Meditation focuses on the present, but does it make people impatient?
Mindfulness meditation encourages attention to the present moment. That emphasis has prompted an intriguing concern: could practising mindfulness make people less willing to wait for rewards in the future?
A peer-reviewed study published in Scientific Reports on 15 October 2026 investigated that question across three laboratory experiments and an eight-week meditation programme.
The researchers found no meaningful evidence that mindfulness increased present bias, the tendency to favour immediate rewards over larger delayed benefits.
The finding is important because present-moment awareness and short-term gratification sound similar in everyday language, but they are not necessarily the same psychological process.
Mindfulness can involve noticing thoughts and sensations without automatically acting on them. Present bias, by contrast, concerns how people value outcomes arriving at different times.
The study’s conclusion is not that meditation improves every decision or guarantees greater patience. It is that the specific concern about increased impatience was not supported in the situations tested.
What economists mean by present bias
Imagine being offered a smaller payment today or a larger payment in several weeks. Choosing the immediate reward can reflect many factors, including uncertainty, financial need and personal preference.
Present bias refers more specifically to an additional preference for an immediate outcome simply because it is available now.
Researchers study this tendency through intertemporal choice tasks, in which participants compare rewards delivered at different times.
Someone might prefer a larger payment in six weeks over a smaller one in four weeks, but reverse that preference when choosing between a smaller payment today and a larger one in two weeks.
That inconsistency can reveal the special pull of immediacy, although real financial decisions are often more complicated.
The authors wanted to know whether training people to attend to the present would amplify that pull.
The question matters for workplaces and educational settings where mindfulness is sometimes promoted alongside goals involving planning and self-control.
Four studies tested the idea
Josep Gisbert, Daniel Navarro-Martinez, Andrés Martín-Asuero and Jordi Quoidbach conducted three laboratory studies and one longitudinal field study.
The first laboratory experiment involved 323 participants assigned to mindfulness, mind-wandering or control conditions.
A second experiment recruited 140 participants and used hypothetical financial allocation scenarios inspired by everyday decisions.
The third included 389 participants and introduced 42 choices involving smaller earlier and larger later monetary rewards.
Together, the three laboratory studies involved 852 participants, although each experiment had its own measures and analysis.
The fourth study followed 57 people who completed both assessments around an eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course.
The researchers used different tasks and intervention lengths to test whether a consistent effect might emerge under more than one set of conditions.
Because the fourth study lacked a separate randomized comparison group, it provides a different level of causal evidence from the laboratory experiments.
A 15-minute meditation did not change choices
In the first experiment, participants completed a brief guided exercise or entered one of the comparison conditions before answering questions about rewards over time.
The mindfulness exercise worked as intended on measures of present-moment focus.
Participants in the mindfulness condition reported greater attention to the present than those in the mind-wandering or control groups.
Yet their preferences for earlier versus later rewards did not differ meaningfully from those of the comparison groups.
The authors reported negligible standardized differences, with confidence intervals including zero.
Bayesian analyses also generally favoured the interpretation that the mindfulness exercise had no detectable effect on these decisions.
This matters because a null result is easier to interpret when the researchers can demonstrate that the intervention changed the mental state it was designed to influence.
The first experiment therefore separated increased present awareness from increased desire for immediate gratification.
Everyday financial scenarios produced a similar result
The second experiment moved beyond conventional reward-choice questions to scenarios resembling personal financial decisions.
Participants considered how they would divide a hypothetical €10,000 windfall between immediate enjoyment and saving for later.
Other tasks tested preferences involving present and future consumption.
The researchers again compared people who completed a mindfulness exercise with mind-wandering and control groups.
The results did not show that the mindfulness group became more inclined toward immediate spending or gratification.
Some comparisons involving mind-wandering differed from control responses, but those findings did not establish a harmful effect of mindfulness.
Because these decisions were hypothetical, the authors acknowledged that participants might behave differently when real money is at stake.
That limitation motivated a third experiment involving consequential financial choices.
Real incentives and 42 choices
In the third laboratory experiment, 389 participants made 42 decisions comparing monetary rewards available at different times.
Earlier payments ranged from €5 to €34, while later payments ranged from €7 to €43.
The researchers estimated two features of time preferences using a mathematical model: general discounting of delayed rewards and the additional preference for immediate rewards.
This approach allowed them to distinguish impatience in general from present bias specifically.
Among participants in the mindfulness group, 74% were classified as present-biased by the model.
The corresponding figures were 77% in the mind-wandering group and 82% in the control group.
