Two weeks of mindfulness, less mind wandering
A two-week mindfulness course reduced mind wandering and improved reading-comprehension scores and working memory, most of all in easily distracted people.
The short version
Mind wandering — drifting off a task without noticing — quietly undermines a lot of work. In this randomized study, a two-week mindfulness course reduced mind wandering and improved both working memory capacity and scores on the reading-comprehension section of the GRE, a graduate admissions test. The improvements were explained by less mind wandering, mostly in people who were easily distracted to begin with.
What the researchers did
Michael Mrazek, Jonathan Schooler and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara randomly assigned undergraduate students to one of two two-week courses:
- a mindfulness class that taught focused attention on the breath and other practical techniques for noticing and returning from distraction; or
- a nutrition class, an active control with similar time and teacher contact.
Before and after the course, students took a working memory test and a version of the GRE reading-comprehension section, and the researchers measured how often their minds wandered during those tests.
What they found
- The mindfulness group improved on GRE reading comprehension and on working memory capacity.
- They also reported fewer distracting thoughts while taking both tests.
- The performance gains were mediated by reduced mind wandering among students who had been prone to distraction at the start. In other words, the people who drifted most benefited most, and they benefited because they drifted less.
Limits and caveats
This was a single, fairly small study of university students, measured immediately after the course; it does not show how long the benefits last. Mind wandering was partly measured by self-report, which participants trained in mindfulness might answer differently. The result is encouraging rather than definitive, but it fits with larger meta-analyses showing modest attention gains from mindfulness, such as the 111-trial review.
What it means for how you work
If you often realise you have read the same paragraph three times, a short, structured mindfulness course is a reasonable experiment, and this study suggests you are in the group most likely to benefit. A practical way to tell whether it is working is to check in after each focus block: how often did your mind drift? Tracking that alongside your hours gives you a simple before-and-after measure. Compare this with brief daily practice in Basso et al. (2019), where gains took eight weeks.