I Needed Distance Before I Could Write About My Dissertation

I have been meaning to write about my dissertation ever since I passed.

But the truth is, I think I needed to stop thinking about it before I could talk about it properly.

After months of reading, writing, editing, re-editing, collecting data, cleaning data, checking analyses, questioning my wording, and living in a constant state of low-grade academic anxiety, I did not come out of dissertation season wanting to immediately reflect on any of it. I wanted rest. I wanted my brain back. I wanted to not see the words mindfulness, rumination, or mediation analysis for a little while.

So I took the post-dissertation break my mind clearly needed.

And now, with a much clearer head, I can finally say this: I genuinely loved this topic.

Not in the stressful, deadline-driven way you “love” something because you have no choice but to stay attached to it. I mean I really loved it in the deeper sense — as a question I found intellectually rich, emotionally meaningful, and humanly honest. It was one of those topics that kept unfolding the more I sat with it. Even now, without the pressure of submission hanging over me, I still find myself thinking about it.

My dissertation was titled:

The Role of Decentering in the Relationship Between Daily Mindfulness Practice and Rumination.

At first glance, it might sound like a very academic title. And it is. But beneath it sits a question that feels incredibly real:

Why do some people get less trapped in their thoughts, while others get pulled under by them?

Or, more specifically:

How does mindfulness relate to rumination, and could decentering help explain that relationship?

That was the heart of my research.

The question that stayed with me

What drew me to this topic was not simply an interest in mindfulness as a popular concept. If anything, I was interested in going beyond the simplified version of mindfulness that often circulates in wellness culture.

Mindfulness is everywhere now. It is recommended in therapy, discussed in self-help books, built into apps, taught in workshops, and increasingly presented as a cure-all for stress, anxiety, overthinking, burnout, and emotional overwhelm. And while there is a strong body of research showing that mindfulness can be beneficial, I was interested in something more precise than the general idea that “mindfulness helps.”

I wanted to understand how it helps.

Psychology becomes most interesting to me when it asks mechanistic questions rather than just descriptive ones. Not only what is associated with what, but what is the process underneath the relationship? What is actually happening psychologically?

In my dissertation, I focused on three key constructs:

Mindfulness — broadly, the tendency to pay attention to the present moment with awareness.
Rumination — repetitive, passive, negative thinking, often focused on distress, mistakes, or unresolved feelings.
Decentering — the ability to step back from thoughts and emotions and see them as temporary mental events rather than facts, truths, or fixed reflections of the self.

The more I read, the more I became drawn to decentering.

There is something almost deceptively simple about the idea. A thought arises. Instead of collapsing into it, identifying with it, or letting it define reality, you observe it. You notice that it is there, but you do not become entirely fused with it.

The difference can be subtle in language, but enormous in experience.

“I am failing.”

versus

“I am having the thought that I am failing.”

One statement feels engulfing. The other creates space.

That space is what fascinated me.

Why rumination matters so much

Rumination is not just “thinking a lot.” It is not ordinary reflection, and it is not the same as healthy introspection. It is the kind of repetitive negative thinking that circles without resolving. The kind that keeps returning to the same wound, the same fear, the same regret, the same self-criticism. It often feels active, but it is psychologically sticky rather than productive.

The literature consistently links rumination with depression, anxiety, and the maintenance of distress. In simple terms, people do not just feel bad and then ruminate; rumination can also keep them feeling bad for longer. It reinforces negative mood, narrows perspective, and makes it harder to disengage from maladaptive thinking patterns.

That makes it an important process to study, especially in young adults.

My dissertation focused on young adults aged 18–30, a developmental period that often contains identity formation, instability, academic or career pressure, relationship change, future uncertainty, and heightened vulnerability to emotional distress. I was interested in this age group partly because it felt both important and under-examined in this area of research. Much of the existing mindfulness literature focuses on clinical samples or structured intervention settings. I wanted to look at these processes in a non-clinical, everyday young adult population.

The core idea behind the study

The theoretical model behind my dissertation was:

Mindfulness → Decentering → Rumination

In other words, I proposed that mindfulness might not reduce rumination directly and uniformly on its own. Instead, its beneficial effect might depend on whether it helps people develop decentering.

This distinction mattered to me because it challenged the overly tidy assumption that awareness is always automatically helpful.

What if becoming more aware of your inner world is only beneficial when you also know how to relate to that inner world differently?

What if awareness without distance can sometimes leave people more exposed to their own difficult thoughts rather than less?

That possibility made the study feel much more nuanced, and much more psychologically honest.

