The Importance Of Mindfulness Mental Health Relationship,...

Research around the construct of mindfulness has exploded in the past few decades. Even though mindfulness is increasingly being incorporated in many modern day psychotherapeutic approaches and daily lives, it is still unclear as to how and why it has its many beneficial effects on a range of physical and psychological health variables. This study was undertaken to explore two possible mediators of the mindfulness-mental health relationship, namely decentering and nonattachment. Because of the nascent stage of this research and previous mixed findings obtained in the area, the authors took a more exploratory approach in investigating this mediation. As hypothesized, mindfulness was significantly related to lower levels of depression, anxiety and stress in a population of college students and adults, consistent with a host of previous research (Baer et al., 2006; Brown Ryan, 2003). Decentering means to take an objective perspective of one’s life, as opposed to a subjective one, and to be able to notice the process and context of thinking and gain psychological distance from one’s thoughts, feelings and emotions. In the present study, higher levels of decentering were linked to lower levels of psychological distress (depression, anxiety, stress), consistent with prior research (Fresco et al., 2007; Hayes-Skelton Graham, 2013; McCracken et al., 2013; Pearson et al., 2014; Sauer Baer, 2010). Nonattachment is the psychological quality of deriving happiness independently of