You make it work for me: priming social support reduces alienating effects of short mindfulness meditation among poor self-regulators

Abstract Mindfulness meditation has become increasingly popular and research shows that it has many positive effects on psychological health. However, recent research indicates that mindfulness meditation may not benefit everybody. Specifically, short mindfulness meditation has been found to alienate poor self-regulators from their self. Our research aimed at replicating the alienating effect of mindfulness meditation among poor self-regulators (replication hypothesis) and expanding previous findings by testing whether adding social support to the mindfulness exercise would buffer the alienating effect (buffer hypothesis). According to the theory of Personality Systems Interactions (PSI), the self is defined as an extended network of implicit representations of own needs, goals, and preferences. We focused on preferences and measured the consistency in repeated preference judgements. Higher consistency indicates reliable access to own preferences, whereas lower consistency indicates alienation from own preferences and the self. In two studies ( N Study1 = 238; N Study2 = 300), we replicated that mindfulness alienated poor self-regulators (i.e., state-oriented individuals) from their self as indicated by significantly reduced consistency after a 5-minute mindfulness exercise compared to the control condition (5-minute text reading). Consistent with our buffer hypothesis, priming social support before the mindfulness exercise buffered the alienating effect as indicated by significantly increased consistency in the social mindfulness compared to the mindfulness condition. Thus, mindfulness meditation alienated poor self-regulators in its classical form but could be easily adapted to prevent alienation by priming social support. We discuss our findings within the framework of PSI theory.