Effect on Well-Being from an Online Mindfulness Intervention: “Mindful in May”

Mindfulness has been shown to improve mental health and well-being both in clinical populations and in healthy controls. However, while most mindfulness interventions have been assessed in a research context, demonstrating efficacy, the majority of mindfulness interventions in the public sphere are not assessed, and there has been little research examining the effectiveness of these interventions in the public context. As such, this study explored whether a public online mindfulness intervention providing 10-min daily guided meditations was associated with improvements in well-being, and whether these improvements were related to the number of days participants practiced mindfulness meditation. Two hundred and nineteen participants took part in the study. Participants were aged 22–75 (mean age 44.31, SD 12.40), and the majority of participants were female (199, 16.16%). The majority of participants undertook mindfulness practice on 25+ days (126 respondents of 219; 57.53%). Participants completed both baseline and post-intervention assessments of perceived stress, positive and negative affect, mindfulness, flourishing, and self-compassion. Results indicated that all measures improved from baseline to post-intervention and that number of days practiced predicted increased mindfulness, and increased mindfulness predicted improvements in positive affect. These results suggest that online mindfulness interventions may be effective at improving mental health in the general population.