Most research suggests that mindfulness (the practice of paying attention to the present moment with awareness and without judgment) helps people become calmer, more self-aware, and less impulsive. However, a recent study found that mindfulness can actually increase one’s propensity for risk-taking – in the short term.

The study, titled Brief mindfulness meditation increases risk-taking behaviour, found that even a brief five-minute mindfulness meditation session can influence how people make decisions under uncertainty.

“The key lies in how mindfulness affects loss aversion – a deeply ingrained psychological tendency where people fear potential losses far more than they value equivalent gains . By cultivating present-moment awareness and a non-judgmental stance toward experience, mindfulness appears to reduce the emotional weight people assign to negative outcomes. As a result, practitioners become less reactive to the prospect of losing, lowering the psychological barrier to risk-taking. Rather than simply calming the mind, mindfulness reshapes the very calculus by which people weigh risk against reward,” explained lead researcher Associate Professor Lucy Tan, Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology at JCU in Singapore.

“The findings challenge the common perception of mindfulness as purely calming or caution-inducing, suggesting instead that it may shift how people perceive and respond to risk,” she added.

Testing how mindfulness shapes risk-taking

The researchers conducted two experiments involving 300 participants each from the United Kingdom (UK) and Singapore.¹ Across both experiments, participants who completed the mindfulness meditation consistently took greater risks than those in the control groups.

To understand why this happened, the researchers applied computational modelling to analyse how participants made decisions during the tasks. They found that mindfulness specifically changed how strongly they reacted to potential negative outcomes, instead of altering how participants learned from feedback or estimated risk.

The analysis revealed that mindfulness primarily reduced Loss Aversion – a psychological tendency where people weigh potential losses more heavily than equivalent gains. For example, someone would rather have a guaranteed win of $50 than gamble for a potential gain of $100, due to the greater fear of losing.

“In other words, participants who underwent mindfulness meditation became less emotionally affected by the possibility of losing, making them more willing to continue taking risks,” explained Associate Professor Tan.

Who these findings can impact

The findings highlight the complex ways mindfulness can influence cognition and behaviour. For example, rather than simply making people calmer or less impulsive, mindfulness may also alter how individuals evaluate uncertain situations and balance risks against rewards.

“That’s not to say that reduced loss aversion is always negative,” clarified Associate Professor Tan. “In some situations – such as investing, entrepreneurship or high-pressure decision-making – being less emotionally reactive to setbacks could support more objective choices.”

She noted that the findings may be particularly relevant for professionals whose work involves making high-stakes decisions under pressure, such as investors, traders,  surgeons, pilots and first responders; as well as individuals with certain psychiatric conditions.

“The first group that comes to mind is anyone who manages money for a living – investors, traders, fund managers. Loss aversion is already well-known as one of the messiest cognitive biases in financial decision-making, and this paper shows that even a single five-minute meditation can chip away at it. That's not a small thing. Someone who meditates regularly before making portfolio decisions may be operating with a consistently different risk threshold without ever realising it.”

Dr Tan also shared about high-stakes professionals such as surgeons, pilots, first-responders. “These are people who already operate under enormous pressure, and where a certain kind of over-caution can be the dangerous thing. In these situations, reduced loss aversion isn't obviously bad. It might actually be the edge that keeps them decisive when it counts,” she said.

The findings may also raise important considerations for clinical groups. Conditions such as ADHD, addiction and borderline personality disorder are already closely linked to impulsivity and risk-taking, and mindfulness-based interventions are commonly used in therapeutic settings.

“It doesn’t mean mindfulness is wrong for these patients,” said Associate Professor Tan. “But it probably means we can't keep treating it as a one-size intervention without asking sharper questions about what it's doing.”

Associate Professor Tan also raised the importance of better understanding the cognitive effects of mindfulness practices, especially as brief meditation exercises become increasingly common in workplaces, schools and digital wellness platforms.

Why these findings matter

“Most people – individuals, organisations, governments – are using mindfulness as if its effects are well understood, and they're not,” said Associate Professor Tan.

“For healthcare workers and mental health professionals, what’s valuable here is not just the finding itself, but understanding the mechanism behind it,” she added. “The computational modelling showed that mindfulness specifically reduced loss aversion. It opens up more targeted questions about which patients may benefit most, in which contexts, and towards which outcomes.”

“And for organisations and governments, the stakes are arguably the highest – because scale amplifies everything. Workplace mindfulness programmes, national wellbeing campaigns, meditation apps with tens of millions of users – the fact that this effect held across both UK and Singaporean samples suggests it's not culturally specific. That's a lot of people quietly having their relationship to loss and risk reshaped, often with no awareness that this is happening. That's exactly why research like this needs to move out of academic journals and into the rooms where these programmes are being designed and funded,” she added.

The researchers hope future studies will explore whether different types of mindfulness practices produce similar effects, how long these behavioural changes last, and how mindfulness influences risk-taking in real-world settings beyond laboratory tasks.

PAPER

Tan, L.B.G., Golubickis, M. & Macrae, C.N. Brief mindfulness meditation increases risk-taking behavior. Sci Rep 16, 6760 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-37597-6

Check out Associate Professor Lucy Tan’s staff and research profiles here.

Find out more about our Psychology courses.

Discover further information on areas of research, and research strength at James Cook University in Singapore.

Find out more about the Singapore campus of James Cook University.

Contacts

Associate Professor Lucy Tan lucy.tan@jcu.edu.au

Media: Ms Pinky Sibal pinky.sibal@jcu.edu.au / Ms Hoe Shu Rin shurin.hoe@jcu.edu.au