Mindfulness and Signature Strengths on the Journey to Well-Being
In today’s day in age, social pressures, standards and ideas of success perpetrated by social media and mainstream culture can make it seem like happiness and well-being is something that exists externally, something to seek, to strive for and will be attained once one embodies the societally-imposed measures of success. Amidst the pandemic, depressive symptoms in American adults have escalated from 8.5% to an alarming 32.8% according to an article published by The Lancet Journal (Ettman et al, 2021.) The current mental health crisis illustrates the need for increased wellness practices and awareness amongst individuals, which would then have a positive impact on societal wellbeing. It is imperative that the idea of success and happiness is recontextualized to become a journey into the self and balance, rather than a journey to attain something external or material, and it all begins with mindfulness and attention. A balance between hedonic (what makes life pleasant) and eudaimonic (what gives purpose and meaning to life) well-being, embodying and expressing strengths, and self-regulation, mindfulness are all imperative into developing individual and societal well-being.
The power of attention and presence is incredibly important to well-being, and a crucial step to being an active participant in one's own life. An antidote to mindlessness, mindfulness involves the awareness and witnessing of one’s physical, cognitive, and emotional states and can be exercised through breathing techniques, guided visualizations, and observing these states without interpretation and judgment. Lack of engagement and mindlessness are all too common in today’s world, a Harvard cellphone study showed the prominence of mind-wandering, which occurred in 46.9% of the samples, regardless of the nature of the activity. The study also showed how being cognitively engaged during a neutral activity, will contribute to happiness more than mind-wandering into a neutral mental place.
A concept originally derived from Buddhism, mindfulness meditation has now become a popularized psychotherapy and wellness practice. In her book, How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind, Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist teacher writes “Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.”
Given that “mindfulness meditation” is a complex construct, it does not pertain to a single universalized definition . While definitions might vary and can encompass a wide array of practices and techniques which involve self-regulation, they are anchored in the ability to witness oneself leading to increased awareness of actions, thoughts, and sensations (Van Dam et al, 2016) l). Mindfulness meditation techniques are vast, and can include an array of exercises like body scans, guided breathwork, observing breath, or observing thoughts. The MAT model of mindfulness proposes a comprehensive open-ended structure that includes attention monitoring, and non-judgemental acceptance of thoughts and experiences. Nevertheless, beyond the specific technique, the benefits of the practice holistically remain somewhat consistent: including but not limited to stress mitigation, increased attention and engagement, increased discernment, and the ability to break away from habit. (Davidson and Kaszniak, 2015).
A study that assigned college students to either a nutrition class or a meditation class, showed the increase of cognitive control and skill, showing promise in how meditation can train attention. This is important in the efficiency of a society and gives context how we could “work smarter” instead of “work harder”. Emotionally, meditation can aid in emotional hardship, as a study that followed breast cancer patients for 8 weeks showed increased emotional well-being than those in the control group, which shows that mindfulness can help mitigate negative emotions and contributes to resilience. With increased meditation throughout society, people could endure hardship with greater ease, and cultivate well-being, which could help with the mental health crisis relevant to the pandemic.
Additionally, the practice of meditation, and mindfulness in general, is imperative for individuals as it allows them to connect with the agency they have over their own mental state by witnessing and accepting the flow of emotions and their own nature, without self-judgment and evaluation, which lies at the root of detrimental self-talk and lack of self-esteem.
Awareness is important, as it allows humans to understand their emotions, purpose, and place in the world, which are queues and indicatives of danger or pleasure. According to the Functional Theory of Emotions, emotions prepare us to act in accordance to our stimuli. For example, fear can indicate that one needs to escape a dangerous situation, guilt from hurting a loved one might indicate that one needs to make amends and apologize.
