Taming the wild elephant: Mindfulness and its role in overcoming automatic mental processes

Abstract

There is increasing evidence that automatic mental processes contribute to self-regulation failures such as eating high-fat foods despite being on a diet and getting trapped in old ways of thinking about problems that require a novel response. Mindfulness meditation, which was developed to overcome habitual patterns of the mind that contribute to human suffering, holds great promise as a strategy to improve self-regulation. This chapter examines the idea that mindfulness may facilitate self-regulation by influencing automatic processes and their relation with subsequent cognition and behavior. After beginning with a discussion of the functional value of automatic processes, the chapter continues with a review of how these processes contribute to self-regulation failure. Next, a theoretical discussion is presented concerning mindfulness and how it might moderate automatic processes. After presenting a review of research addressing this topic, the chapter concludes with suggestions for future work.