Mindfulness Skills Worksheet: See Which of the Five Facets Come Easily to You

About this tool

Mindfulness is often described as a single thing, but researchers have found it is made of several distinct skills. The Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), developed by Ruth Baer and colleagues, identified five facets that tend to grow with practice: observing, describing, acting with awareness, non-judging of inner experience, and non-reacting to inner experience. Seeing mindfulness as five separate skills is useful, because most of us are naturally stronger in some than others.

Each facet is concrete. Observing is noticing sensations, sounds, and feelings as they arise. Describing is putting inner experience into words without getting lost in it. Acting with awareness is doing one thing at a time, the opposite of autopilot. Non-judging is meeting your thoughts and feelings without labeling them good or bad, or criticizing yourself for having them. Non-reacting is letting thoughts and emotions come and go without being swept into them or having to act on them immediately.

This worksheet is not the formal questionnaire and does not produce a clinical score. It is a reflective tool that borrows the five-facet framework to help you take stock. By noticing which facets feel natural and which feel hard, you can aim your practice where it will help most. For example, someone who observes easily but judges harshly might focus on the non-judging skill, while someone who lives on autopilot might practice acting with awareness during routine tasks.

Treat the result as a starting point, not a verdict. All five facets strengthen with regular mindfulness practice, and picking one to work on for a week makes the practice specific and doable.

The framework comes from a 39-item questionnaire that Ruth Baer and colleagues built by combining and testing several earlier mindfulness scales, then confirming the same five-facet structure held up in both people who meditated regularly and people who did not (Baer RA, Smith GT, Hopkins J, Krietemeyer J, Toney L, 2006; Baer RA, et al., 2008, both listed in the references below). That is why the five facets, rather than a single overall mindfulness score, are the more useful way to think about the skill.

This kind of reflection tends to help people who are starting a meditation or mindfulness-based practice and want a way to notice what is changing, or who feel stuck and want to see which specific skill to work on next. It is not built to track symptoms of a diagnosable condition. If what you are really trying to understand is anxiety or low mood rather than mindfulness skills, a screening tool aimed at that condition, followed by talking to a licensed therapist, will tell you more than this worksheet can.

A common mistake is treating a low rating on one facet as a personal failing rather than a starting point, or trying to work on all five facets at once. Picking a single facet and a single small practice, as the last section asks you to, tends to produce more real change than a vague intention to be more mindful overall.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Reviewed the worksheet for fidelity to the five-facet framework and clarity.

References

1. Baer RA, Smith GT, Hopkins J, Krietemeyer J, Toney L. Using self-report assessment methods to explore facets of mindfulness. Assessment. 2006;13(1):27-45.
2. Baer RA, et al. Construct validity of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire in meditating and nonmeditating samples. Assessment. 2008;15(3):329-342.

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