Beyond Meditation: Understanding Everyday Mindfulness Practices and Technology Use Among Experienced Practitioners

TL;DR

This study addresses how experienced mindfulness practitioners integrate everyday mindfulness into daily life and how technology supports or challenges long-term practice. It uses semi-structured interviews with 20 long-term practitioners to capture diverse definitions, formal and informal practices, benefits, barriers, and technology use. Key findings show mindfulness as a multi-faceted, ongoing journey defined bottom-up by practitioners, with technology serving as reminders, community connectors, or mindful objects, while deliberate non-use can defend the practice. Design implications advocate metaphor-based thinking, a toolkit approach, reappropriation of existing tech, minimizing negative effects, and community integration to support sustainable, meaningful mindfulness in everyday life.

Abstract

Mindfulness, a practice of bringing attention to the present non-judgmentally, has many mental and physical well-being benefits, especially when practiced consistently. Many technologies have been invented to support solo or group mindfulness practice such as mobile apps, live streams, virtual reality environments, and wearables. In this paper, we present findings from an interview study with 20 experienced mindfulness practitioners about their everyday mindfulness practices and technology use. Participants identify the benefits and challenges of developing long-term commitment to mindfulness practice. They employ various strategies, such as brief mindfulness exercises, social accountability, and guidance from teachers, to sustain their practice. While conflicted about technology, they adopt and appropriate a range of technologies in their practice for reminders, emotion tracking, connecting with others, and attending online sessions. They also carefully consider when to use technology, when and how to limit its use, and ways to incorporate technology as an object for mindfulness. Based on our findings, we discuss expanding the definition of mindfulness and the tension between supporting short- and long-term mindfulness practice. We also propose a set of design recommendations to support everyday mindfulness including such as through the lens of metaphor, reappropriating non-mindfulness technology, and bringing community support into personal practice.