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In general, you can sum up experience as
stimuli -> processing -> reaction
Think of mental health as how appropriately your mind processes an experience. Healthy processing requires conscious attention, and your capacity for this can be exercised with mindfulness and meditation. The goal is to increase the space and consideration between stimuli and reaction.
In meditation you sit (or walk, etc.) with complex emotions, under stress, boredom, or even joy, examining your thoughts rather than immediately jumping into reaction. This practice pays off, allowing you to exercise more consideration in all moments. It allows you to wield intention, to create your OWN mental patterns, rather than allowing your inertia to take you where it will.
Many mental health issues are essentially well-reinforced patterns of negative stimuli -> negative processing -> negative reaction. If one strengthens the mental muscle of pumping the brakes in the middle there, they can access other perspectives, and make more balanced decisions. If they do this enough, they can move away from negative patterns and into balanced, present, healthy processing.
Theres a few “mechanisms of action” that the research on mindfulness looks into, to borrow a medical phrase.
1) emotion regulation. We know quite a bit about emotion regulation processes people can do and which tend (on average) to be adaptive or bad for your overall well-being. mindfulness in particular is like training yourself to do acceptance more often. Emotional acceptance is good for you when situations are out of your control or you tend to be anxious (perhaps overrespond emotionally). One of the problems with negative feelings is some people get trapped in a cycle of feeling bad about feeling bad.
2) cognitive reappraisal (also an emotion regulation strategy but not just that). Mindfulness can reorient the way you think about or prioritize the “self.” If stress is primarily about “you” it could help to reduce the relative importance of “you” as a solitary individual. This can happen in different ways. For example, one is through shared humanity (remembering you’re not alone in struggling often comforts people). Another is contextualizing challenges (how important is it really?).
3) Mindfulness promotes the prior kinds of things also by focusing attention on things not just about your future or past worries. Attention regulation itself is a pretty big ingredient in well being. E.g., how do I move from spending all this attention on feeling bad about myself to instead pay attention to things that make life worthwhile? Depressed people and anxious people and many others have biases in what they pay attention to (e.g., more likely to pay attention to signs of rejection or failure). Many mindfulness practices are specifically about redirecting your attention to the present moment or activity. It’s a genuine skill being able to do it. Practice via meditation can help.
There’s more. I’m sure. But these are the ones I know a little about.
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