State mindfulness impaired motivation to complete cognitive and performance tasks, had no overall effect (good or bad) for performance; weakened future focus and arousal serially mediated demotivating effect, but also enabled people to detach from stressors, which improved task focus

Mindfulness Meditation Impairs Task Motivation but Not Performance. Andrew C. Hafenbrack, Kathleen D. Vohs. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Volume 147, July 2018, Pages 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2018.05.001

Highlights
•    State mindfulness impaired motivation to complete cognitive and performance tasks.
•    State mindfulness had no overall effect (good or bad) for performance on same tasks.
•    Weakened future focus and arousal serially mediated demotivating effect.
•    Mindfulness enabled people to detach from stressors, which improved task focus.
•    Detachment and task focus help explain why mindfulness does not alter performance.

Abstract: A state of mindfulness is characterized by focused, nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment. The current research experimentally investigated how state mindfulness influences task motivation and performance, using multiple meditation inductions, comparison conditions, tasks, and participant samples. Mindfulness inductions, relative to comparison conditions, reduced motivation to tackle mundane tasks (Experiments 1–4) and pleasant tasks (Experiment 2). Decreased future focus and decreased arousal serially mediated the demotivating effect of mindfulness (Experiments 3 and 4). In contrast to changes in motivation, inducing a state of mindfulness did not affect task performance, as seen in all experiments but one (Experiments 2–5). Meta-analyses of performance experiments, including unreported findings (i.e., the file drawer), supported these conclusions. Experiment 5’s serial mediation showed that mindfulness enabled people to detach from stressors, which improved task focus. When combined with mindfulness’s demotivating effects, these results help explain why mindfulness does not alter performance.

Keywords: Mindfulness; Meditation; Motivation; Performance; Arousal; Psychological detachment