Mindfulness-Based Training To Improve Behavioural Health and Performance in Astronautics for Deep Space Missions

The importance of behavioral health challenges in current and future human space flight are likely to increase, along with the resulting needs for new mitigation and prevention strategies in astronautics. Mindfulness training is now seen as one of these potential countermeasures, holding transdiagnostic and transtherapeutic qualities in clinical and non-clinical applied research in real-life contexts. To discuss its potential functions mindfulness and psychological flexibility are described from an experiential perspective to showcase how they work and contribute to human behavior: mindfulness can foster contextually functional adaptation, or the opposite, contextually dysfunctional and maladaptive behaviors. This spectrum of adaptivity is commonly referred to as behavioral health. Building on this framework in contextual behavioral science and contemplative science, this paper introduces the existing efforts of mindfulness training in human space exploration. The existing research is scarce, but contains theoretical, survey-based descriptive, and experimental studies too. Results are consistent with research from other applied areas of mindfulness, for example sports and other performance scenarios, as well as military and defense, and indicate that it may be effective to increase behavioral health (resilient coping strategies, mental health, team cohesion, and performance). The utility of mindfulness training in space exploration has promising potential in BHP, and its benefits may extend beyond behavioral health and performance to potential uses in space tourism: mindfulness has the potential to facilitate and strengthen the insights gained from the overview effect. Furthermore, mindfulness training may have neuropsychological protective potential against the adverse effects of space flight. Finally, a number of important recommendations are placed to consider when implanting mindfulness training in space exploration: (1) treat mindfulness training as a process-based approach (for example Acceptance and Commitment Therapy); (2) to maximize benefits and facilitate contextually functional adaptive behaviors; (3); apply an organizational perspective, where not just astronauts, but all mission critical personnel are trained in mindfulness and psychological flexibility; (4) apply an intensive longitudinal design, and collect various kinds of data from self-reported subjective measures to objective digital and biomedical data, as well as qualitative experiential accounts too. The author stresses the potential benefits of mindfulness and psychological flexibility to be explored in more robust controlled experiments in human space flight and seeks for the means to collaborate with researchers and professional bodies and the space agencies.