Understanding our own strengths and expressing them fosters eudaimonic well being, meaning it contributes to the purpose of our life. We need awareness to understand our character and virtues, which relate to wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendenment, which indicate to be universal. These virtues are shown all over the world, as the Biswas- Diener study showed that these traits were esteemed in college students in Illinois, in the Masai people in Kenya, and in the Inughit people of Greenland. Understanding these strengths and how they relate to the individual, and practicing them, as philosopher Aristotle would call it, virtue in action, improves well-being. A study conducted by Proyer et al (2012) which followed a 5 week intervention and assigned individuals to use their individual signature strengths showed improvements in well-being versus no improvements for the control group. Using one’s strengths also contributes to the workplace and leads to happier employees. A case study that evaluated Fabrick CAT, a company which invested $500,000 to “improve worker engagement” by fostering individual strength expression through team job crafting, saw a return of $3 million in profits. Increased attention and cultivation of individual strengths in the workplace not only increases worker wellbeing, but company profit. Without awareness, we wouldn't be able to detect our strengths nor derive meaning from life.
Mindfulness is the regulation of awareness, it allows the witnessing of emotions, rather than emotions “taking over” and leading people to be “bullied” by their own mind, or fall into negative self-awareness loops. Without taking agency of one’s self awareness through mindfulness, acceptance and consciously intentioning a positive inner dialogue, this awareness can be incredibly destructive as it fosters comparison to imposed standards. Without a grounding practice, the brain wanders off into spontaneous thought patterns that are often rooted on comparing one’s identity to imposed self-standards. Although reframing standards plays an important role, the acceptance that comes through mindfulness serves as an antidote to the interruption self-awareness can have in even automatic behaviors.
Increased self-awareness without a solid mindfulness practice can lead to individuals to “choke under pressure”. An article by R F Baumeister in 1984 exemplified 6 experiments that showed that “pressure increases the conscious attention to the performer's own process of performance and that this increased conscious attention disrupts the automatic or overlearned nature of the execution”. These experiments also showed how those with low dispositional self- consciousness, meaning that those who were low in their reflection tendencies and ability to witness their own psychological processes, were more likely to “choke under pressure”.
Mindfulness allows individuals to tune into the self and the individual yearnings, as well as work through trauma. Much of today’s society escapes self- awareness and avoids intimacy with one’s internal world, filling the void with distractions and materialism. Self-awareness can be incredibly intimidating and uncomfortable for those who have repressed emotions and trauma as without practice in mastering thoughts, the mind wanders into shame and negative spirals. A study by Wilson et al (2014) showed the extent of uncomfort, as it showed that when left alone with thoughts for 15 minutes in a room with a self-administered shock button 70% of men and 25% of women chose to distract themselves from their thoughts by pressing the button. Thus, acceptance and embrace of the internal world, cognitively, trains the mind to activate the attention network (the part of the brain responsible for engagement and present moment) and inhibits the default mode network (the part of the brain that is responsible for rumination, is self-referential, and spirals into the past and future).
Mindfulness lays the foundation for increased attention, presence and engagement, creates improved mental habits, and fosters self-acceptance and self love. On the individual level, people can enjoy the present moment through increased engagement, make better use of their time, and make more conscious decisions. Societally, individuals can be more engaged and productive in their jobs, connections, and foster a more emotionally, mentally, and environmentally conscious world.
Baumeister RF. Choking under pressure: self-consciousness and paradoxical effects of incentives on skillful performance. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1984 Mar;46(3):610-20. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.46.3.610. PMID: 6707866.
Chodron, P. (2022). How to meditate: A practical guide to making friends with your mind. Sounds True.
Davidson, R. J., & Kaszniak, A. W. (2015). Conceptual and methodological issues in research on mindfulness and meditation. The American psychologist, 70(7), 581–592. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039512
Ettman, C. K., Cohen, G. H., Abdalla, S. M., Sampson, L., Trinquart, L., Castrucci, B. C., Bork, R. H., Clark, M. A., Wilson, I., Vivier, P. M., & Galea, S. (2022). Persistent depressive symptoms during COVID-19: A national, population-representative, Longitudinal Study of U.S. adults. The Lancet Regional Health - Americas, 5, 100091. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lana.2021.100091
Van Dam, N. T., van Vugt, M. K., Vago, D. R., Schmalzl, L., Saron, C. D., Olendzki, A., Meissner, T., Lazar, S. W., Kerr, C. E., Gorchov, J., Fox, K., Field, B. A., Britton, W. B., Brefczynski-Lewis, J. A., & Meyer, D. E. (2018). Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation. Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, 13(1), 36–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617709589