Usually, practicing being mindful just brings about more anxiety than if I were to lose myself into doing something that has the capability of swallowing me whole - such as playing video games, running, driving, having long walks.
> lose myself into doing something that has the capability of swallowing me whole
That's what being mindful is all about! It teaches you how to be present in the moment and let those negative anxious thoughts pass by rather than consume you.
Well, that's just as much something that can be learned through CBT or other means, and it's worth keeping in mind that negative effects are not unheard of [1].
This isn’t meditation or mindfulness, it’s just an aspirational sales pitch for it that says nothing about how fucking hard it is when you’re dealing with non-trivial stuff. Nobody at any level below enlightenment will let go of any particular emotion and let it pass by, just by engaging in this practice.
There is no letting go unless your meditation practice has first allowed you to fully express that which is holding you back.
> Nobody at any level below enlightenment will let go of any particular emotion and let it pass by, just by engaging in this practice.
Have you tried? It's not easy. It's taken months but my anxiety has noticeably decreased, though there's still a long way to go. Several times I've "let my guard down" and relapsed, thinking that I didn't have to try so hard anymore. I've come to admit that it's going to be a daily thing that I have to watch for, though it does get easier.
> There is no letting go unless your meditation practice has first allowed you to fully express that which is holding you back.
Yes, that's exactly what you have to do. You can't let something go if you don't know what it is. Maybe you have an inaccurate idea of what mindfulness is?
I’m no zen monk but I do this on a very surface level, detaching myself from my current emotions and trying to observe them going by. I’ve found it useful in controlling anger and anxiety. Does it solve it? No. But I do find it useful and it doesn’t take that much effort or practice to get some value out of it.
> let those negative anxious thoughts pass by rather than consume you.
Lol, I'd much rather prefer for those negative anxious thoughts to not occur in the first place (and there is a superior method to achieve this), much less having to have to let them pass by or consume me. This is why meditation is not a solution.
Most people will experience anxious/negative feelings throughout their life, and improving how they handle them will be useful on all those occasions. I don’t know how you think you are going to prevent this from happening to you - perhaps you are thinking specifically of an anxiety disorder or other extreme?
I've successfully disarmed myself off most of the normal everyday anxieties by investigating them one by one. What's left will also go away in due time.
Trying to suppress your thoughts is not a solution either, that just gives them more weight. When you let them by, you realize that they were not worth the attention in the first place, and they fade away over time. There is no quick fix.
Unfortunately I think you'll find that not everything can be solved, and that you'll always have some anxiety. It would actually be strange if you didn't, everyone has these thoughts every so often. The trick is to not let them take over you, and just move on.
I suspect you're doing this without realizing it; you're analyzing your anxieties until you understand them, and then they stop happening over time as you stop giving them so much attention.
I've met people who have eliminated all of their anxieties (and more), so it is certainly possible. I do not armchair analyze or suppress feelings (sincerity is an essential ingredient). There is no need to guess; you could just ask me as to how I investigate and eventually eliminate; though mind you it will likely conflict with much of your cherished values about humanity :-P
It takes some effort to grasp the method of actualism, so I've linked the wiki below[1] if you're interested in exploring further (most people run away at this stage :P), but the basic method is to feel good, as a bottom-line, each and every moment again ... and sincerely explore (neither withdrawing nor psychoanalyzing) any hindrances to that feeling good until one can clearly see the silliness (whatever it is) of it preventing one from enjoying this moment (which clear seeing is sufficient to get back to feeling good). It is as simple as that (and, before you bring up any parallel, it is 180 degrees opposite to any meditation/ stoicism practices that HN is so fond of).
Changing my perspective from "I wish I didn't have these thoughts/feelings" to "how can I deal with these thoughts/feelings productively" was a game changer for me.
Drop too many packets that way and you'll be missing out on potentially valuable data you can use for introspection.
Also, while negative thoughts are not pleasant, learning to maintain your sense of self while under duress (whether internally or externally derived) can be very useful.
I'm curious to hear about your solution / "superior" method though, even if I am skeptical for the reasons given above.
If you can manage to momentarily step outside of that stockholm syndrome towards anxiety, you'll find that the human brain is remarkably capable of living and solving problems without the burden of anxiety.
