Discerning and Nonjudging Mindfulness: Temporal Links to Nonattachment and Mental Health

Mindfulness has become one of the most widely practiced and studied psychological interventions in the world, credited with everything from reducing workplace stress to easing symptoms of depression and anxiety. Yet beneath the calm surface of the global mindfulness boom, a quiet scientific controversy has been brewing. At the center of the debate is a single word from the field’s most famous definition. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in the 1980s, famously described mindfulness as paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally. That final clause has shaped decades of research and measurement, but critics have long argued that it diverges from the tradition from which mindfulness was borrowed. Now, a new eight-month longitudinal study published in the journal Mindfulness suggests the critics may have a point: when it comes to long-term mental health benefits, the ability to judge, discern, and evaluate one’s inner states may matter far more than simply refusing to judge them.

The research, conducted by Ben C. L. Yu of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and colleagues at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and The University of Hong Kong, set out to compare two competing qualities of mindfulness that appear, on the surface, to be nearly contradictory. The first is nonjudgment, the familiar operationalization embedded in the widely used Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire, which asks whether people approach their thoughts and feelings in a non-evaluative way. The second is discernment, a construct rooted in classical Buddhist teachings that emphasizes actively assessing whether one’s mental states are wholesome or unwholesome, that is, whether they lead toward well-being or toward suffering. From a Buddhist psychological perspective, this evaluative function is not a corruption of mindfulness but one of its defining features. In the ancient text The Questions of King Milinda, the monk Nāgasena describes mindfulness precisely as the examination of the wholesomeness and unwholesomeness of mental states, and early discourses such as the Kālāma Sutta frame unwholesome states as those marked by greed, aversion, and delusion that lead to harm, while wholesome states are those conducive to welfare and happiness.

To translate these concepts into testable psychological terms, the research team drew on the Mindfulness-Discernment Scale, a recently validated instrument grounded in Buddhist teachings that reconceptualizes mindfulness as having two functions. The first function is maintaining steady, non-forgetting awareness of internal and external objects, including sensations, thoughts, feelings, and mental states. The second is discernment, a clear knowing of those objects, such as recognizing whether one’s breath is long or short, or whether one’s current mental state is characterized by greed. The scale’s developers found that discernment correlated moderately with well-being, lower stress, and lower psychological distress, and showed moderate-to-strong associations with secularized Buddhist constructs including nonattachment, acceptance of impermanence, wisdom, tranquility, and concentration. Nonjudgment, meanwhile, has accumulated its own impressive empirical record. Studies have linked the nonjudging facet of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire to higher well-being, lower psychological disturbance, and, in a meta-analysis, strongly reduced post-traumatic stress symptoms.

The Hong Kong study followed 275 adults with no meditation experience over eight months, with assessments at baseline, four months, and eight months. Participants had a mean age of 24.5 years, just over half were women, and nearly all held at least an undergraduate degree, with the majority reporting no religious affiliation. The researchers used path analysis with full maximum likelihood estimation in Mplus, structuring their models with baseline discernment and nonjudgment as independent variables, nonattachment at the four-month follow-up as the mediator, and either life satisfaction or psychological distress at eight months as the outcome. Crucially, the longitudinal portion of the model controlled for baseline levels of the mediator and outcomes, allowing the team to test whether the mindfulness qualities genuinely predicted change over time rather than merely correlating with it. Indirect effects were estimated using bias-corrected bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples, and the models showed excellent fit to the data.

The answer to which quality matters more depended entirely on the timescale. When all variables were measured at the same time point, both discernment and nonjudgment performed respectably. Both were significantly associated with higher nonattachment, which in turn was associated with lower psychological distress and greater life satisfaction. But the concurrent results already hinted at an asymmetry: after controlling for each other, discernment showed a much stronger association with nonattachment than nonjudgment did, with standardized coefficients of 0.51 versus 0.18. The indirect effect of discernment on distress through nonattachment was roughly two and a half times larger than that of nonjudgment. In other words, even in the cross-sectional picture, the evaluative quality of mindfulness appeared to be doing considerably more work.

