The Impact of Trait Mindfulness on Perceived Stress among Adults

Abstract

Stress is a very eminent psychological issue that is enveloping earth with the fast paced life style that people are adopting. Zeidner (1992) put forth that people vary in the way they perceive and react to stressful situations. Lazarus’s cognitive appraisal theory proposed that depending on the appraisal of a situation people may perceive a situation as stressful or not. In contrast, Kabat-Zinn (2014) out forth a core concept of mindfulness as paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally. This study made the premise based on this that increased Mindfulness will lead to declined perception of stress. A correlational design was adopted. A total of 150 participants in the age group of 18-31 years from South India were selected for the study. Participants were required to fill two questionnaires Five facet Mindfulness Questionnaire and Perceived Stress Scale that measures Mindfulness and Stress respectively. Person’s correlation and spearman’s Correlation was used between find the nature and strength of relationship for normal and not normally distributed data respectively. Results of regression analysis yielded that there is a significant negative impact of mindfulness on perceived stress. Correlational analysis revealed a strong significant negative correlation between act with awareness and describe facets of mindfulness and perceived stress, and a significant weak negative correlation between observe, non-reactivity towards and non-judging of inner experience facets of mindfulness and perceived stress. It can be concluded that mindfulness has negative influence on perceived stress. It is suggested that mindfulness practice that help a person become more aware and confident in describing the experiences will help significantly reduce stress.