Being present in the moment - is one aspect of mindfulness.
That this can facilitate less "holding on" to thoughts and emotional states is a nice side effect.
For me and the communities I am a part of - I've noticed something that feels "deeper", here, which is that I've learned to not try to avoid things that feel negative - really, to befriend and even welcome every and all emotional state with curiosity and compassion. In this way, I've felt much less reactive, and much more capable of introspecting on what is going on within myself. This, combined with various other practices, support, and therapy, has been uncovering some really big changes in my life, both internally and externally.
This reminds me of a concept that is frequently discussed by a teacher and author I recommend - Tara Brach (she has a great podcast series).
She talks about the twin wings of compassion and awareness that are fundamental to many schools of Buddhism. Awareness === mindfulness, mastery of the mind and thought. Without compassion, i.e., opening of the heart - mindfulness doesn't have the same kind of potency for cultivation. It's hard to fly with only one wing. There's been a very large push for mindfulness but less so for unconditional love. Probably because we are a very cognitively-focused society, with many, many powerful disembodying influences.
To stay connected to ones heart is a somatic experience. In my own experience and, again, hearing from many others, this is much more challenging than practicing different kinds of mindfulness meditation on a regular basis. Certainly not even remotely close to impossible - it's a natural state of our physiology that's often been deconditioned. There are many tools, techniques, and systems to help us re-access this state.
With compassion, unconditional love can be brought to all aspects of yourself, all parts of experience that our egoic states might want to categorize as "bad" (or "good"). And, if we can really give this to ourselves, then we bring it out into the world, to share with as many beings as possible.
That is because you are too focused on doing it "right". That was something that I also had problems with in the beginning.
Anxiety went away from the moment that I've read and accepted that there is no right or bad way to being mindful or meditate. Also not being negative against bad feelings that could arise when practicing and just observe was a big step for me and made it easier to make it go away or make it less powerfull.
1. Useful $THING gets mentioned in the news (mindfulness, AI, cryptocurrency, ...)
2. $THING gets hyped into orbit ($THING consultants, $THING apps, $THING books, $THING as a way of life, ...)
3. We start seeing articles like "$THING has been over-hyped" or "$THING results not replicated".
4. $THING drops out of the limelight, sometimes into a worse position than it started in because of the 'negative' press.
5. A new $THING emerges ...
Edited: not trying to be snarky here (see below for the actual term I was looking for). It's just that this is a pattern I've seen repeated so many times, in tech. and elsewhere.
You can still ask people different things and see how it turns out. If you can't assess whether they were meditating or not, just record whether you asked them to.
It's a bit easier to assess whether you yourself are getting into the meditative state when you try. (Still, that's made difficulty by not knowing what "experts" mean when they describe a meditative state.)
There was a study where they wrote some software with a bar on it representing brain activity in the area of the brain that decreases when meditating. They then told people to try to get the bar to go down. This worked, and showed that meditation can one day be made easy, and is a valuable tool that can be studied in a clear way.
Depends on the particular techniques and quality of instructor, ranging from a calm state of mind during meditation, less worry, increased sense of happiness, increased sense of spiritual development, increased focus, decreased afflictions, etc.
Basically, when you practice meditation of type X, you should ask what are the benefits. If you practice as told, and get the benefits, you know for yourself it's working.
Similarly, if you're working remote I can't really tell if you are programming or on facebook, but at the end some task must be accomplished.
Just fyi, if meditation feels difficult or frustrating, it may mean you are meditating for the wrong reason. Your objective when meditating should be to observe your own experience as objectively as you can. This includes things like your chosen object of meditation (e.g. following the breath), whatever thoughts, feelings, itches, pains may arise. If you are failing at this, you won't be aware you are failing at it, but if you are aware your attention has drifted elsewhere aside from your goal of sitting and observing, you are now observing again and succeeding at meditation. So you can actually only ever be aware of succeeding at meditation :).
If you are meditating with the goal of relaxing your mind, for example, you can easily fail at that, and will likely fail at it more often than not given how much the mind can wander. Meditating with that goal in mind can be extremely frustrating. So a useful thing to know is that intentions matter a lot when meditating.
