ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews how comprehensive mindfulness interventions, as well as self-reported mindfulness skills reflecting both of these components, have been shown to affect health behaviour. A significant number of studies to date have shown effects of comprehensive mindfulness interventions and of mindfulness-related skills on health behaviour. The domains of eating behaviour, smoking, and alcohol use simply serve to illustrate basic processes that are most likely applicable to other health behaviours as well. Most of the mindfulness interventions described were targeted toward a specific behaviour and delivered with a particular long-term goal in mind to reduce alcohol consumption or food cravings. The chapter explores the ways attention regulation and decentering interact and complement each other, and discusses the possibility of the domain-specificity of mindfulness effects. The mindfulness intervention contained both an attention regulation component – such as increasing awareness of thoughts, physical states, and eating-related sensations – and an attitudinal component promoting a non-judging approach to one’s experience.
