MINDLIVEN Training: Meditation exercises in a virtual natural environment and its effects in workplaces

To cope with modern work contexts, people need to develop new skills such as cognitive flexibility, problem-solving abilities, and work-related stress resilience (Carnevale and Smith, 2013). Pieces of evidence have shown that mindfulness practices applied to work contexts can strengthen these skills. In fact, among the outcomes of a constant mindfulness practice, work-related stress reduction, increased creativity, problemsolving, and cognitive flexibility can be listed (Bazarko et al., 2013; Burton et al., 2017; Glomb et al., 2011). Spending time in regenerative natural environments (e.g., green areas, gardens, forests) has also been shown to lead to similar outcomes (Lee et al., 2022; Spano et al., 2022). However, modern lifestyle and pressing work schedules make it difficult for most people to carry out prolonged mindfulness practices in nature (Cox et al., 2018). To enable as many people as possible to benefit from such practices, we created MINDLIVEN, a digital training platform consisting of a virtual natural environment in which it is possible to run a complete mindfulness training, composed of a set of nine lessons of increasing difficulty. We carried out a pilot study on 140 workers who voluntarily participated in the project. Before starting the training and after completing it, we measured the participants’ levels of work-related stress, perceived restorativeness of their work environment, and emotional regulation abilities using the following instruments: the Health and Safety Executive (HSE; Balducci et al., 2013) for levels of work-related stress, the Nature Contact Questionnaire (NCQ; Largo-Wight, 2011) and the Restorativeness at Work Scale (REST@WORK) for the perceived restorativeness (Brondino et al., 2023) and the EMRS (Gross et al., 2003) for the strategies of emotional regulation. At the end of the course, we also measured the mindfulness experience with the Toronto Mindfulness Scale (TMS; Lau et al., 2006). The structure of the Mindfulnessin- Nature training platform MINDLIVEN and the positive outcomes obtained with the training will be discussed.