Promote Adaptive Emotions with Mindfulness
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“Mindfulness allows us to watch our thoughts, see how one thought leads to the next, decide if we’re heading toward an unhealthy path, and if so, let go and change directions. It allows us to see that who we are is much more than a fearful or envious or angry thought. We can rest in the awareness of the thought, in the compassion we extend to ourselves if the thought makes us uncomfortable, and in the balance and good sense we summon as we decide whether and how to act on the thought.” – Upaya Zen Center
Mindfulness is associated with the health and well-being of the individual. It affects a strikingly wide variety of physical and mental capacities and conditions, from cognitive process, to emotions, to stress, to disease states, to mental health, etc. Its effects are so widespread and diverse that it would seem unlikely that mindfulness would directly affect each individual process or state. It is more likely that mindfulness works through intermediaries. That is, it has direct effects on a few processes that in turn have influences on even more processes. This would suggest that many of the effects of mindfulness are indirect.
One possibility for an intermediary is coping style. Mindfulness has been shown to heighten adaptive coping. This is a form of coping with stresses in which the individual does not personalize it but looks directly at its environmental causes and addresses them directly. Mindfulness has also been shown to reduce maladaptive coping such as avoidant coping, where the individual does not directly confront the stress but rather turns away from, ignore, or escape from stress. This form of coping does not adequately address the stress which can reemerge in the future.
Mindfulness has also been shown to improve emotion regulation, such that the individual fully experiences emotions but reacts appropriately and adaptively to them. Emotion regulation, then, involves coping with the emotion adaptively. It would seem logical then that the improved emotion regulation that occurs with mindfulness may be a secondary effect of the effect of mindfulness on adaptive and maladaptive coping. So, improved emotion regulation may be the result of the improved adaptive coping or less maladaptive coping produced by mindfulness.
Emotions are quite complex and dynamic. They can be considered as reasonably stable traits that characterize and individual. But, emotions also vary from moment to moment and different individuals have different patterns of emotional variation over the course of the day. Some people have highly variable emotions that show frequent changes over the day, while some people tend to have more stable emotions that don’t change much, called emotional inertia, while some people have great instability in their emotions, changing wildly from moment to moment, and some people switch back and forth between positive and negative emotional states frequently over the day. To date the effect of mindfulness on these aspects of dynamic daily emotions has not been investigated, nor their relationships to coping styles.
In today’s Research News article “Riding the Tide of Emotions with Mindfulness: Mindfulness, Affect Dynamics, and the Mediating Role of Coping.” See:
or see below
Keng and Tong address these questions. They measured trait mindfulness, coping styles, positive and negative affect, self-esteem, depression, openness, and habitual reappraisal and suppression. They also acquired reports of the emotional states of participants at 19 different points a day for 2 days from which they calculated the individual’s emotional variability, inertia, instability, and switching.
Keng and Tong found the higher the levels of trait mindfulness, the lower the levels of emotional variability, instability, and inertia. High mindfulness people were also more likely to switch from feeling negatively in the morning to feeling positively in the afternoon. These relationships with mindfulness were not due to positive and negative affect, self-esteem, depression, openness, and habitual reappraisal and suppression. So highly mindful people tend to have less variability in their emotions, but also less inertia being able to change emotions when appropriate. They were also less likely to have unstable, wildly varying emotions and be more likely to switch from a negative to a positive emotional state. Hence mindfulness appears to produce less variable and unstable emotions that are better attuned to the events of the day and more likely to become positive.
Keng and Tong also found that maladaptive coping meditated these effects. Highly mindful people were less likely to use maladaptive coping strategies in their emotional reactivity to daily stressors. Interestingly adaptive coping styles did not mediate these effects. These results suggest that mindfulness does not affect emotional well-being by producing adaptive coping styles, but rather by interfering with maladaptive styles. Thus mindfulness makes it less likely that the individual will use ineffective maladaptive coping with stress and thereby have higher emotional wellbeing.
The most important message here is that mindfulness improves your emotional life and makes you less likely to cope with your emotions in such a way as to make matters worse. It doesn’t change your life, just how you experience and deal with your emotions and this make life better. So, promote adaptive emotions with mindfulness.
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
“The next time you sense a strong emotion, take some time to put a finger on exactly what you’re feeling. Get quiet, turn inward, and just listen.” – Lisa Nichols
Study Summary
Keng, S., & Tong, E. W. (2016). Riding the Tide of Emotions with Mindfulness: Mindfulness, Affect Dynamics, and the Mediating Role of Coping. Emotion, doi:10.1037/emo0000165
Abstract:
Little research has examined ways in which mindfulness is associated with affect dynamics, referring to patterns of affect fluctuations in daily life. Using ecological momentary assessment (EMA), the present study examined the associations between trait mindfulness and several types of affect dynamics, namely affect variability, affect inertia, affect switch, and affect instability. Three hundred ninety undergraduate students from Singapore reported their current emotions and coping styles up to 19 times per day across 2 days. Results showed that trait mindfulness correlated negatively with variability, instability, and inertia of negative affect and positively with negative-to-positive affect switch. These relationships were independent of openness, habitual reappraisal, habitual suppression, depression, and self-esteem. Importantly, lower maladaptive coping was found to mediate these relationships. The study suggests that trait mindfulness independently promotes adaptive patterns of affective experiences in daily life by inhibiting maladaptive coping styles.