In recent years, there has been a proliferation of scientific interest in mindfulness and its effects on reducing dysfunction among adolescents. While this body of literature has tended to endorse a “deficit” model, less work has focused on mindfulness and its associations with youth flourishing and the capacity to find meaning and purpose in life. In the current analysis, we test longitudinal associations between mindfulness and meaning in life in two data sets from similar, yet separate high schools.

Students (Study 1, Exploratory: N = 599; Study 2, Confirmatory, Preregistered: N = 1,093) completed self-report measures of mindfulness and meaning in life three times during an entire academic year. Cross-lagged panel models with lag-1 effects (CL1PM) were utilized to test for prospective, reciprocal associations between mindfulness and meaning in life.

In both studies, results revealed that higher levels of mindfulness significantly (p <.05) prospectively predicted higher levels of meaning in life, and that higher levels of meaning in life significantly (p <.05) prospectively predicted higher levels of mindfulness.

Overall, this study provides evidence for bidirectional, longitudinal associations between mindfulness and meaning in life during adolescence; a developmental period that can be viewed as a "window of opportunity" for cultivating positive mental capacities.