Analysis of the relationships between mindfulness and stress for construction professionals

Stress can result in significantly negative consequences to individuals, organization, and society. Various stress reduction methods have been implemented to reduce stress, including mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) that teaches individuals to cultivate mindfulness to release stress. Although it has been confirmed that mindfulness can release stress, relative contribution of each mindfulness characteristics to stress reduction remain unknown. Hence, this study sets out to fill in the research gap in the context of construction industry. A questionnaire was designed and distributed out to construction professionals. Purposive sampling has been adopted to control the quality of the data, and a total of 84 responses were received. A series of statistical techniques are applied to analyze the collected data for testing the reliability and validity of the questionnaire, and for investigating the relationships between mindfulness characteristics and stress. Factor analysis and reliability test determine ten mindfulness characteristics, including attention, patience, beginner's mind, trust, self-compassion, non-reaction, non-judging, non-striving, letting go and description; and four kinds of stress, including quantitative stress, qualitative stress, emotional stress and physical stress. The results of the study reveals that (1) non-reaction and self-compassion can release quantitative stress, while trust and non-judging can exacerbate it; (2) non-reaction can reduce qualitative stress, while attention increases it; and 3) non-judging and description can relieve CPs' emotional stress, while non-striving will exacerbate it. Based on the research findings, several practical recommendations were proposed to construction organization and construction professionals, including developing emergency response guidelines and promoting the value of self-compassion. This work determined the effect of mindfulness characteristics on stress of construction professionals, which enhance the knowledge of stress management in the construction industry.