University Students’ Perspectives on Mindfulness and mHealth: A Qualitative Exploratory Study

ABSTRACT

Background: Mindfulness can help college students with key challenges they face relating to weight gain and stress-induced emotional eating and binge eating. Little is presently known about the extent to which students are aware of mindfulness, their conceptualization and understanding of it, and the barriers as well as the facilitators of mindfulness on campus. Understanding the barriers and facilitators may also inform future Health Education and promotions campaigns. Additionally, promoting mindfulness through mHealth is a novel and accessible intervention medium. Though there have been qualitative studies on mHealth for weight loss, there has not been a study on mHealth for weight loss using mindfulness that has explored student perspectives on mHealth for promoting mindfulness. Purpose and Methods: An exploratory pilot study with a participatory design using qualitative methods was undertaken at the St. Lucia campus at the University of Queensland in March 2017. Data were analyzed with the assistance of NVivo software. Results: Participants identified a number of barriers to a mindful lifestyle: social, cultural, knowledge, and time management related. Environmental barriers included the food environment because it promoted a fast food mentality over slow, mindful eating. The mindfulness-based sample text messages were positively received by students. Students preferred messages with practical tips about how to be mindful and how to integrate mindful reflection on both one’s body and one’s environment while on campus. Students preferred a theoretical future student-centered mindfulness app that had the following design features: a simple design interface, a focus on education/practical tips, and real-life practical exercises. Social media should be avoided. Discussion: This study is important because it identified a number of potential barriers to and facilitators of mindfulness in students that should ideally be targeted by maximizing the facilitators and by aiming to minimize potential roadblocks. Mindfulness can be made more accessible to students by targeting educational, social, and environmental barriers. Future mHealth studies may consider integrating mindfulness-based text messages in their interventions for weight and stress because this is a novel feature that appears to be acceptable for students. Translation to Health Education Practice: Health Educators should aim to increase knowledge dissemination efforts and improve the campus social and built environments to promote mindfulness by making it accessible. Sending tailored inspirational mindfulness-based, educational text messages that have a student context is also a good idea.

Declaration of conflict of interest

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for the study was provided by the UQ Centennial Scholarship and Australia Research Training Scheme Scholarship.