The Self Improvement Industry Has Mindfulness All Wrong
A single study proves how mindfulness is misrepresented in popular media.
Looking up the term “mindfulness” today will net 3 billion hits about mindfulness, what it’s about, the benefits of it and more. But it shouldn’t come as a shock that it is so often misrepresented and twisted.
So often in these mindfulness articles, the writer explains how simple mindfulness really is. “Practice mindful meditation and watch your stress melt away.” they say.
It’s effective for the masses, but when you look at scholars and researchers who have studied mindfulness, along with the Buddhist tradition itself, you’ll notice that mindfulness is complicated compared to the picture that others present.
Meditation As A Study
Unlike some other topics around self-improvement, meditation is one of those practices that has been incredibly researched.
Mindfulness started out as a Buddhist practice of “anapana-sati,” a Sanskrit phrase meaning “awareness of breath.” Self-improvement articles call back to this by telling people to “focus on your breath when meditating.”
Regardless, meditation for a time was something that practiced in monasteries almost exclusively until it was introduced to the general public. Once it became available to the public, it was then simplified for people to learn.
The gradual spread of meditation to now, is more complex than that though.
Looking at the US, it started amongst spiritual seekers as early as the 19th century. It was then adopted by psychotherapists in the early 20th century.
And by the 21st, it was promoted by celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra and Gwyneth Paltrow.
From those transitions alone, you can see how there are cultural divides between the practices. What a psychologist will tell you will be very different from what a random self-improvement person will tell you — myself included.
But there is a larger disparity between modern views of meditation and what Buddhist meditation actually is.
Mindfulness pushed to the public emphasizes stress relief and mental health benefits in daily life. The Buddhist monks will use meditation as a form of spiritual development, liberation or enlightenment.
That’s not to say the meditation the public has been pushing is entirely false. The mindfulness-based stress reduction was looked into by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, in 1979.
His research sparked the “medicalized” mindfulness that people have now been pushing for the past two decades. It’s what brought forth over 21,000 research articles on mindfulness and is in the National Library of Medicine’s online database — two and a half times larger than articles published on yoga, tai chi and reiki combined.
The Science Versus The Hype
Mindfulness — and by extension meditation — is a thoroughly researched subject. However where the self improvement industry misleads people is how they use that information in the first place.
Because when turning to medical researchers on mindfulness, they acknowledge there are benefits, however there is a large discrepancy in what the study says and what the public is saying.
For example, a 2019 meta-analysis, which reviewed several individual scientific studies, pointed out that the evidence for the benefits of mindfulness has “significant limitations” and that the research has “methodological shortcomings.”
On the plus side, the study found various forms of meditation to be more or less comparable to conventional therapies that can be used to treat depression, anxiety, chronic pain and substance use. At the same time, more evidence is needed before any strong claims are made regarding treatment of conditions like attention disorders, PTSD, dysregulated eating or any serious mental illness.
However, some people hype this up so much that they brush all of those things aside.
Furthermore, researchers are starting to suggest that a percentage of patients could experience negative side effects from practicing meditation such as:
- Increased anxiety
- Increased depression
- Or in extreme cases, psychosis.
The studies haven’t fully understood why that happens, but the self-improvement industry brushes those aside, pushing the idea that it works for everyone. That it’s a panacea for everyone and if it’s not working, you just need to do more of it.
Let’s Put Mindfulness Into Context
Medicalized meditation today is now a self-help commodity generating over $1 billion USD per year, leading critics to label the entire thing as “McMindfulness.”
It’s tantalizing, but a large portion of the industry are pushing unhealthy facts and habits. And in the end if it’s not working, they condition you to think that something is broken with you when the real issue is that meditation simply isn’t working.
Bringing back Buddhism into the context of mindfulness is a solid first step. Buddhism from the beginning has a lot to say about health. Furthermore, high-profile monastics like the Dalai Lama are more than willing to help in situations.
Introducing a Buddhist ethical context reveals that just meditating isn’t enough if you’re looking to reduce stress or effectively navigate through the challenges you face.
Instead, Buddhist ethics asks us to look away from meditation cushions and look beyond ourselves.
It asks to appreciate how everything is connected. That our actions and choices influence our lives, our society, and the environment.
While meditation is used for healing ourselves, this context reveals that meditation is designed for us to be agents of compassion, healing and well-being for not just ourselves but for the world.
A context that is sorely missed in this industry.
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