The role of mindfulness and resilience in Navy SEAL training

ABSTRACT

Mindfulness and resilience are thought to be essential qualities of the military’s special operations community. Both are tested daily in Special Operations Forces (SOF) assessment and selection efforts to prepare candidates to persist through grueling training and complex combat situations; but these qualities are rarely measured. While military leadership places value on the concepts of mindfulness and resilience, there is minimal empirical research examining the role that they play in the completion of training. This longitudinal study followed three classes of SEAL candidates at Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL (BUD/S) training over their six-month selection program. We estimated logit models predicting successful completion of BUD/S and specific types of failure in that training environment with indexes of mindfulness and resilience at the start of the program as predictors of completion. The results indicate that (1) mindfulness is unrelated to completion, while (2) resilience is positively related to completion, and (3) The results indicate that mindfulness is generally unrelated to completion, while resilience generally predicts completion.

KEYWORDS:

• Selection and assessment
• resilience
• mindfulness
• SEAL training
• psychological assessment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

The de-identified data can be made available to verified researchers by request with the corresponding author. There were five data collections taken over the course of 18 months for this study. Data was collected at each point for resilience and mindfulness. Code used for the analysis of the resilience and mindfulness data is openly accessible at:

https://osf.io/wjk6m/

https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/WJK6M

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Joint Special Operations University, the Special Operations Command’s Preservation of the Force and Family Task Force, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Neuromuscular Research Laboratory; Office of Research, Health Sciences, University of Pittsburgh.