Mindful moments: A review of brief, low‐intensity mindfulness meditation and induced mindful states

Popular and empirical interest in mindfulness meditation has increased rapidly over the last decades. In particular, mindfulness meditation has been utilized as the basis of numerous treatments for physical and mental health issues, and many of these meditation‐based treatments have demonstrated empirical evidence of their efficacy. However, less empirical attention has been devoted to how mindfulness meditation impacts non‐clinical populations. One growing area of research that tackles this question is research on mindfulness induction tasks—brief, low‐intensity, meditation activities that people can do in their controlled scientific laboratories or in their daily lives. In this article, we review this small but burgeoning literature, focusing on the benefits of brief mindfulness induction tasks for cognition, emotional, social, and health outcomes. In addition, we describe substantive challenges and future directions for this area of research and discuss how this research may inform the mindfulness literature more broadly.