Although these percentages differed numerically, the comparisons were not statistically significant.
The study therefore does not justify claiming that mindfulness reduced present bias by eight percentage points.
The estimated differences were too uncertain to support that interpretation, and other model-based comparisons also failed to establish meaningful effects.
What happened after eight weeks of training?
Short exercises may not have the same effects as sustained practice, so the researchers also examined an established eight-week mindfulness course.
Fifty-seven participants completed both the initial and final decision-making assessments.
Among 55 people with complete mindfulness-scale data, the average score increased from 3.63 before training to 4.39 afterward.
That increase was statistically significant, providing evidence that participants reported greater mindfulness after the programme.
However, the proportion of choices favouring larger delayed rewards changed only from 0.640 to 0.671.
The difference was not statistically significant, with a reported p-value of 0.463.
Of the 57 participants, 12 made a greater proportion of patient choices afterward, 10 made fewer and 35 showed no change.
These results are consistent with the laboratory findings, but the lack of a separate control group means the field study cannot isolate all possible effects of the course.
The programme also experienced 35% attrition between assessments, another limitation when interpreting the result.
A combined analysis strengthened the finding
Rather than relying only on separate experiments, the researchers pooled standardized effects from the three laboratory studies.
The fixed-effect pooled estimate was 0.020, with a 95% confidence interval from -0.096 to 0.136.
An estimate so close to zero suggests that any average effect on the measured choices was very small in these studies.
The reported p-value was 0.730, and a Bayesian analysis offered strong evidence in favour of the null hypothesis.
The researchers also tested a more restricted synthesis using one primary outcome per experiment.
That analysis likewise found an effect close to zero.
These findings make the interpretation stronger than simply saying that one experiment failed to reach statistical significance.
Still, they apply to the tested interventions, participants and decision tasks; they cannot rule out every possible effect in all populations or circumstances.
What the findings mean for workplaces
Mindfulness programmes have become familiar in organisations seeking to support employees’ attention, well-being and resilience.
One concern has been whether encouraging people to focus on the present might undermine planning, saving or other future-oriented behaviour.
This study offers reassurance on that narrow question: it found no meaningful evidence that mindfulness made participants favour immediate rewards more strongly.
However, it does not show that a workplace meditation programme will improve productivity, financial judgment or business outcomes.
Nor does it assess whether mindfulness should replace other forms of mental health support.
Managers considering such programmes should distinguish between specific measured benefits and broader promotional claims.
The research illustrates why a plausible-sounding concern should be tested rather than accepted on the basis of language alone.
Being attentive to the present is not equivalent to abandoning concern for the future.
Important limits and unanswered questions
Most laboratory participants were relatively young, with average ages around 21, so the findings may not transfer directly to older adults.
The laboratory exercises were brief, and the longer programme involved a comparatively small sample.
The study did not specifically test clinical populations, people facing severe financial stress or every type of real-world high-stakes decision.
Even when monetary incentives are used, laboratory choices simplify the complexity of actual saving, borrowing and investment behaviour.
The eight-week study’s attrition and absence of a randomized control group further limit causal interpretation.
Future studies could examine longer training, more diverse populations and decisions observed over extended periods.
Researchers could also investigate whether meditation influences the emotions or brain processes underlying choices even when outward decisions remain unchanged.
The central finding remains appropriately specific: across four studies, mindfulness did not meaningfully increase present bias in the measured tasks.
Why a finding of no effect matters
Scientific headlines often favour discoveries of strong effects, but well-designed research can also clarify when a feared effect does not appear.
The authors tested the same general question using different designs, reward formats and intervention durations.
They showed that mindfulness increased present-moment awareness without producing a corresponding increase in impatience.
The evidence therefore challenges the assumption that paying attention to now necessarily means caring less about later.
For individuals, the findings do not promise that meditation will make financial decisions better.
For researchers and organisations, they provide a more precise basis for discussing mindfulness and decision-making.
The broader lesson is that two ideas that sound similar can describe very different psychological mechanisms.
Being present, according to these results, need not mean choosing the present at the expense of the future.
Source Information
Study: Mindfulness meditation does not make people more present-biased.
Authors: Josep Gisbert, Daniel Navarro-Martinez, Andrés Martín-Asuero and Jordi Quoidbach.
Journal: Scientific Reports, volume 16, article 32477.
Published: 15 October 2026.
Methods: Three laboratory experiments (323, 140 and 389 participants) and one eight-week longitudinal mindfulness course with 57 participants completing both assessments.
