The 25 Benefits of Mindfulness According to Research

For many, mindfulness is overlooked as self-help mumbo jumbo that only new-age hippies indulge in.

But, the reality is that over 4,000 scholarly articles on the topic suggests that we should be taking mindfulness much more seriously. As a result, we are starting to see organizations such as Google, Aetna, mayo Clinic, and the U.S. Army adopt mindfulness training.

(If you aren’t sure what mindfulness is, see my prior blog post: What is Mindfulness and What are its Primary Benefits? Also, see the next two posts in this series:

• Post #3: 6 Ways to Strengthen Your Mindfulness Muscles

• Post #4: To Become Mindful, You Must Know Your Mindsets)

What about you? Why should you start focusing on mindfulness?

Here are 25 benefits of mindfulness according to research:

1. Reduces mind wandering

2. Helps with directing attention amid competing demands

3. Reduces attentional resources to process distractions

4. Improves one’s abilities to process and respond to novel information

5. Improves one’s creativity, divergent and convergent thinking, and problem solving

6. Helps one not react strongly to negative stressors and better cope with stress

7. Helps one respond more positively to goal or constructive feedback

8. Shortens the time it takes for negative emotions to dissipate

9. Helps create a healthy psychological distance from one’s work

10. Helps one better process information and behave more rationally

11. Helps one carry more positive emotional tones

12. Helps one develop more effective relationships with others

13. Helps one have higher communication quality (listening, increased awareness, and less evaluative judgments)

14. Helps one have greater empathy, compassion, and respect

15. Helps one more effectively deal with and resolve conflict

16. Helps one read the environment more accurately and less subject to the potential distortions of internal biases

17. Helps one create a more psychologically safe environment

18. Helps one be more satisfied with their job

19. Helps one be more authentic and optimistic

20. Helps one be more resilient when facing adversity, conflict, or failure

21. Helps one be more comfortable with change

22. Helps one be more intentional about their work

23. Helps one have more autonomous motivation (driven to pursue activities perceived as being important, valued, and/or enjoyable)

24. Helps one have higher job performance

25. Helps one have engage in more ethical behaviors, more prosocial behaviors, and less deviant behaviors

Who wouldn’t want more of these benefits for themselves and those that they live and work with?

Mindfulness is what experts consider to be a “root skill.” A root skill is a skill that, if improved, will benefit a variety of aspects of our lives including our life, work, leadership, relationships, etc.

So, if you want to upgrade your life in any of these areas, it appears that focusing on improving our mindfulness should be a no-brainer.

Thus, in my next blog post, that is what I will be focusing on.

If you would like to read the scholarly articles that I used to compile these 25 benefits, click here and here.

To get a jump start on improving your mindfulness, you can awaken to your mindsets that drive your automaticity with this FREE personal mindset assessment: