Regular aerobic exercise increases dispositional mindfulness in men: A randomized controlled trial

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Highlights

  • We examine whether exercise can be used to increase dispositional mindfulness.

  • Regular aerobic exercise increases dispositional mindfulness.

  • Relaxation and a waitlist condition do not affect dispositional mindfulness.

  • Changes in dispositional mindfulness are related to changes in mental health.

Abstract

Dispositional mindfulness is a construct described as the propensity to be aware of one's actions in everyday life. Although high dispositional mindfulness has been demonstrated to be beneficial for improved mental and physical health, little is known about ways to improve dispositional mindfulness for individuals not practicing meditation or mindful exercises. The study aimed at investigating (1) whether dispositional mindfulness can also be trained by regular aerobic exercise and (2) whether changes in dispositional mindfulness are associated with changes in mental and physical health. 149 healthy men were randomly allocated to one of two 12-week interventions (aerobic exercise or relaxation training) or a waitlist control condition. Dispositional mindfulness and mental and physical health were assessed before and after the intervention by self-report questionnaires. Over the course of the intervention, increases in dispositional mindfulness occurred in the aerobic exercise group but not in the relaxation or waitlist control conditions (p = .018). Increases in dispositional mindfulness were moderately correlated with improvements in mental health. For the first time, this study shows that dispositional mindfulness can be increased through regular aerobic exercise. Future research is needed to identify how the mindfulness-enhancing potential of aerobic exercise can be used most effectively.

Introduction

In recent health-related literature, mindfulness has received considerable attention (Baer, 2003). The concept of mindfulness originated in Buddhist tradition and is defined as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn, 1994, p. 4). A variety of physiological and mental health benefits of mindfulness for clinical and nonclinical populations have been shown in earlier research (Grossman et al., 2004, Hofmann et al., 2010, Sedlmeier et al., 2012). Results indicate that mindfulness-based interventions promote health in individuals suffering from cancer, heart disease, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, psoriasis, borderline personality disorder, major depressive disorder, anxiety, and stress.

Besides the notion of mindfulness as a mental state that occurs during or subsequent to mindfulness meditation exercises, mindfulness can also be understood as a dispositional construct that is described as a basic human capacity representing the propensity to act mindfully in everyday life (Brown and Ryan, 2003, Brown et al., 2007). This means that a person with high dispositional mindfulness is more often aware of his or her actions and thoughts in contrast to a more dissociative or “auto-pilot” mode. Dispositional mindfulness can be fostered by clinical interventions such as mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) (Carmody and Baer, 2008, Kabat-Zinn, 1990) as well as by non-clinical mind-body practices such as yoga (Brisbon & Lowery, 2011), Pilates (Caldwell, Harrison, Adams, Quin, & Greeson, 2010) or tai chi (Caldwell, Emery, Harrison, & Greeson, 2011). In turn, such increases in dispositional mindfulness have been shown to lead to better psychological well-being and perceived health (Bränström et al., 2011, Carmody and Baer, 2008, Murphy et al., 2012).

Recently, movement-based mind-body practices such as yoga or Pilates, referred to as mindful exercises due to their strong focus on body awareness, have become increasingly popular for fostering mindfulness and health in everyday life. For instance, data from the 2007 National Health Interview Survey indicated that roughly 9% of the adult population of the United States engages in mindful exercises (Barnes, Bloom, & Nahin, 2008). Mindful exercises are a new category of physical exercise that are characterized by low to moderate exercise intensities executed with profound and nonjudgmental attention to breathing and proprioceptive awareness of muscles and movements (La Forge, 2005, Larkey et al., 2009). Only recently has it been suggested that mind-body practices incorporating bodily movements are particularly effective. Specifically, Carmody and Baer (2008) found that in MBSR programs, participants benefited more from the typically included movement-based component yoga than from non-movement-based components such as body scan or sitting meditation. The authors argued that it may be easier for individuals to direct mindful attention to their body when engaged in movement. This, in turn, may promote long-lasting mind-body awareness. Further, stressing the importance of movements in enhancing mindfulness, Asztalos et al. (2012) recently proposed a theory proclaiming that regular physical exercise performed in a mindful way may contribute to the development of dispositional mindfulness in individuals. They argued that repeated practice of mindful movement is likely to train individuals to experience their own movements, breathing, feelings, and thoughts, while at the same time they will learn to watch these experiences as a bystander.

