Mindfully missing myself: Induced mindfulness causes alienation among poor self-regulators

Consistent with the popularity of mindfulness, a vast amount of research shows positive outcomes of mindfulness also in terms of getting closer to one’s ‘self’. Nevertheless, a budding different line of research also points out to the other side of this coin. Mindfulness may actually not benefit every person. In our current research, we hypothesized that mindfulness promotes alienation in people with high state orientation (i.e. low self-regulatory abilities). In two studies (N1 = 126; N2 = 108), participants were randomly assigned to either a mindfulness (five-minute audio with mindfulness induction) or control group (five-minute text-reading phase). Alienation was operationalized as lower reliability (retest stability) in preference ratings and lower tendency to adopt intrinsic over extrinsic goals. The results showed that among state-oriented participants, the mindfulness exercise led to a significantly lower stability in repeated preference ratings (Study 1) and lower adoption of intrinsic over extrinsic goals (Study 2) compared to the control condition. These alienating effects were absent in action-oriented participants. Results suggest that mindfulness training may alienate psychologically vulnerable population from their ‘self’ and hamper access to spontaneous preferences and deeper intrinsic goals.