Abstract
Mindfulness has primarily been researched as the psychological change that meditates the relationship between meditation and its many positive outcomes. Mindfulness is made up of five facets including; observing, describing, acting with awareness, non-judging of inner experience, and non-reactivity to inner experience. Mindfulness exists as a dispositional individual difference in individuals whether they meditate or not and can be taught through certain activities that increase mindfulness. The present study asks the question of whether or not there are meaningful associations between how we spend our time, and levels of mindfulness. We hypothesized that activities that promote attentional control such as meditation, yoga, tai chi, listening to music, reading, and playing a musical instrument will be associated with higher levels of mindfulness, while activities that are distracting such as cell phone usage, texting, and social media use will be associated with decreased levels of mindfulness. This talk will present our findings.