How I turned the question into a study

Methodologically, this was a cross-sectional online survey study. I built and hosted the survey using Qualtrics and recruited participants through Prolific. My target population was UK-based young adults aged 18 to 30 who had some current or prior experience with mindfulness practice, whether formal or informal.

I initially collected responses from 310 participants. After data cleaning — which involved removing ineligible cases, duplicate entries, failed attention checks, and substantial missing data — the final analytic sample consisted of 283 participants.

This was one of the parts of the project that made research feel especially real to me.

When people imagine psychology research, they often imagine the final results section, or maybe the big theoretical question. But so much of the work lives in the scaffolding: designing the participant flow, thinking through inclusion criteria, making the survey clear and ethical, anticipating confusion, checking that measures are presented properly, screening the data, and trying to be as careful as possible at every stage.

In my case, participants completed three validated self-report measures:

- the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire – Short Form (FFMQ-SF) to assess trait mindfulness
- the Experiences Questionnaire – Decentering Subscale (EQ) to assess decentering
- the Ruminative Responses Scale (RRS) to assess rumination

These were not just convenient measures. Part of the methodological strength of the study was that all three had established use in the literature and performed well in my sample. Internal consistency was good to excellent across the measures: α = .88 for mindfulness, α = .81 for decentering, and α = .93 for rumination.

That mattered because it meant the scales were reliably capturing the constructs I intended to study. In psychological research, especially when working with internal states and self-report data, measurement quality matters enormously. You cannot build a meaningful interpretation on unstable measurement.

The statistical model

The main analyses included correlations and a mediation model.

The mediation question was whether decentering explained the relationship between mindfulness and rumination. Statistically, this meant testing whether mindfulness predicted decentering, whether decentering predicted rumination, and whether the indirect pathway between mindfulness and rumination through decentering was significant.

The expected logic was straightforward:

- higher mindfulness would be associated with higher decentering
- higher decentering would be associated with lower rumination
- mindfulness would be negatively associated with rumination
- decentering would mediate the mindfulness–rumination relationship

At least, that was the hypothesis.

And then the data became more interesting than the theory.

The findings that made me stop and think

Some of the results aligned with what I expected.

First, mindfulness was positively associated with decentering. People who reported higher mindfulness also tended to report greater ability to step back from their thoughts. This supported the idea that mindfulness and decentering are meaningfully related.

Second, decentering was negatively associated with rumination. People who were better at observing thoughts as mental events rather than truths reported lower levels of repetitive negative thinking. This was a particularly satisfying finding because it aligned strongly with both theory and intuition.

But the third major result was unexpected:

mindfulness itself showed a small positive association with rumination.

That was not what I originally predicted, and not what many people would assume if they hear the words “mindfulness” and “overthinking” in the same sentence.

In simple terms, in this sample, higher mindfulness scores were linked with slightly higher rumination rather than lower rumination.

That finding forced me to think harder, not just statistically but conceptually.

It would have been much easier if the results had confirmed the neat narrative that mindfulness simply lowers rumination across the board. But they did not. Instead, they suggested something more complex and more revealing.

When I ran the mediation analysis, the picture became clearer.

Although mindfulness had a positive direct association with rumination, the indirect effect through decentering was significant and negative. In other words, mindfulness predicted greater decentering, and greater decentering predicted lower rumination. This meant that decentering partially mediated the relationship between mindfulness and rumination.

That was the key finding of the whole dissertation.

Not that mindfulness is useless. Not that mindfulness is harmful. But that mindfulness may not be uniformly protective unless it is accompanied by decentering.

What this finding might mean

This interpretation mattered a lot to me, because it pointed toward a more refined understanding of mindfulness.

Awareness alone may not always be enough.

It is entirely possible that becoming more attentive to your internal world makes you more aware of your difficult thoughts without necessarily teaching you how to hold them differently. If that awareness is not accompanied by non-reactivity, acceptance, or decentering, then greater inner awareness may sometimes feel like greater exposure. You notice more, but you are not yet less entangled.

That possibility helps explain why mindfulness is sometimes treated too simplistically in public discourse. There is a tendency to assume that noticing thoughts is the same as transforming one’s relationship to thoughts. But psychologically, those are not identical processes.

You can be very aware and still be deeply caught.

You can notice every distressing thought and still believe each one.

You can be attentive to your mind and still not know how to create distance from what it is telling you.

The findings of my study suggested exactly this kind of complexity. Mindfulness may be beneficial, but its benefits may depend on the presence of decentering as a mechanism.

