Daily mindfulness, motivational conflict, and stress in university students: An experience-sampling study

Abstract

University students have a lot of freedom in organizing their everyday lives, but often also feel stressed and torn between action opportunities. Mindfulness entails the self-regulation of attention on immediate experience and an open and non-judging attitude towards these mental experiences. It is positively related to well-being and to intrapsychic congruence. The aim of the present work is to examine the relationship of daily mindfulness, motivational conflict, and perceived stress in the everyday life of university students. During a week of smartphone-based experience-sampling, 108 university students were asked five times daily about their momentary mindfulness and whether they experience motivational conflicts. Additionally, we assessed perceived stress each evening. The relationship between daily mindfulness, motivational conflict, and perceived stress was analyzed on the daily level with multi-level analyses. Both aggregated daily conflict (i.e., feeling that one should be doing something else) and mindfulness (i.e., being non-judgmental) yielded an effect on perceived stress, even when controlling for between-person differences in study load, for example. Findings underline the relevance of mindfulness for perceived stress in academic contexts and thereby also show an approach to positively influence well-being in university students in the future