Aside from mindful exercises, some researchers have raised the question whether involvement in regular physical activity per se (i.e., without explicit instructions to direct attention in a specific way to body and movements, e.g., aerobic exercise) has the potential to increase dispositional mindfulness (e.g., Kee and Wang, 2008, Salmon et al., 2010, Ulmer et al., 2010). Indeed, aerobic exercises such as swimming, cycling, or jogging share a variety of characteristics with many mindful exercises. Both types of exercise contain predictive breathing and movement patterns, are repetitive in nature, and are often characterized by an absence of competition. However, they differ from each other, because aerobic exercises are not performed with a deliberate nonjudgmental attention to body and mind (Berger and Owen, 1988, Netz and Lidor, 2003). Nevertheless, several researchers have suggested that aerobic exercise affects dispositional mindfulness, potentially through inherent body- and mind-related experiences associated with exercising or via an improved capacity to self-regulate attention. For instance, Kee and Wang (2008) suggested that involvement in physical exercise may lead to increased mindfulness through the opportunities it fosters for moment-to-moment attention. Likewise, another study contended that long-distance running, similarly to meditation practice, promotes “sustained, essentially nonjudgmental attention that can be directed at will toward a wide range of internal and external experiential cues” (Salmon et al., 2010, p. 150). However, compared with the relatively large body of research showing increases in mindfulness following mindful exercises (Brisbon and Lowery, 2011, Caldwell et al., 2011, Caldwell et al., 2010), there is very little empirical research examining the potentially positive effects of regular aerobic exercise on dispositional mindfulness.

So far, only a few cross-sectional studies have examined the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and regular physical activity (Gilbert and Waltz, 2010, Murphy et al., 2012, Roberts and Danoff-Burg, 2010, Ulmer et al., 2010). Only one study investigating 441 women via questionnaires reported no relationship between dispositional mindfulness and regular physical activity (Murphy et al., 2012). In contrast, two studies based on surveys using samples of students showed that higher levels of regular physical activity were moderately associated with higher levels of dispositional mindfulness (Gilbert and Waltz, 2010, Roberts and Danoff-Burg, 2010). Similarly, Ulmer et al. (2010) reported that YMCA exercisers who were more successful in exercising regularly over the previous year indicated higher levels of mindfulness. Generally, these results were interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that higher mindfulness leads to improved health behavior (e.g., more physical activity). However, as these studies were cross-sectional in nature, several of these authors conceded that the available data could also be interpreted as being in a reverse causal relationship. In fact, Brown and Ryan (2003)—both initially substantiating the concept of dispositional mindfulness—presumed that there is a bidirectional relationship between mindfulness and health behaviors such as physical activity. To ascertain the causal effects of regular physical activity on dispositional mindfulness, it will be necessary to conduct a randomized controlled trial with regular physical activity as the grouping variable (some receive regular physical activity, others do not) and dispositional mindfulness as the outcome parameter. To the best of our knowledge, a study like this has not been realized so far. The present investigation is an attempt to fill this gap.

In light of the above, the main purpose of this study was to investigate—by means of a 12-week randomized three-armed intervention—whether initially inactive men participating in a regular aerobic exercise program report greater increases in dispositional mindfulness than the participants of a waitlist control group or relaxation group. Furthermore, we examined on an exploratory level whether resulting changes in dispositional mindfulness were associated with changes in mental and physical health.

Section snippets

Study design

This study was part of a trial examining psychobiological effects of exercise training on psychosocial stress reactivity (for more details, see Klaperski, von Dawans, Heinrichs, & Fuchs, 2014). We conducted a randomized, controlled trial utilizing a 12-week intervention period with three groups: (1) exercise training (EG), (2) relaxation training (RG), and (3) waitlist control group (WCG). We hypothesized that (1) participants in the exercise group would show greater improvements in

Results

Table 1 summarizes the sample characteristics at T1 and T2. As may be seen in Table 1, the groups did not differ at baseline (T1) in terms of age, BMI, physical and mental health, activities of daily life, physical exercise, physical fitness, relaxation activity, and dispositional mindfulness. As expected, over the course of the intervention the participants in the exercise group increased their levels of physical exercise (though not significantly, d = 0.20) and physical fitness (d = 0.71);

Discussion

The present study examined whether participation in a regular aerobic exercise program can increase dispositional mindfulness and whether changes in dispositional mindfulness are associated with changes in measures of mental and physical health. With regard to the first research question, results of the randomized controlled trial showed that dispositional mindfulness increased significantly over the course of the 12-week intervention in the exercise group, whereas dispositional mindfulness did

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgments

We thank all those at the Institute of Sports Science at the University of Freiburg who provided support for this study, with special thanks to Julia Jäger for her assistance on this project. The authors also wish to thank Mathis Trautwein, Johannes Sperling, Joshua Marcus, and Jillian DeMair for their comments on this manuscript. This research was funded by the German Research Foundation (research grant FU458/2-1) and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

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    Present address: Institute of Sports Science, University of Basel, Birsstrasse 320 B, CH-4052 Basel, Switzerland.

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