My Research on Mindfulness in Everyday Life Covered by the Media

A research paper I published along with Adam Hanley (first author) in the journal Mindfulness has received an astounding amount of press, including coverage by the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, and television outlets like the Today Show! This deceptively simple study involved randomly assigning college students to read a passage by Thich Nhat Hanh on mindful dishwashing or a textual description of dishwashing procedures like what might be found in a home economics textbook, Then students washed a sink full of dirty dishes, and then completed state measures of mindfulness and positive and negative emotions. After controlling for differences in baseline tendencies towards mindfulness and well-being, we found that individuals who received the mindful dishwashing induction reported significantly deeper states of mindfulness, as well as some improvements in positive and negative emotions following dishwashing. Perhaps most interestingly, people who engaged in mindful dishwashing reported a slowing of perceived time (that is, they overestimated the length of time they spent washing dishes) – a finding that is consistent with research on “flow states” and other studies of mindfulness (e.g., Berkovitch-Ohana et al., 2012). As we note in the published paper, it is fascinating to observe “that a task potentially construed as unpleasant or a “chore” can be experienced as reducing nervousness and being inspirational by simply shifting one’s approach to the task and the quality of attention” (Hanley et al., 2015, p. 1101). This simple study has implications for research on mindfulness, suggesting that the informal practice of mindfulness during everyday life activities may be an important means of cultivating attention and awareness in much the same way as formal mindfulness meditation. More research is needed to outline the differences and similarities between formal and informal mindfulness practices.