You don't say. I've seen companies that really couldn't afford it get sucked in to this nonsense at great expense and with very little to show for it. But some 'mindfulness consultant' made off with the loot. Besides the fact that you can't really force employees into stuff that they wouldn't do out of their own volition (imagine a company that suddenly forced all the employees to visit Scientology sessions regularly or something that effect).
These hype cycles only serve the people that peddle the hype.
Of course people are totally free to do what they want in their own time and if they feel like spending that on 'mindfulness' (which conveniently is so vague it could mean just about anything) then that's fine. Back in the 80's everybody seemed to have their personal Guru, now we have this. 20 years from now we'll probably have something else that takes its place.
Shame the only point of reference is as paid service rather than meditation you do yourself. Most people could do well to do anything that peels them away from the media stream (including hackernews) or libertarian news sites, etc.
The nutrition space is filled with this shit too. I've had so many friends go "Gluten Free" with nothing at all to show for it, besides vague claims of feeling better.
There's a 65 year old guy that just finished his 30,000th big mac [1] and meanwhile people are trying to tell me that the piece of toast I had for breakfast is causing systemic inflammation and killing me.
The person you're replying to specified that the sauce is where the bad stuff is, and I think basically all the sugar and most of the non-beef fat is in the sauce. Beyond the sauce, any fat in a Big Mac is just from the ground beef, right? Any burger you get from some non-chain place or make yourself is going to be a greasy mess, so how exactly is the Big Mac especially bad?
I don't understand why you would dismiss someone's vague claim of feeling better so quickly. Your day to day subjective experience matters a lot. If a lot of people can follow a particular regimen and they say it improves their subjective experience, perhaps it has some value? I don't understand why we dismiss things just because the science hasn't caught up yet.
Shouldn't it depend on what your goal is? If your goal is to know exactly how something works, I agree with you. If your goal is to "feel better" along some dimension of your mental or physical health, then you don't need to know how it works, just that it works for you.
You should separate trendy goal-oriented mindfulness from the thousands year old concept so you aren't throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
A mindfulness consultant forced onto a workforce sounds about as effective as forcing all your employees to run five miles every week. But that doesn't mean that running is bad for you.
You know the experience where you're reading something, only to discover that your eyes are just scanning the page while your mind wanders? During that time, you're thinking about something without knowing that you're thinking about it. This mode occurs all day long, and not only while you're reading.
The "baby" is the ability to recognize the tens of thousands of thoughts you are thinking every day without knowing that you are. This can offer tremendous insight into your mood and personality (and how to change them if you wish).
It's exhausting just keeping up with the thoughts that I do know about. I'm perfectly happy to let my autonomous systems keep doing their autonomous things and only demanding my attention when something requires higher-level intervention, just as they've evolved to do.
I find mind-wandering exhausting whether or not I'm aware of it. The difference is that I can now choose not to fall into the same old cycles for the n-thousandth time, because I'm aware that I'm doing it.
My dad has the exact opposite phrase, if someone tells him "We've been doing it like that for 20 years already!" he just very dry responds "And you've been doing it wrong for those 20 years."
Would those be the same ancestors that believed in the healing power of bloodletting and leeches? Or are we taking about those who knew for a fact that the Sun went around the Earth? Or are we talking about my ancestors in particular, who believed thunderstorms were caused by Perun chasing Veles around the world?
Do you have any idea how many "folk" remedies — specifically including leeching — have subsequently been validated, in at least some contexts, by modern medicine? How many plants the daft old witch in the forest used in ancient times, from which we now extract some medicinal compound or other to treat the very same ailment?
The general position here seems to be that because the ancient herbalist didn't have a notion of acetylsalicylic acid, the willow bark he dispensed for pain wasn't even "wrong", despite its being the correct treatment from the tools he had available.
I don't know what "the general position" seems to be here and I don't really care. My reply to the grandparent comment was on point: the age of a belief is not a valid measure of its correctness.
> the age of a belief is not a valid measure of its correctness.
Exactly. Its correctness is.
The "general position" I'm seeing is that if a piece of knowledge wasn't premised on a contemporary understanding of the world (which is itself, with a probability that approaches unity, also wrong in critical and meaningful ways), it can't have been "right".