That, to me, was far more interesting than a clean, simple result.

## Why decentering stayed with me

If I am honest, decentering is the idea I carried away from this project most strongly.

There is something about it that feels scientifically rich and emotionally resonant at the same time. It is a psychological construct, yes. But it is also an everyday human skill.

To decenter is not to suppress. Not to deny. Not to pretend. Not to become numb. It is not the refusal of emotion. It is not detachment in the cold sense.

It is more like learning not to confuse every thought with truth, every feeling with permanence, every mental event with identity.

That shift feels deeply important.

Because a lot of suffering seems to happen not only because a painful thought appears, but because we get pulled so close to it that we lose perspective entirely. The thought becomes the whole room. The feeling becomes the whole self. There is no space left between observer and experience.

Decentering reintroduces that space.

And I think that is why I found the topic personally meaningful as well as academically compelling. It offers a gentler model of psychological wellbeing. One that is not built on the fantasy of eliminating discomfort, but on the possibility of relating to discomfort differently.

Not “I must never think this.”

But “I notice that I am thinking this.”

Not “this feeling defines me.”

But “this feeling is here right now.”

That is a very different psychological position to inhabit.

## What I learned from the process of doing the research

Beyond the actual findings, this dissertation taught me a lot about what research is.

Before conducting a project like this, it is easy to imagine research mainly as reading theories and producing conclusions. But the lived reality is messier, more demanding, and more humbling.

Research involves doubt.

It involves sitting with ambiguity. It involves building a design, making the best decisions you can, recognising limitations, and then interpreting findings carefully rather than forcing them into the shape you hoped for. It also involves accepting that results do not owe you neatness.

I think one of the most valuable things this project taught me was intellectual honesty.

It would have been easy to feel frustrated by an unexpected positive association between mindfulness and rumination. But in reality, that result was part of what made the study worth doing. It pushed me to think beyond assumption, to engage more critically with the literature, and to reflect on how constructs behave differently depending on context, measurement, and population.

That is part of what I love about psychology when it is done well. It resists simplification. It asks you to tolerate complexity.

This project also strengthened my appreciation for methodology itself: survey design, participant recruitment, ethics procedures, data cleaning, reliability checking, and statistical interpretation. Those parts are not glamorous, but they are where rigour lives.

The limitations that matter

As much as I care about the findings, I also care about being honest about what the study cannot claim.

This was a cross-sectional study, which means it cannot establish causality. I could examine associations and test a mediation model statistically, but I could not prove that mindfulness causes decentering, or that decentering causes reduced rumination over time. The model is theoretically grounded, but longitudinal or experimental research would be needed to establish directionality more confidently.

The study also relied on self-report measures, which always come with limitations. Self-report is useful and often necessary in psychological research, especially for internal constructs like mindfulness and rumination, but it is also shaped by self-awareness, interpretation, and response tendencies.

In addition, my sample was composed of UK-based young adults recruited online, which means the findings may not generalise in the same way to older adults, adolescents, or non-Western populations.

These are not fatal flaws. They are simply the real boundaries of the design. Good research does not pretend to be more definitive than it is.

Where this research could go next

One of the reasons I still find this dissertation exciting is that it feels like a beginning rather than an endpoint.

There are several directions that future research could take.

A particularly important next step would be longitudinal or intervention-based research. If decentering is genuinely a key mechanism linking mindfulness to lower rumination, then studies that track participants over time or explicitly train these skills could test the pathway more directly.

Another promising direction would be to examine the different facets of mindfulness more closely. Mindfulness is not a single monolithic process. It includes observation, acting with awareness, non-judging, non-reactivity, and description. It may be that some facets are more protective than others, or that some are beneficial only when combined with decentering-related skills.

I also think there is strong potential for this research to be extended into clinical populations, especially people experiencing depression or anxiety, where rumination plays a central role. If decentering is a protective factor, then understanding how to cultivate it more effectively could have meaningful therapeutic implications.

More broadly, the findings suggest that mindfulness-based programmes in schools, universities, workplaces, and therapeutic settings may be strengthened when they explicitly teach how to step back from thoughts, not just how to notice them. That means thought-labelling, cognitive distancing, non-reactivity, and practical exercises that help people see thoughts as passing events rather than truths they must obey.

In other words, the future of this line of research may lie not in asking whether mindfulness “works” in a broad yes-or-no way, but in clarifying which components matter, for whom, and through what mechanisms.

That feels like a more mature and more useful direction for psychology.