Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Consciousness and Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/concog Building mindfulness bottom-up: Meditation in natural settings supports open monitoring and attention restoration Freddie Lymeus a, ⁎ , Per Lindberg a , Terry Hartig a,b a Department of Psychology, Uppsala University, Box 1225, SE-751 42 Uppsala, Sweden b Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University, Box 514, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Attention Mindfulness Meditation Restoration Training ABSTRACT Mindfulness courses conventionally use effortful, focused meditation to train attention. In con- trast, natural settings can effortlessly support state mindfulness and restore depleted attention resources, which could facilitate meditation. We performed two studies that compared conven- tional training with restoration skills training (ReST) that taught low-effort open monitoring meditation in a garden over five weeks. Assessments before and after meditation on multiple occasions showed that ReST meditation increasingly enhanced attention performance. Conventional meditation enhanced attention initially but increasingly incurred effort, reflected in performance decrements toward the course end. With both courses, attentional improvements generalized in the first weeks of training. Against established accounts, the generalized im- provements thus occurred before any effort was incurred by the conventional exercises. We propose that restoration rather than attention training can account for early attentional im- provements with meditation. ReST holds promise as an undemanding introduction to mind- fulness and as a method to enhance restoration in nature contacts. 1. Introduction Many people in modern societies routinely challenge their cognitive and emotional capabilities in efforts to meet the demands of their work and personal lives. These efforts draw down adaptive resources, like the ability to direct attention despite intrusive thoughts or external distractions. If the resources remain depleted, focus and performance will deteriorate, fatigue and chronic stress ensue, and health and well-being suffer (Cohen, 1980; Kaplan, 1995; von Lindern, Lymeus, & Hartig, 2017). Different approaches have been proposed to prevent these negative effects. Some aim to enable periodic relief from demands and promote restoration of depleted resources, like restorative environments approaches (e.g., Hartig, Mitchell, De Vries, & Frumkin, 2014; Kaplan, 1995). Others target a presumed need for individual training to strengthen the capabilities needed to meet demands, like mindfulness training (e.g., Brown, Ryan, & Creswell, 2007; Tang, Holzel, & Posner, 2015; cf. Kaplan, 2001; Tang & Posner, 2009). In this paper we offer an integration of these approaches that takes advantage of their respective strengths to overcome their respective weaknesses. In the following, we first consider the restorative environments and mindfulness training approaches alone, and then we indicate points of connection between the two. We draw on these connections in our integrated approach which we call restoration skills training (ReST). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2018.01.008 Received 18 July 2017; Received in revised form 29 January 2018; Accepted 30 January 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: Freddie.Lymeus@psyk.uu.se (F. Lymeus), Per.Lindberg@psyk.uu.se (P. Lindberg), Terry.Hartig@ibf.uu.se (T. Hartig). Consciousness and Cognition 59 (2018) 40–56 1053-8100/ © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. T