Even when it turns out it was, when examined through the lens of that understanding. Hence the mention of willow bark: we didn't even understand aspirin's mechanism of action until the last ~half century. Does that make every doctor who prescribed it before that point wrong, or even just "not right", for having done so?
Ancient people and people 50 years ago were both wrong about a lot of things, as we no doubt are today, but there is a very different sort of wrong between the pre-scientific world of mythology and the self-correcting methodology we have today.
I'd actually already read it, but thanks for linking to it; it had been many years!
That said, I'm not the one painting the hard and bright distinction between "right" and "wrong". I know the dude who thinks the earth is flat is "more wrong" than the person who thinks it's spherical.
I'm instead trying to point out the presumption structurally inherent in "we know more than those benighted, unenlightened sods that came before us did" being not merely a reason, but a requirement to dismiss anything said sods might have to offer.
Consider: all of the out-of-hand dismissal of meditation, or mindfulness in general, in this thread. As far as I can tell, the dismissal boils down to taking "We didn't invent it", "The evidence is generally at best weakly supportive, and doesn't conclusively refute the thesis", and, "But unscrupulous people do unscrupulous things and hide their misdeeds behind these concepts" as sufficient cause to nope right on past with prejudice.
The thing is, if you're properly playing "science", you don't get to "nope" out like that. Replicate it or refute it, sure, but not repudiate it. Empirically demonstrated results that run counter to our intuitions, and are at all replicable, are the things we should be paying the most attention to, because that's where we're most likely to learn something new. (Even if it's just about our intuitions...)
We've instead somehow made a more-or-less collective, and as far as I can tell unexamined choice somewhere along the way to interpret skepticism not as, "I will neither believe nor disbelieve without evidence" but rather as, "If something doesn't comport with my [certainly limited and probably incorrect] understanding of our [certainly limited and probably incorrect] understanding of reality, it should be mocked and dismissed."
And, no matter how hard I try, I can not wrap my head around how the latter follows from anything except yet another case of over-privileging our own perspective, and patting ourselves on the back for being so clever as to have inherited the trials-and-errors of aeons of ancestors, without crediting more than a token named few of them for any of that work (and often in some backhanded way that undercuts them as much as credits them. "That Newton. He sure was smart. Too bad he drank so much mercury...").
So, yes, Asimov was right. Of course our knowledge improves and is refined over time — assuming we're pursuing correct-enough theories that we don't get stuck in various local minima of understanding. But I wasn't disagreeing with him in the first place.
The problem is that herbalists are forced to go through trial and error to come up with this information (tradition just means that someone else already did), because they do not have a working model of how their herbs work. Modern medicine has a vastly better model of human biochemistry (although it obviously still has huge gaps), which allowed it to develop a ton of new drugs in a surprisingly short amount of time (around 100-150 years, which is nothing on the scale of human history).
Regarding leeches and bloodletting, of course it helps in some cases, in the same way that executing random actions sometimes helps: by chance. To get from anecdata to systematic application, you need scientific inquiry to form a model of why it helps.
> Unless you think all your ancestors were just idiots
This doesn't follow, you can be smart and also wrong. It's also possible to be smart and not have good enough tools. The randomized controlled trial (RCT), for instance, is a marvelous tool that might sound obvious to you, but that's only because you received the kind of education which wasn't possible for most of history. Those ancestors from a millenia ago, however smart they were, didn't have RCTs and didn't have the world-view which would make them value RCTs and even if they did their peers certainly didn't have the right world-view to value things learned from RCTs and as a result, through no fault of their own, those ancestors had a much harder time understanding reality than we do.
That your ancestors were idiots? Because they very well probably knew something that you don't.
Religion doesn't even have to be based in fact to have merit. The fact that it has been around forever indicates that it is quite beneficial for it's adherants.
I was reading an article on very old pyramids they found in Peru a few days ago. There is a pit at the top, they think for burnt offerings.
Why was everyone doing burnt offerings? The Old Testament mentions them and ancient peoples in many geographically isolated parts of the world were doing them.
