Introduction
The inflammatory response triggered by persistent psychological stress has been implicated in virtually all chronic physical conditions (Cohen et al.
2007; Yusuf et al.
2004), and many mental health conditions (Garcia-Bueno et al.
2008). Enduring work-related stress is a major contributor to overall stress and meta-analyses of prospective studies indicate it is associated with a 1.4-fold increased risk of coronary heart disease (Steptoe and Kivimäki
2012). Workplace stress is also predictive of metabolic syndrome (Chandola et al.
2006) and major depressive disorder (Netterstrøm et al.
2008), and is associated with overeating, smoking, alcohol misuse, low levels of activity, poor sleep quality and social isolation (Chandola et al.
2008; Steptoe and Kivimäki
2012). The reduction of work-related stress is important for tackling stress-related health risks (Milczarek et al.
2009). Interest in the effectiveness of mindfulness-based approaches in the workplace has been growing given their potential to reduce current stress and protect against the effects of future stress (Wolever et al.
2012).
Mindfulness can be defined as a form of metacognitive monitoring of present moment experience without fixation or judgement (Kabat-Zinn
2009; Lutz et al.
2008). One’s ability to be mindful can be improved through training, and usually via an eight-week, structured group programme in which formal meditation practices are taught to foster accepting awareness of thoughts, emotions and body sensations. Sustained rehearsal of these practices appears to engender a disposition to be mindful in daily living (Chambers et al.
2009). Mindfulness training produces significantly different cardiovascular and autonomic effects than relaxation training (Ditto et al.
2006; Jain et al.
2007) and is thought to generate positive effects through distinct psychological mechanisms. The core proposed change is in the nature and function of attention (Bishop et al.
2004; Carmody
2009; Lutz et al.
2008), particularly the directing of attention and the monitoring of distracting thoughts, emotions or sensations (Jha et al.
2007; van den Hurk et al.
2010). Improved attentional control, when combined with awareness (Reb et al.
2013), is thought to be the building block for other changes pertinent to stress reduction including enhanced body awareness, emotion regulation, tolerance of negative states and de-centering (i.e. perceiving the self as an observer rather than casualty of stress experiences) (Carmody and Baer
2008; Hölzel et al.
2011). When sustained, these changes are collectively conceived of as enhanced mindfulness.
Meta-analyses of the effectiveness of mindfulness interventions on mental health and psychological distress in non-clinical populations report post-treatment summary effect sizes in the medium to large range (Chiesa and Serretti
2009; de Vibe et al.
2012; Grossman et al.
2004; Khoury et al.
2015). Variants of mindfulness interventions have been developed for implementation in organisations (e.g. Good et al.
2015; Klatt et al.
2009), and their effectiveness in reducing stress been indicated (Allen et al.
2015; Hyland et al.
2015) among working adults exposed to high occupational stress, including doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals (e.g. Bazarko et al.
2013; Irving et al.
2009; Martín-Asuero and García-Banda
2010); teachers (Emerson et al.
2017); those working in occupations with high emotional labour (Hülsheger et al.
2013); and with indices of poor mental health (Huang et al.
2015).
However, whilst several studies have reported associations between increased dispositional mindfulness and positive outcomes (e.g. Baer et al.
2012), others have shown that not all currently measurable facets of mindfulness explain the effects of interventions on well-being (e.g. Eberth and Sedlmeier
2012; Nyklicek and Kuijpers
2008). We have little understanding of what these others factors are, and for workplace interventions in particular, as most studies have focused on outcomes rather than process. Where studies of mechanisms of change exist, they have tended to focus on clinical populations, where the application of mindfulness training (e.g. to coping with pain or cancer) is likely to shape process and outcomes (e.g. Dobkin
2008; Mackenzie et al.
2007; Malpass et al.
2012). Only a handful of qualitative studies have explored the experience of mindfulness interventions for non-clinical populations, and these have relied on feedback forms (e.g. Morone et al.
2012) or have reported experiential themes rather than mechanisms (e.g. Beckman et al.
2012; Cohen-Katz et al.
2005). Mechanisms of change have been explored for healthcare professionals but these have focused on the ways mindfulness can promote patient care or prevent compassion fatigue (Irving et al.