The longitudinal results were more decisive. When the researchers inserted a four-month time lag between the predictor and the mediator, nonjudgment simply stopped predicting anything. Baseline nonjudgment showed no significant association with nonattachment at four months, and no indirect pathway to either distress or life satisfaction at eight months. Discernment, by contrast, held its ground. Baseline discernment significantly predicted higher nonattachment at four months, and nonattachment at four months in turn significantly predicted greater life satisfaction at eight months, producing a significant indirect effect of discernment on life satisfaction through nonattachment. The parallel indirect pathway to reduced psychological distress, while directionally consistent, did not reach significance, likely because of the modest effect sizes involved and the attrition of participants reporting higher distress. Still, the pattern was unambiguous: only discernment carried psychological benefits forward across time.

Why might this be? The researchers draw on Buddhist psychological models in which suffering arises from habitual clinging to pleasant feeling tones and aversion to unpleasant ones, followed by mental proliferation of the initial events. Mindfulness, in this framework, is not an end in itself but a vehicle for recognizing these patterns of clinging and repulsion and fostering nonattachment, defined psychologically as a flexible, balanced way of relating to one’s experiences without clinging to or suppressing them. Discernment, the authors argue, is what makes this possible. According to the theory of embodied mindfulness, bodily states and cognitive-emotional processes interact bidirectionally: unwholesome states characterized by greed, aversion, or delusion may manifest as visceral tightness, constriction, or physiological agitation, while wholesome states present as bodily ease, spaciousness, and relaxation. A person with discerning awareness can use these somatic signals as a compass, deliberately letting go of unwholesome states and cultivating wholesome ones. Nonjudgment, by contrast, may offer only a temporary buffer, shielding people from the sting of negative experiences in the short term without fostering the deeper understanding needed to release them.

There is also a darker possibility that has concerned scholars for a decade. Some researchers have warned that an emphasis on nonjudging may foster passive acceptance, in which individuals tolerate adverse or even abusive situations rather than changing or leaving them, potentially exacerbating their difficulties and allowing harmful sensations to accumulate unexamined. Intriguingly, the new study found a hint of this: after controlling for nonattachment and discernment, nonjudgment showed a significant negative direct effect on life satisfaction at the eight-month follow-up. The authors are appropriately cautious, noting the small effect size and the absence of a zero-order correlation between nonjudgment and life satisfaction, and they stop short of declaring nonjudgment harmful. But they urge researchers to remain alert to its potential long-term costs.

The findings also connect to a growing body of temporal evidence suggesting that the benefits of mindfulness may be less durable than cross-sectional studies imply. Previous work by the same research group using ecological momentary assessment found that mindfulness predicted nonattachment and positive affect only when variables were measured concurrently, with the association vanishing when a lag of a few hours was introduced. A subsequent two-month study produced the same pattern. The authors of the new study suspected that part of the problem lay in measurement: those earlier studies used instruments capturing bare awareness or the mere absence of inattention, which may not capture the multidimensional richness of mindfulness. By pitting two distinct, well-measured qualities against each other, the present study suggests that the choice of which quality to cultivate, not merely whether to be mindful, may determine whether benefits persist.

The practical implications could be significant for the design of mindfulness-based interventions. If discernment is the active ingredient for enduring well-being, programs might benefit from teaching participants not just to observe thoughts, bodily states, and emotions without immediate reactivity, but to evaluate whether those states are wholesome, unwholesome, skillful, or unskillful, and to respond without clinging or avoidance. Such training would represent a meaningful departure from the strictly non-evaluative stance that has dominated secular mindfulness pedagogy. The study’s authors also caution that future research should not treat mindfulness qualities as interchangeable, recommending finer-grained measurement rather than reliance on broad global scales.

Limitations remain. The sample consisted of young, highly educated, predominantly non-religious university affiliates in Hong Kong with no meditation experience, and the authors note that meditators interpret mindfulness qualities differently. The longitudinal design, while stronger than cross-sectional work, cannot establish causation, all measures were self-reported within the same surveys, raising the possibility of common method bias, and attrition reached roughly 21 percent by the final follow-up, though full information maximum likelihood estimation was used to mitigate missing data. Even so, the study represents one of the most rigorous comparisons to date between two rival conceptions of what mindfulness actually is. Taken together with earlier null findings for bare awareness and inattentiveness, the evidence points toward a provocative conclusion: simply watching the mind without judgment may calm it for a moment, but learning to discern the nature of what arises, and to release what harms, may be what sustains well-being over the long run.