It's really weird, there must be something in the human psyche that resonates with the idea of burnt offerings. Or maybe burning offerings produced effects from the gods, but I'm guessing it didn't do anything but be a ceremony or totem. It's still weird and has me puzzled but I'm pretty sure objectively it wasn't all that great of an idea and certainly don't think we should take up doing burnt offerings now even though it was pretty common practice in ancient times.
Be aware that for a number of cultures "burnt offerings" were more like "roast offerings". They often eat the cooked meat. This is one of the ways that the priests got food.
I don't consider Plato to be an idiot but his model of the solar system was entirely without merit. It dug a very deep hole for astronomy, leading to centuries of wasted effort despite the existence of Aristarchus's more accurate model.
Well it is probably a good reason not to describe it as a fad that will be gone in twenty years, as the GP did.
Though of course there have always been ephemeral fads surrounding Buddhism, which have come and gone. Employer-provided mindfulness consulting is likely one of them.
True, but I am convinced that meditation can lead to awakening, which, apparently, involves the cessation of suffering and feeling one with the universe. It's not so far fetched, since our experience is generated by our brains, and similar things can happen on drugs.
But it does mean that you get to write the article "Maybe running doesn't make you immortal. If not, is it really worth doing?"
Interleaving quotes from various semi-related conversations plumps up the word count, grab that quote from a conversation about a shoe marketing campaign and segue it into a quote from a blogger who thinks barefoot running cures cancer.
Boom, there's your content production done for the day. Sweet. You can get a head start of reading the wikipedia entries on "incels" and "crypto" as you will be solving those questions tomorrow, so you should probably find out what those words mean.
Actually, now that you mention it, forcing all of my employees to run for five miles every week would actually be amazing. I bet the impact to health would be profound. (given able physical condition, of course)
> which conveniently is so vague it could mean just about anything
That’s on purpose, because Jon Kabat-Zinn intended it to be a placeholder term. Also why I flagged the article, because epistemologically the idea of researching whether mindfulness works doesn’t even make sense. And there is no shortage of content on this topic that’s actually good, e.g. Willoughby Britton’s talks and interviews.
If management are idiots enough to foist something like that on their staff, particularly if they can ill-afford to, that is entirely about them and their narratives, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the efficacy of meditation, the hypedness of mindfulness, or the price of tea in China.
They're the ones choosing to pay the (presumably, in your conception at least) hucksters. Who keeps hucksters in business, but the people who give them money? What if the people paid for this mindfulness training were on the level, but the culture at the hiring organization was so rotten it would never stick? How does that blame fall at meditation's feet? Or even just the sheer fact that in the West we are inculcated from the youngest ages that validation, authority, and meaning are all external?
Your apparent lack of understanding of what mindfulness work actually is doesn't invalidate the concept, and your seeming biases against it probably preclude your ability to meaningfully grasp it.
Just because there's a hype cycle doesn't mean there's no value in the thing being hyped, and I'm genuinely dismayed that I should have to say that aloud in a forum dedicated to technology entrepreneurship, a thing that more or less wouldn't exist — or would, at a minimum, be unrecognizable — without them.
Yes, hype cycles are problematic. But they're the problem, more than the thing being hyped. Let's think more critically than that, hmm?
The thing that always gets me is that mindfulness isn't for tolerating stress, which is what these bozos take away from the Cliff's Notes.
If you separate the things you think you need from the stuff you really need, then a lot of incidental stressors don't really affect you most of the time. But a lot of really big stresses (like your company's antics) that seemed like "have to" turn out to be "choose to".
They've hired a guru because they think it's cheaper than fixing the real problems. If the guru does the job properly, boy are they screwed. Instead of their little cogs thinking, "these problems aren't so bad" they may find themselves thinking, "these problems don't have to be my problems."
The problem is that "mindfulness", whatever that mean, was never designed to be a performance enhancer for salaried workers. At its root, the teaching of Buddha was not a business.
It's a bit unfair to apply it where it's not meant to be applied and discard it for being useless, isn't it?
20 years from now we'll probably have something else that takes its place.
Considering mindfulness meditation has been around for millenia, I kind of doubt it's going away. You seem to be very pessimistic of mindfulness meditation. Have you given it a chance? It really has helped a lot of people.