2014; Morgan et al.
2015). Experiences of change in a non-clinical, non-healthcare workforce have not been examined; many have argued that examining such experiences could offer theoretical developments about how mindfulness-based interventions are working within a normative, stressed workforce and how the nature and form of such interventions could be enhanced (Good et al.
2015; Hyland et al.
2015; Jamieson and Tuckey
2016).
The present study thus elicited retrospective, experiential accounts from people who had taken part in a workplace mindfulness-based intervention in order to generate a data-driven, provisional model of how positive benefits were secured by them. We examined an adapted mindfulness programme available for free to the workforce of a large higher education institute (HEI) in the United Kingdom. In the UK, academic and academic-related staff have reported high levels of psychological stress (Kinman et al.
2006), reports matched by other national and international studies of HEI workforces (e.g. Tytherleigh et al.
2005; Watts and Robertson
2011).
Discussion
Based on participants’ accounts of a workplace mindfulness-based intervention, this study proposes a provisional model of change to explain how the intervention appeared to help participants secure meaningful benefits. Our proposed model is consistent in several ways with other accounts of how MBSR secures positive outcomes and it partly aligns with the MBSR curriculum in terms of first developing attention and awareness. However, as far as we are aware, this study is the first to report that early
resonance (between the programme and the person) may be an even more foundational mechanism of change, at least in workplace mindfulness programmes. Many of our participants wanted the intervention to be justifiable intellectually and from the outset. Psychoeducation components and the group were important in meeting this need, typically by representing both the psychophysiology and social views of stress in ways that made sense to them. Other participants reported a less analytic, but equally persuasive experience of resonance in the very first session, described as feeling mindfulness ‘working’. These different representations of resonance may be reflective of dual information processing models of the self, which posit that reality can be processed via an analytical-rational system and/or an intuitive-experiential system (Pashko
2016). The former is slow but conscious and the latter is quick but unconscious and pre-linguistic, and it has been proposed that people vary in their preference for each (Epstein et al.
1996; also described as a “need for cognition”; Norris and Epstein
2011). Our data suggested that intervention participants may come with differing processing preferences and that the ability of MBSR-based interventions to meet such individual differences in the first session may be important to securing subsequent benefits.
The second stage of
legitimising self-care captured participants’ need to justify active care of their mental health. Although
legitimising self-care is presented in the model as an early experience foundational to later benefits, it was an ongoing process for many participants. We present it as a discrete early stage as it was an early experience reported by most participants and appeared to be a necessary building block for subsequent experiences. A sense of reluctance and/or guilt for engaging in self-care has been reported in many mindfulness studies in diverse contexts and countries (Beckman et al.
2012; Irving et al.
2014; Morgan et al.
2015). The modelling of self-care in the group appeared to help our study participants. Group effects in MBSR-based interventions are expected, and reported, as vicarious learning, normalisation, cohesion, empathy, compassion and reduced professional isolation, and are therapeutic in stress reduction in and of themselves (e.g. Beckman et al.
2012; Dobkin
2008; MacKenzie et al.
2007). Irving et al.’s (
2014) model of change, based on healthcare practitioners, similarly positioned group experiences as an intervening factor, whereby peer endorsement of the intervention’s application to working life improved the intervention’s credibility and acceptance. Notably, our participants also reported that it was the organisation’s provision of free and easy access to the intervention, and thereby its representation of support for staff well-being, which also strongly legitimised their participation. Thus, the way the intervention came to have positive effects appeared, at a foundational level, to be bound up with its implementation in the workplace. There is some evidence that, compared to out of hours delivery (e.g. van Berkel et al.
2014), providing mindfulness for stress reduction in the workplace during working hours may be particularly beneficial for a stressed workforce (Duchemin et al.
2015; Horner et al.
2014; Huang et al.
2015). Thus, given the proposed two first stages of change, the present study’s findings pose new questions about how best to support the resonance of mindfulness- based interventions with members of a general workforce who may benefit from such programmes but who may be hard-to-reach because of scepticism about mindfulness and/or the benefit of self-care and preventative action.
