Effectiveness of brief mindfulness intervention for college students’ problematic smartphone use: The mediating role of self-control

by Fengbo Liu, Zhongqiu Zhang, Shuqiang Liu, Zhantao Feng

Mainland China has the most smartphone users worldwide, especially among college students, while mindfulness intervention can significantly alleviate the level of problematic smartphone use. We examined the effects of a brief mindfulness intervention on problematic smartphone use and investigated if this effect is mediated by self-control.

Participants were recruited randomly from a university in Beijing of China. Forty-four college students were assigned to a mindfulness group or a control group. The mindfulness group took part in a brief (30 min) single-session mindfulness intervention. The control group was instructed to listen to a neutral news audio recording for the same duration (30 min). The Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, Mobile Phone Addiction Tendency Scale, and Self-control Scale were used to measure state mindfulness, problematic smartphone use, and self-control of college students at pre-intervention and post-intervention, respectively.

Two-way repeated-measures ANOVA revealed that the mindfulness group had significant improvements in state mindfulness (p = .049) and self-control (p = .012), and had significant alleviation in problematic smartphone use (p < .001) at post-intervention. In the regression model, self-control had a mediating effect between mindfulness intervention and problematic smartphone use (95% CI [0.490, 7.216]).

A brief single-session mindfulness intervention can alleviate the level of problematic smartphone use and increase the level of state mindfulness and self-control compared to the control group. Self-control can completely mediate the efficacy of the mindfulness intervention in reducing problematic smartphone use.