In plain language
Mindfulness has exploded in popularity — use of the word in written English has increased about 15-fold over three decades — yet in science it is used loosely to mean a technique, a collection of methods, a psychological process, and sometimes an outcome in itself. This chapter for the second edition of the Handbook of Mindfulness steps back and asks: how should mindfulness research move forward now that critics question whether the concept adds anything beyond personality traits, and “McMindfulness” apps have commercialized the practice?
The authors argue the field’s core problem is that it relies on group averages, which need not apply to any given individual (the ergodicity problem). They propose an “idionomic” approach: start the analysis with each individual person, then generalize to groups only when doing so improves the fit for individuals. To demonstrate, they present a study in which 44 adults completed brief process measures (from the Process-Based Assessment Tool) and a distress screener twice a day for 35 days, and each person’s data were analysed as their own time series.
On average, lower mindful connection with daily life went with higher distress — but variability was enormous: for a substantial number of individuals the relationship was absent or even reversed. When people were grouped bottom-up by how much mindfulness actually affected them, network analyses showed the groups had different process dynamics: those weakly affected by mindfulness were driven more by feeling stuck and failing to persist at important things. The practical message is that mindfulness training helps many people but should not be prescribed uniformly; person-level analysis can identify who is likely to benefit from mindfulness and who may need a different intervention target first.
Key findings
- Mindfulness research has relied on group averages that violate the ergodic assumption — average effects are not guaranteed to describe any individual, so the field needs individual-first (idionomic) methods.
- In a demonstration study, 44 adults completed PBAT process items and a distress screener twice daily for 35 days, and person-specific time-series (ARIMAX) effects were pooled meta-analytically.
- Struggling to connect with the moments of day-to-day life (low mindfulness) predicted higher negative functioning on average (Beta = .25, 95% CI [.16, .33]), but heterogeneity was extreme (I² = .88): many individuals showed null or even opposite effects.
- Grouping people bottom-up into low-impact vs moderate-to-high-impact mindfulness groups revealed different drivers of distress: in the low-impact group, feeling stuck and failing to persist at important activities were more reliable drivers than mindfulness.
- Multilevel network (mlVAR) analyses showed mindfulness had no direct link to negative affect in the low-impact group — only an indirect path through struggling to persist — while feelings-related and cognitive processes were central in the high-impact group.
- The authors propose a two-step pragmatic agenda: identify individual process profiles, then test whether interventions personalized to those profiles outperform generic ones.
How to cite
APA
Hayes, S. C., Sahdra, B., Ciarrochi, J., Hofmann, S. G., & Sanford, B. T. (2025). How a process-based idionomic approach changes our understanding of mindfulness as a method and process. In K. W. Brown, J. D. Creswell, & R. M. Ryan (Eds.), Handbook of mindfulness (2nd ed.): Theory, research, and practice. Guilford Press.
BibTeX
@incollection{hayes2025how,
author = {Hayes, Steven C. and Sahdra, Baljinder and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Hofmann, Stefan G. and Sanford, Brandon T.},
title = {How a Process-Based Idionomic Approach Changes our Understanding of Mindfulness as a Method and Process},
booktitle = {Handbook of Mindfulness (2nd ed.): Theory, Research, and Practice},
editor = {Brown, Kirk Warren and Creswell, J. David and Ryan, Richard M.},
publisher = {Guilford Press},
address = {New York},
year = {2025}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
- The Process-Based Assessment Tool (free download)
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version.