In our provisional model,
legitimising self-care directly fosters
awareness. This is different to Irving et al.’s (
2014) model whereby self-care was positioned as an outcome rather than also as an intervening stage. Additionally, although attention is typically dominant in mindfulness models of change, participants in our study talked primarily about awareness (of self) rather than attention; thus, attention does not appear explicitly in our model. However, attention and awareness are interdependent, with attention driving an experience of awareness, and awareness informing attention (or lack of it), and it is possible that awareness was simply a more usable construct for participants, as also noted in Irving et al.’s study (
2014). Improved self-awareness is well established as an outcome of, and mediator of change in, mindfulness programmes (e.g. Morone et al.
2012). Participants’ accounts in this study resonate with existing findings that now being able to “see what was happening” in their bodies, thoughts and emotions facilitated change, suggesting that their baseline levels of self-awareness were low. The fourth stage of change,
Detection-Choice-Opportunity, represents the ways in which this increased awareness of, and ability to detect changes in stress physiology (also termed ‘body awareness’; Hölzel et al.
2011) and emotional or cognitive states at work, provides an opportunity for people to alter their relationship with those states, and subsequently makes available the prospect of engaging in alternative cognitive, affective or behavioural responses. Thus, awareness of inner experiences appeared to be an essential precursor to further change and benefits.
The intention to increase self-awareness in order to reduce stress is not unique to mindfulness interventions. Psychodynamic approaches, for example, cultivate an “observing self” or meta-awareness (Schooler et al.
2011) to defuse automatic thinking or feeling in order to interrupt the stress response (Williams
2010). What may be unique to mindfulness training is the practice of a particular attitudinal response to awareness, as reported by our participants. Practising new ways of relating to conscious experience is fundamental in mindfulness training and can include attitudinal change (e.g. curiosity, kindness and acceptance; Keng et al.
2012), as well as cognitive re-orientation (e.g. distancing, de-centering and re-perceiving; Shapiro et al.
2006). These new ways of encountering experience are often taken up and interpreted by participants as new “coping strategies” (Irving et al.
2014; Morone et al.
2012). As argued elsewhere, when awareness is coupled with these kinds of strategies, de-automatisation is more likely (Kang et al.
2013; Reb et al.
2013). This refers to the minimisation of automatic, largely unconscious processes (driven by habit or heuristics) to inform the interpretation of experience. This is represented in our model in terms of
Detection-Choice-Opportunity, as this was the way in which participants operationalised the construct. Consistent with other qualitative studies, our findings show that mindfulness training and application to daily work life, weakens the automaticity of and engagement in habitual, negative ways of experiencing and responding to stress, increases people’s resources to cope and supports a faster return to baseline (Cohen-Katz et al.
2005; Irving et al.
2014; Morone et al.
2008,
2012).
Upward spiralling is the fifth proposed stage of change, supported by participants’ experimentation with “being mindful” in real world situations. Our provisional model proposes that these positive gain cycles are influenced by
awareness and
self-care. In addition, the intervention’s encouragement, through the pleasant experiences exercise and more generally, to “bring positive experience into higher resolution” appeared to help in that, by broadening people’s attention to good moments, stress burden decreased. Such ways of altering day-to-day appraisals appear similar to the notion of benefit-finding (e.g. Garland et al.
2011), itself associated with changes in stress physiology (Bower et al.
2008). Upward spiralling is represented in other models of mindfulness wherein mindful coping is proposed to facilitate positive psychological processes that build resilience (e.g. Fredrickson and Losada
2005; Garland et al.
2011). Although tentative, their work suggested that mindfulness operates by strengthening positive cognitive-emotional processes rather than by disrupting negative ones (e.g. catastrophizing). Our model only partly concurs with this proposition as
awareness and
self-care appear to both inculcate positive, and disrupt negative, cognitive-emotional processes. For example, participants reported dynamic processes whereby, as awareness became more routine, so did self-care. They reported being more able to interrupt a stress experience and replace it with a beneficial activity (such as break-taking or exercise), pointing to a possible mechanism by which mindfulness training may come to build resilience to stress-related mental health difficulties. Other evidence suggests that transitory states of mindfulness, when repeatedly induced every day, may engender trait or dispositional mindfulness (Chambers et al.
