COVID-19 lockdown reported less stress and anxiety and better emotion regulation than people who did not, and the gains lasted at least a month.
- Does mindfulness training make thinking more flexible, and how?
An eight-week mindfulness course made stressed adults more cognitively flexible than a waitlist group, and this benefit ran through learning not to react to their own thoughts and feelings.
- Does 8 weeks of mindfulness change how people plan ahead mentally?
Mindfulness training raised self-reported mindfulness, but only hinted at a shift toward more anticipatory (proactive) cognitive control, with no reliable group-by-time effect.
- Does coloring a mandala actually make you more mindful?
Coloring a mandala was no more mindful or calming than free drawing, but adding spoken mindfulness guidance reduced anxiety, and increased mindfulness only in people who liked the guidance.
- Does being mindful and calm boost your brainpower?
People with high mindfulness and low anxiety perform better on visual memory and attention tests than those with low mindfulness and high anxiety.
- Does mindfulness training help you let go of old mental sets?
After a six-week mindfulness course, people showed a cleaner sign of actively suppressing tasks they had just abandoned, while a waiting-list group did not, and a memory-tagging measure was unaffected.