Incorporating Mindfulness within Established Theories of Health Behavior

Abstract

Mindfulness is quickly becoming recognized as an important theoretical construct in health promotion and disease prevention research. Greeson (2009) recently evaluated the basic and clinical research on mindfulness, and the accumulated evidence from this review of the literature suggested that the cultivation of mindfulness has beneficial effects on mental, emotional, and behavioral health and well-being. The notion that mindfulness has a positive influence on health has also been supported by evidence suggesting that mindfulness-based interventions have protective influences on some physiological, psychosocial, and behavioral domains of health among both clinical and nonclinical samples comprising youth (Black, Milam, & Sussman, 2009) and adults (Brown, Ryan, & Creswell, 2007; Grossman, Niemann, Schmidt, & Walach, 2004). These empirical findings lend evidence regarding the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions on certain health outcomes; however, relatively little is known regarding the mechanisms whereby mindfulness produces change in health behavior outcomes. In this respect, little attention has been directed toward testable theoretical models underlying mindfulness and its influence on health behavior, even though some recent attention has been directed toward the integration of mindfulness and theories of mental health (Grossman et al., 2004). Thus, integrating mindfulness within existing theories of health behavior is one important next step in mindfulness research, considering the widespread application of mindfulness-based interventions in community, school, and clinic settings. To date, one known study examined mindfulness within the context of a formalized theory of health behavior (Chatzisarantis & Hagger, 2007). This prospective study found that mindfulness moderated the intention–behavior relationship within the Theory of Planned Behavior among a college student sample. According to this study, those respondents higher in trait mindfulness, as measured with the Mindful Attention Awareness scale (MAAS), were more likely to enact their behavioral intentions than less mindful respondents. The implications of this study are important, considering that strengthening the intention–behavior link is a key strategy in health promotion programming. Thus, future studies are needed to develop and rigorously test hypotheses that represent theoretical models which elucidate how mindfulness