Incorporating Mindfulness within Established Theories of Health Behavior

摘要

Mindfulness is quickly becoming recognized as an important theoretical construct in health promotion and disease prevention research. Greeson (2009) recently evaluated the basic and clinical research on mindfulness, and the accumulated evidence from this review of the literature suggested that the cultivation of mindfulness has beneficial effects on mental, emotional, and behavioral health and well-being. The notion that mindfulness has a positive influence on health has also been supported by evidence suggesting that mindfulness-based interventions have protective influences on some physiological, psychosocial, and behavioral domains of health among both clinical and nonclinical samples comprising youth (Black, Milam, & Sussman, 2009) and adults (Brown, Ryan, & Creswell, 2007; Grossman, Niemann, Schmidt, & Walach, 2004). These empirical findings lend evidence regarding the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions on certain health outcomes; however, relatively little is known regarding the mechanisms whereby mindfulness produces change in health behavior outcomes.