2009; Garland et al.
2010), which would manifest as a new way of coping with stress. Of course, that many participants attended the intervention for stress reduction is likely to have influenced their attention to the disruption of negative cognitive-emotional processes.
Recovering agency refers to participants’ accounts of increased control compared to their pre-intervention state of feeling overwhelmed and without coping resources. Clinical studies often report increased self-control as an outcome of mindfulness training (Dobkin
2008; MacKenzie et al.
2007), and it is implicated in Irving et al.’s (
2014) model as part of strategies and consequences. Recovering agency was talked about by participants more than any other stage of change, and it was expressed as evolving over time, supported by
detection-choice-opportunity and
upward spiralling. Many participants talked of now having “toolkits” (a common description following MBSR, e.g. Morone et al.
2012) for improving working practices and managing stress triggers and stressful episodes. Their accounts reflect key features of the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory whereby psychological health is theorised to require a strong armamentarium of social and personal resources, the input-output balance of which must be vigilantly managed (Halbesleben et al.
2014). Our study showed that knowing one has a mindful “toolkit” is perceived as a psychological asset (e.g. see Youssef and Luthans
2007). Although some studies failed to find an effect of mindfulness interventions on job control (when assessed via short standardised measures; e.g. Huang et al.
2015), in interview, our participants reported feeling new equipped and able to apply mindful practices and principles to challenges in working life.
At the time of interview, most participants reported that mindfulness training had engendered a sense of being s
ettled in the self: at ease in the present. That mindfulness brings about a sense of peace, calm, well-being and even serenity is well documented (e.g. Liu et al.
2015; Morone et al.
2012), yet little empirical work exists on the mechanisms by which mindfulness practice fosters this outcome in particular. Our findings suggest that a sense of peace was influenced by being settled in who they are, and by practising acceptance of the way things are. Acceptance of self and experience is an intended outcome of mindfulness training, and seems important to a sense of well-being, a proposition supported by Xu et al.’s (
2015) study in which the positive association between mindfulness and peace of mind was mediated by self-acceptance. It has been argued that equanimity (a concept related to acceptance), defined as an even-minded mental state toward all experiences, internal and external and regardless of their valence (Desbordes et al.
2014) can, over time, become an effective counter to allostatic load following chronic stress (Karatsoreos and McEwen
2011).
Overall, our provisional model proposes stages of changes that may be experienced by people on an adapted workplace mindfulness-based intervention for stress reduction. The proposed stages of change point to experiences not routinely measured in mindfulness interventions, including the importance of early engagement and resonance, intentions for self-care, recovery of agency and a sense of peace. Notably, our findings support Good et al.’s (
2015) hypotheses of how mindfulness might promote well-being at work, including the de-automatization of potentially toxic responses (seen in
detection-choice-opportunity), increased confidence in dealing with challenging workplace situations (seen in
recovering agency) and greater experience of positive emotions (seen in
upward spiralling). In addition, whilst the present study cannot constitute an analysis of mindful emotion regulation, our data point to the possible unique contributions of group- and workplace MBIs here. Mindful emotion regulation has typically been conceived of as a principally internal process (Chambers et al.
2009; Hölzel et al.
2011). However, our findings suggest relational and organisational influences on early stage emotion regulation processes. Specifically, psychoeducation and the effect of the group appeared to facilitate intellectual resonance and normalisation of the stress response, which in turn helped people to re-frame their stress experience as modifiable. In addition, the personal and organisational legitimisation of self-care for stress management appeared foundational for investment in mindful practice. Together, these features appeared to help establish openness to new, mindful ways of relating to stressful emotions and thoughts. Such ways of thinking appear different to the intrasubjective emotion regulation process of re-appraisal often used in connection with mindfulness (e.g. Hölzel et al.
2011). However, participants’ foregrounding of the role of awareness and detection does support the central role of attention in emotion regulation established elsewhere (Good et al.
2015; Reb et al.
2013), and staying present with strong feelings and replacing reacting with intentional responding may correspond to exposure and extinction as described by Hölzel et al. (
2011). Furthermore, upward spiralling, the recovery of self-agency and increased settled sense of self may relate to reconsolidation (Hölzel et al.
