Mindfulness Passes the Stress Test: Attenuation of Behavioral Markers of Mind Wandering During Acute Stress
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Mindfulness Passes the Stress Test: Attenuation of Behavioral Markers of Mind Wandering During Acute Stress Frederikke Piil 1 & Johanne Lundager Axelsen 1 & Walter Staiano 2 & Ulrich Kirk 1 Received: 26 June 2020 / Accepted: 22 September 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Objective Recent studies illustrate that lapses of attention and mind wandering severely hinder performance on tasks which require cognitive function during acute stress. Recent studies provide support that mindfulness training enables stress-reduction and enhancement of cognitive control. However, it is not yet clear if mindfulness can mediate the impact of acute stress on cognitive performance. Because of this, the main aim of this study was to clarify if mindfulness can successfully mediate the relationship between cognitive performance and stress. Method The sample consisted of staff and students from a local university (N = 48), where 26 practiced mindfulness for 4 weeks, while the remaining 22 participants practiced NeuroNation as an active control training. We measured mind wandering at baseline across the two groups and after completion of the interventions (30 days) using the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) and administered questionnaires regarding mindfulness and stress. The acute stressful state was achieved using the cold pressor test (CPT). Results The mindfulness intervention significantly uncoupled the relationship between cognitive performance and acute stress, as well as enhanced self-reported dispositional mindfulness. These changes were not present in the active control group. Conclusion The implications of these findings suggest that mindfulness may be employed as way to dampen the impact of acute stressors on cognitive performance. Keywords Mindfulness . Cold pressor task . Stress . Mind wandering
Introduction Lapses of the mind are common, but costly in a performancebased culture (Jha, Morrison, Parker & Stanley 2017; Jha et al. 2015), where the demands are ever-rising (Kabat-Zinn 2012). Executive functioning is necessary for consistent, efficient, and productive performance, and lapses of attention are detrimental across performance-based domains (Jha et al. 2015; Feldman et al. 2016). This issue is especially relevant, since the more demands that are placed on the executive functioning, the more Frederikke Piil and Johanne Lundager Axelsen contributed equally to this work. * Ulrich Kirk [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, University of Southern Denmark, 5230 Odense, Denmark
2
Department of Physical Education and Sport, University of Valencia, 46010 Valencia, Valencia, Spain
likely lapses of attention becomes (Jha et al. 2017). This means that when demand rise and stress occurs, executive functioning will deteriorate, and the margin of error will grow. As a consequence it enforces a loop, where the bigger the need, the fewer the resources, or in other words when we need executive functions the most is when they are most vulnerable (Feldman et al. 2016). These
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