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Mindfulness in Motion: a Mindfulness-Based Intervention to Reduce Stress and Enhance Quality of Sleep in Scandinavian Employees

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Abstract

Worksite stress reduction interventions are utilized by employers to improve the health and productivity of their workers. Originally designed for the American workplace, Mindfulness in Motion (MIM) is a mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) that incorporates mindfulness, music, and yoga in a time-limited fashion. This study examined the effectiveness of the Danish translation of MIM and investigated the ability of MIM to reduce stress while enhancing quality of sleep and work engagement in bank employees of a non-American culture. In a randomized controlled trial in Copenhagen, Denmark, participants were assigned to the worksite MIM stress reduction program or were wait-listed to the control group. The intervention group (n = 27) received 8 weeks of MIM (60 min/week) via a trained instructor. The controls (n = 30) received no intervention during the study period. Participants were assessed at baseline, immediately following the intervention, and 8 weeks post-intervention via the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS), the Pittsburgh Quality of Sleep Scale (PSQI), and the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale-9 (UWES-9). While there was no significant improvement in overall work engagement, the MIM group achieved significant reductions in stress (p < 0.001), improvements in global sleep (p = 0.005), subjective sleep quality (p = 0.007), and daytime dysfunction (p = 0.004) and trended toward improvement in the subscale of work absorption (p = 0.05). These improvements were maintained at least 8 weeks after the completion of the program. This study demonstrates the feasibility of the cross-cultural translation of MIM as an effective MBI that can be generalizable to populations outside the American worksite.

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Acknowledgments

CN coordinated the onsite MIM intervention and translated it into Danish, SW performed the statistical analysis, LY edited the manuscript and added public health insight, BR made critical editorial and content-specific suggestions, MK created research intervention, trained CN in MIM, designed the study, and wrote the manuscript. All authors read and approved final manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge Roshini Srinivasan who provided formatting assistance with the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Family Medicine, The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Suite 250 Northwood-High Building # 261, 2231 North High Street, Columbus, OH, 43201, USA

    Maryanna Klatt

  2. Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Chris Norre

  3. Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Columbus, USA

    Brenda Reader

  4. Health Services Management & Policy Division, The Ohio State University College of Public Health, Columbus, USA

    Laura Yodice

  5. OSU-CCC James Cancer Hospital, Health Information Management and Systems Division, The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA

    Susan White

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  1. Maryanna Klatt
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  2. Chris Norre
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  4. Laura Yodice
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  5. Susan White
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maryanna Klatt.

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Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Funding

The materials for this study were paid for by Nordea Bank, but the authors of this study received no funding for conducting the research study.

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Klatt, M., Norre, C., Reader, B. et al. Mindfulness in Motion: a Mindfulness-Based Intervention to Reduce Stress and Enhance Quality of Sleep in Scandinavian Employees. Mindfulness 8, 481–488 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-016-0621-x

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