2011).
The proposed model may direct further examination of possible mechanisms of change. For example: how can early resonance be promoted to increase the intervention’s reach to those who are at risk of stress-related illness but unlikely to self-refer?; what can be done at an organisational level to foster sustained legitimisation of self-care for the prevention of stress-related outcomes?; and does the self-care endorsed in mindfulness-based interventions engender the uptake of other health promoting behaviours? Additional questions remain about the preventative power of mindfulness training. Although we know of participants’ frustrations and challenges in mindfulness training (e.g. Moss et al.
2008), future research should aim to identify why people might find it difficult to apply mindfulness training in the workplace, and whether ongoing mindfulness meditation is pivotal to sustained changes in stress experience. In addition, as our data prohibited possible explanations for the differing end state of participants, future studies could use our model to examine possible mediators and moderators of this, for example, whether the likelihood of establishing a consistent mindfulness practice is predicted by strong resonance during the intervention.
Limitations
We evaluated the study against Tracy’s (
2010) eight criteria for excellence in qualitative research and rated it high in terms of being (i) a worthy topic, (ii) credible, (iii) having resonance, (iv) a significant contribution, (v) coherent and (vi) ethical; and moderately well on (vi) richness and rigour (given the moderate sample size). As contemporary theory of knowledge disputes the possibility of a neutral observer, Tracey’s final criterion (viii), reflexivity and transparency, invites researchers to consider their influence on data generation and analysis, appreciating that we can only ever be partially conscious of this (Malterud
2001). The first three authors are likely to have been sensitised to the data in particular ways as SR designed and delivered the intervention and SHJ and GK were participants on the pilot delivery of the intervention. Whilst this familiarity with the intervention helped in contextualising participants’ accounts, it is possible that our view of mindfulness as beneficial, and as involving changes over time, meant we were likely to be particularly alert to similar experiences reported by participants. Given this closeness to the data, we assigned a fourth independent researcher (RSE) who was without connection to the intervention, to conduct the interviews and first-stage data analysis (i.e. coding to categories). Additionally, we sought to manage our influence on data analysis through constant grounding in the data and collective group discussions of emerging analytic thoughts. Barry et al. (
1999) have argued that a team can improve the rigour of qualitative analysis and foster conceptual thinking compared to individuals working alone; our experiences resonated with this in that having four people involved in analysis precluded one dominant orientation to the data and prompted a good level of checking with the data to enable consensus.
A number of limitations to this study should be noted. Although there are multiple perspectives on the validity of retrospective reports (Schwarz and Sudman
2012) and the ontological positions available in relation to them (King and Horrocks
2010), accounts of the past can generate useful insights into the nature and meaning of experience for people. The retrospective narratives produced via interviews in the present study are likely to have involved recollection, reconstruction and co-construction. Thus, the proposed model of change is a highly subjective and probably incomplete one—although we were nonetheless able to identify patterns across participants. Furthermore, participants varied in the time since programme completion and interview participation; whilst we drew only on aspects of the interview data which clearly pertained to experiences on the programme (and often checked this was what participants were referring to), it is possible that participants infused their recollection of the programme with practices and benefits they had in fact secured post-programme. In addition, participants had opted into both the programme and to the interview study, and it is likely participants were positively biased. Thus, our proposed model represents a framework of change for a specific, motivated population for whom mindfulness was felt to “work” over a period of time. The model should be examined in diverse workforces to test its validity as other workforces, working under different conditions, stressors and resources may experience different mechanisms of change. As one of our participants reported, a HEI environment is “hypercritical, like that sort of critical ability is so integral to research and to teaching, and you, I mean I then apply that to every aspect of my life and, and myself” (15). Thus, workplace mindfulness programmes might work differently depending on the dominant workplace climates and concerns. In addition, future studies could use our model to examine possible mediators and moderators of end states, for example, whether the likelihood of establishing a consistent mindfulness practice is predicted by strong resonance during the intervention. Finally, whilst this study involved participants who had completed the intervention up to 16 months previously, there remains a need for substantially longer follow-up periods to determine if individual level changes are sufficiently robust on return to the workplace context (which remains unchanged) and its indigenous stressors.