Mindfulness is like a superpower. It helps us focus on what’s happening right now and accept it without getting upset or worried. It means paying close attention to our thoughts, feelings, and what our body is telling us.
A recent online study conducted in the United Kingdom revealed that practising mindfulness for a short amount of time (just 15 minutes per day for two weeks) can help people become more open to information that may cause them anxiety or regret. But what does the latter part mean?
Basically, avoiding information that could have negative outcomes, even if it’s easily accessible, is a common bias in how people make decisions. This bias goes against the goal of making sound choices. Consequently, researchers, especially in the management field, have dedicated considerable efforts. What for? To finding ways to reduce this bias in information avoidance. That’s where mindfulness helps!
A Play Of Mindfulness!
To investigate the potential of mindfulness training in reducing information avoidance, researcher Elliott Ash and his team conducted an experiment involving 261 participants recruited through the Prolific platform.
To be part of the study, all participants needed to be from the United Kingdom and have a history of participating in previous studies on Prolific. Additionally, they were specifically chosen not to have any meditation experience. The participants in the study were divided randomly into two groups.
One group received mindfulness training, while the other group received a music intervention. For the mindfulness group, participants practised a 15-minute mindfulness session each day for a period of two weeks. At the start of the study, there were no notable differences between the two groups. In terms of information avoidance, mindfulness, and stress levels.
In the music intervention group, participants listened to calming music led by the same instructor. The intervention sessions were pre-recorded, allowing participants to choose a convenient time to engage with them online.
Then What Changed?
Comparing the results after the interventions, the researchers found that those who underwent mindfulness training were less likely to avoid such information compared to those who received the music intervention. Training also increased participants’ mindfulness levels.
The evidence they gathered suggests that individuals who frequently engage in mindful states have an improved capacity to confront potentially negative, yet valuable, information about themselves and the world.
Additional data suggest that the benefits of mindfulness on emotion regulation (particularly, non-reaction to emotions) may be a potential mechanism through which this increased tolerance for information works. Their work makes an essential contribution to the development of methods to reduce information avoidance.
