Long considered a uniform path for well-being, mindfulness may actually manifest differently across people. Recent research, including an empirical study of my own, reveals, instead, that people may express mindfulness in at least four distinct ways.

The Mindfulness Renaissance

To get started, two points. First, mindfulness is important and generally positively associated with mental acuity, self-awareness, and various markers of well-being. Second, mindfulness has gone through a renaissance of sorts, especially since the 1990s and the 2010s. Growing numbers of teaching programs surging in schools, hospitals, workplaces, in therapy and beyond attest to that renaissance.

While valuable in establishing its benefits and in increasing access, prior research and teaching has mostly maintained one largely unexamined assumption: that people fall under a single continuum of more or less mindfulness, whereby some show higher mindfulness, and others show less of it. Would it be nice if life were that simple and linear?

Building on the work of other laboratories, my research questions this assumption. What we and other researchers have been finding is that there are not one, but multiple profiles, groups, or faces of mindfulness. And these faces, like people, are not all alike.

Breaking Down Mindfulness

To unpack this point, it is crucial that we understand how mindfulness is measured in the scientific literature. For a while now, psychologists and statisticians have been coming up with measures, or scales of mindfulness. Think of these as questionnaires with descriptive items people may agree or disagree with. When summed up, responses to these scales provide researchers with a score for where people are at mindfulness-wise.

Despite the complicated psychometrics—a fancy term for the study of the statistics behind psychological questionnaires—most researchers seem to agree on one premise: that mindfulness is complex, and that it may consist of multiple related aspects. Paying attention in the present moment and not judging one’s own experience may be two of the most basic dimensions. Might there be more than two basic dimensions?

Enter the five-facet theory and questionnaire of mindfulness (Baer et al., 2006), quite a popular measure. What are these five facets, you might ask? Simply put, observing one’s experience, describing one’s experience, not judging one’s experience, not reacting (on autopilot) to one’s experience, and acting with awareness. Simple and clear. Five facets, five aspects, five correlated elements that, together, paint a more complete picture of mindfulness.

What most researchers have done for quite some time, though, is this: they’ve taken the sum of these five elements, jumbled them all together, and assigned people with a distinct number, a five-into-one formula.

Wait a minute. Even though each aspect seems important on its own and as a whole, they may not—and are not—all alike. Could some people have more of a way with words and be excellent at describing their experience, but still maintain plenty of negative judgment toward whatever they’re feeling? And could others not judge their experience at all, but have difficulty with observing and describing what they feel? What if, instead of a single group of highs and lows across the five facets, there were multiple, distinct subgroups altogether?

Beyond the One-Size-Fits-All Approach

In essence, that is what my research study shows. Some people show mid-range responses across all five dimensions of mindfulness. We called them “average mindfulness.” Some show above-average scores across all five dimensions. We called them “high mindfulness.” These two groups are “even” in a way, and align with the assumption of a single continuum going around academic psychology.

But you know what’s interesting? Some people came out uneven across the five dimensions of mindfulness. For example, some self-described as excellent observers but as very, very judgmental of their own experience. Know some? These we called “judgmental observing.” Others self-reported as not that observant, but were able to abstain from judging themselves and still act with awareness. A nice deal, huh? These we called “non-judgmentally aware.” And who do you feel is happier, less anxious, and less depressed among? Take a guess.

The Four Faces of Mindfulness Revealed

As you may have thought, the high mindfulness group embodied the healthiest psychological profile: lower anxiety, lower depression, and higher levels of life satisfaction. The average mindfulness group showed moderate levels across these measures. Fair enough, no?

But here's where it gets particularly interesting: the judgmental observing group—those keen observers who harshly judge their experiences—had the highest indices of anxiety and depression, along with the lowest levels of well-being. The non-judgmentally aware people, while better off than the judgmental observers, still showed mixed outcomes in terms of psychological health.

Moving Forward: Personalizing Mindfulness

As simple as these results sound, these groups hold important implications for how we approach mindfulness training. Should we continue offering one-size-fits-all programs? Or might we benefit from first understanding where someone starts—their natural mindfulness profile—and then tailoring our approach accordingly? Might someone with a judgmental observing quality benefit most from exercises focusing on self-compassion and non-judgment? Might a non-judgmentally aware person benefit more from practices that enhance observational and describing skills? These questions remain unanswered, but are increasingly relevant as more people download another app or join an online class.

The evidence is clear: with few exceptions, mindfulness—both the trait and the practice—brings people enormous good. It’s just good, and I personally vouch for, after years of training and research, how good mindfulness has been in my own personal and professional life. However, it may be time to recognize the varieties of mindfulness experience, the four faces of mindfulness, as I playfully noted earlier. Recognizing them might help us tailor approaches to distinct starting points. The path to mindfulness, it seems, isn't a single highway but rather multiple routes, each worthy of recognition and requiring its own map.

Curious about your own mindfulness profile? You may access my peer-reviewed study via the journal Current Psychology for a deeper dive into these profiles, or reach out to discuss how these findings might inform your own mindfulness journey.