Short Mindfulness Meditations During Breaks and After Work in Everyday Nursing Care: A Simple Strategy for Promoting Daily Recovery, Mood, and Attention?

Background: Nurses experience high job demands, which makes recovery particularly necessary to maintain well-being and performance. However, these demands also make recovery challenging. Short mindfulness meditations could potentially help alleviate this paradox.

Methods: Two ecological momentary intervention studies were conducted among geriatric nurses (Study 1: break study) and hospital nurses (Study 2: after-work study) to investigate whether short audio-guided mindfulness meditations are beneficial for recovery during breaks and psychological detachment after work. Furthermore, break recovery and after-work detachment were examined as mediators of the associations between mindfulness meditations and after-break/after-sleep mood and attention after respective recovery periods. Multilevel path models were based on a sample of 38 nurses and 208 after-break surveys in the break study and 26 nurses and 192 after-sleep surveys in the after-work study.

Results: Compared to breaks spent as usual, breaks that incorporated short mindfulness meditations were associated with higher break recovery, which mediated the positive associations between mindful breaks and after-break calmness, valence, and energetic arousal. Only with certain constraints did mindfulness meditations predict a lower rate of attention failures. In the after-work study, short mindfulness meditations were positively related to psychological detachment, which mediated the positive associations between the intervention and after-sleep valence and calmness.

Conclusion/application to practice: Both pilot studies showed that short mindfulness meditations aid in recovery among nurses. However, to fully utilize the advantages of recovery-promoting breaks, structural changes are necessary to ensure that breaks of an appropriate duration are consistently implemented.