Personalizing Practice using Preferences for Meditation Anchor Modality

Many new people are engaging contemplative practices and Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs) have become quite popular. While MBIs positively impact well-being, drop-out and lack of practice-maintenance plagues these interventions, which use the breath to anchor attention. No study had yet compared preferences for practices using anchors from different sensory modalities (e.g. auditory, visual) thus the present study examined such individual differences, sharing resources on the OSF (osf.io/hcnz2/). Participants engaged 10-min practices within three modalities (somatosensory, auditory, visual) and post-practice preferences were modelled. Preference differences did exist: 49% preferred the breath, 30% the auditory-phrase, and 21% the visual-image. Pre-practice motivation and anchor-modality were primary predictors and cardiac responses also influenced preference. Preferences were updated through experience and over half of participants left the experiment preferring a different anchor than when entering. Tangible next-steps are discussed, including integrating additional anchor modalities into existing interventions by offering brief practices with a variety of anchors. Suggestions are made for increasing post-training contact using email-automation to answer central practice-maintenance questions, including whether and which contemplative benefits are predicated on continued practice.