A meta-analysis of 29 randomized controlled trials with 2,191 participants found that mindfulness-based interventions produce a small-to-medium improvement in self-reported interoceptive awareness (g = 0.31). Mindfulness-based programs showed the largest effects (g = 0.41). Improvements in interoception were similar in size to improvements in self-reported mindfulness and were linked to reductions in psychological distress. No evidence of publication bias was detected, and no other factors such as practice dosage or clinical sample significantly moderated the results. These findings suggest mindfulness interventions can positively alter how people subjectively experience bodily sensations, which may contribute to better mental health.
Mindfulness-based interventions produce small-to-medium improvements in self-reported interoceptive awareness, according to a meta-analysis of 29 randomized controlled trials involving 2,191 participants (77.8% female, mean age 32.8 years). The overall effect size was g = 0.31, with mindfulness-based programs showing the largest effects (g = 0.41). Improvements in interoception were similar in size to improvements in self-reported mindfulness and were linked to reductions in psychological distress. No evidence of publication bias was found, and no other moderators—such as practice dosage or clinical sample—were significant. The findings suggest that mindfulness training leads to adaptive changes in how people subjectively experience bodily signals, which may contribute to better mental wellbeing.
Body awareness is thought to be a cognitive mechanism of mindfulness, but neuroscience evidence is limited. Postural control during quiet standing relies on body cues, especially with eyes closed. Postural signals were recorded from 156 healthy participants standing quietly with eyes closed and eyes open. Each participant completed the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory. Machine learning models were trained to estimate mindfulness scores and classify participants as mindful or non-mindful from their postural signals. Models using eyes-closed data performed much better than those using eyes-open data. These findings provide the first physiological evidence supporting the hypothesis that mindfulness involves enhanced body awareness.
A commentary on a neurocomputational model of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy argues that the model's two proposed mechanisms—increasing the precision of likelihood while decreasing the precision of prior—conflict when describing mindful functioning. The authors propose an alternative mechanism: the dynamic updating of prior beliefs as a function of context, which contributes to active inference. They suggest that the moment-to-moment attentional pattern of mindfulness could promote optimal adjustment of prior beliefs to the context of each present experience.