Formal Versus Informal Mindfulness Among University Students With and Without Recent Nonsuicidal Self-injury

The formal mindfulness induction will consist of a 10-minute audio recording of a sitting meditation, guiding the participant to consciously and repeatedly bring their attention to their breath and inner experience with nonjudgmental acceptance.

The informal mindfulness induction will consist of on-screen instructions guiding participants through the completion of four routine tasks (washing hands, drinking water, laying down, listening to music) with mindful awareness and acceptance over the course of 10 minutes.

Participants assigned to the active control condition will be prompted to download a single-page document containing 100 letters, numbers, and symbols, and a grid of 100 boxes. Following along with a guided audio, participants will be instructed to place all of the characters in the grid in a specific order over the course of 10 minutes. A version of this task has been used in previous studies by our team (Carsley \& Heath, 2019; Petrovic et al., 2022) and has been shown not to impact mindfulness levels, and was thus deemed an appropriate neutral attention task for this study.