The New Gospel of Mindfulness

True enough, mindfulness has been seriously oversold. The enemies of Western civilization have glommed on to this practice—because it comes from Buddhism and Buddhism is not Western. Wouldn’t it have been better if they had embraced Tai Chi or Tae Kwon Do?

For my part I am not inclined to dismiss meditation practices out of hand. People who suffer from anxiety, for example, often gain a significant benefit from yoga... for example. And yet, as Kevin Williamson explains in an excellent column, mindfulness has become a new fad among American corporations.

It makes you more pessimistic about corporate America.

Naturally, its proponents claim that mindfulness will solve all of your problems, make you healthy, wealthy and wise. In addition, it will make you a better worker, better able to compete against our Asian competitors… with better work/life balance. What's not to like?

Our corporations have even figured out how much mindfulness adds to the bottom line. Williamson explains:

Andy Lee has an interesting job title: He is his company’s “chief mindfulness officer,” and he is not employed at some voguish Silicon Valley start-up or by a chain of organic-food co-ops — he works for Aetna, as old-fashioned a corporate giant as you could ever hope to find. In an interview with Healthy Workplace author Leigh Stringer, Aetna’s mindfulness program was described in familiar terms: “Participants are regaining 62 minutes per week of productivity,” Stringer wrote. “They are seeing an approximate dollar return, in terms of productivity alone, of more than $3,000 per person per year.”

And also:

When they aren’t pushing Häagen-Dazs out the door, General Mills employees and executives have access to a seven-week mindfulness program. After completing the program, 80 percent of executives reported that their decision-making skills had improved. 

And yet, how much should we rely on these testimonials. Williamson casts doubt on them:

Were these executives going to tell their superiors that their decision-making skills had been degraded, or that they’d wasted their time? Bear in mind that Häagen-Dazs doesn’t actually mean anything in any language — the guy who founded the company just thought it sounded cool and that people would buy it. There may be a bit of that at work here, too.

He continues, presenting the scientific evidence:

The evidence for its effectiveness is largely subjective, e.g., self-reported improvements in mood, attitude, stress, or sleep. A recent paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science — co-authored by 15 prominent psychological and cognitive-science researchers — gently derided the “pervasive mindfulness hype” associated with research on the subject and concluded that there was very little evidence for its effectiveness on any metric. There were predictable design problems with the research: inconsistent and conflicting definitions, lack of control groups to adjust for placebo effects, lack of replicable results. A review in American Psychologist found that fewer than one in ten mindfulness studies had included a control group. “A 2014 review of 47 meditation trials, collectively including over 3,500 participants, found essentially no evidence for benefits related to enhancing attention, curtailing substance abuse, aiding sleep or controlling weight,” Scientific American reports.

Mindfulness training is a $1 billion–plus business in the United States alone and growing robustly.

This doesn’t make it all bad. It does mean that mindfulness has been seriously oversold… like most forms of therapy.

Williamson argues, cogently, that corporations and even individuals embrace mindfulness because Buddhism does not bear the same stigmas as Western religions. Of course, we can ask what Buddhist civilization has contributed to the world, but that must be for another day. What with every pseudo-intellectual Westerner being a self-proclaimed atheist, our civilization is descending into moral senescence. If it has not already arrived there, that is.

Williamson sees it as a symptom:

It may in fact indicate that among reasonably enlightened, good-faith leaders in the business community, there is an understanding that something is wrong with life here in the rich, healthy, peaceful, free, capitalist world, that something is missing. But if there is a hole in the soul of the West, it probably isn’t shaped like a designer meditation cushion ($349.99 from Walmart), and it probably will not be healed by something so vague and diluted as “mindfulness.”

Or by therapy, for that matter.