Short Mindfulness Meditations During Breaks and After Work in Everyday Nursing Care: A Simple Strategy for Promoting Daily Recovery, Mood, and Attention?

Abstract

Background Nurses experience high job demands, which makes recovery particularly necessary to maintain well-being and performance. However, these demands also make recovery challenging. Short mindfulness meditations could potentially help alleviate this paradox. Methods Two ecological momentary intervention studies were conducted among geriatric nurses (Study 1: break study) and hospital nurses (Study 2: after-work study) to investigate whether short audio-guided mindfulness meditations are beneficial for recovery during breaks and psychological detachment after work. Furthermore, break recovery and after-work detachment were examined as mediators of the associations between mindfulness meditations and after-break/after-sleep mood and attention after respective recovery periods. Multilevel path models were based on a sample of 38 nurses and 208 after-break surveys in the break study and 26 nurses and 192 after-sleep surveys in the after-work study. Results Compared to breaks spent as usual, breaks that incorporated short mindfulness meditations were associated with higher break recovery, which mediated the positive associations between mindful breaks and after-break calmness, valence, and energetic arousal. Only with certain constraints did mindfulness meditations predict a lower rate of attention failures. In the after-work study, short mindfulness meditations were positively related to psychological detachment, which mediated the positive associations between the intervention and after-sleep valence and calmness. Conclusion/Application to Practice Both pilot studies showed that short mindfulness meditations aid in recovery among nurses. However, to fully utilize the advantages of recovery-promoting breaks, structural changes are necessary to ensure that breaks of an appropriate duration are consistently implemented.