I never understood the difference or relationship between trace-like "meditation" and "mindfulness" (which I thought is something like introspecting into your mental state to recognize and defuse your emotions, like the "HALT: Hunger, Anger, Loneliness, and Tiredness" self-check)
There are many kinds of meditation. Three that I know of: (i) focusing on the sensations of your breath, either in your nostrils or your abdomen, while maintaining peripheral awareness; (ii) practicing feeling "loving kindness" towards people; (iii) visualizing complex shapes. I'm not sure what you mean by "trace-like", but I suspect that it would describe some forms of meditation but not others.
I believe that "mindfulness" is also used in more than one way, and as a result may or may not refer to a kind of meditation.
I have a book "The Mind Illuminated", which discusses meditation (i) in great detail, and suggests a self-check as you begin meditating, though with different steps than HALT.
Disclaimer: I know very little about meditation, and some of this might be wrong. But it's certainly complicated, and words refer to many different things.
Transcendental meditation is probably the trance like one you have in mind, and that's very different from the far more established Buddhist practice of "mindfulness" which is traditionally practiced via meditation. Transcendental meditation is just repeating a nonsense phrase over and over. Both practices typically have you sit still for 15 minutes, but that's where the similarities end.
Mindfulness practice encompasses cultivating awareness of internal states, so the HALT thing can be seen as a limited form of that. The meditation aspect is typically used more to practice non-reactivity, body awareness, and to understand the temporary nature of things. For example, in one practice you sit still and make a mental note of all the sounds you hear. You hear them start and end, consider the qualities of the sound (loud, rhythmic, high pitch, etc) and you notice your reaction to them (do you get startled when the ice maker goes off? Are the sounds of birds calming?). You allow yourself to welcome new sounds into your perception, and try not to linger or dwell on old ones when they're gone. Obviously it's not directly practical to most things, but the idea is that you learn to feel alright with the temporary nature of things, pleasant or unpleasant, and can then apply that to your own emotions or other external situations.
I'd compare it to a physical workout: it's not necessarily a good treatment for a specific disease or injury and may even be harmful to a person who isn't well. Being in shape, however makes a person generally more resilient to disease and injury.
When I see mindfulness mentioned, I am often reminded of my eastern philosophy classes. Mindfulness is not a 'moment of the day', it's a way of living your life.
The idea was that in the west, we would take these ideas and try to fit them into a western world which is a world where time == money. So you get these things like 'mindfulness classes' where, for one hour, you practice being in a state of mindfulness whilst the rest of the week you go through your life as usual.
I guess that when we took the idea of mindfulness and put it in a package that fit our society, it might have gotten hyped and more distant from its essence. This just to state that mindfulness might still be worth your time - just not the 'prepackaged' version.
* Small disclaimer: I do not practice it, I'm just being a parrot of some philosophy classes that I thought were interesting.
In fairness, "do this one thing in a tiny fragment of your time and reap benefits continually" works fine for quite a lot of things around well-being, mostly excercise.
Kurt Vonnegut made me more mindful before I even knew that was a word. In A Man Without a Country he relays some advice given to him by his uncle:
> I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.
Since reading that ten years ago I've done that almost daily. Often I'm only saying it to my dog but it certainly has made me appreciate the small moments that can be wonderful.
No kidding. Dealt with pitches for 'mindfulness' as a practicing stoic for years.
"Dude, you should check out mindfulness. You'd really be into it."
Nope. As best I could ever tell, mindfulness was a pop-psych pastiche of various bits of Buddhism, Daoism, and Stoicism designed to sell self-help books and consulting hours.
I can't speak for Buddhism and I've heard that the Daodejing appears cryptic now because the body of contemporary Chinese literature it frequently alludes to has been largely lost to history. But the surviving late stoic works are surprisingly accessible, even in stilted translations, making it much easier to see through attempts to repackage old ideas and make a quick buck.
Hoping to peak your interest, Stoicisim and Buddhism are a lot similar than they seem.
The way I see it, Buddhism talks a lot about the idea of "mind workout" (meditation) to be able to draw conclusion (insights), whereas Stoicism uses only discourse and logic. The conclusions are roughly the same though, for example the emphasis on equanimity, happiness and virtues in both philosophy.
In practice, and to draw a shitty analogy: using logic, you know you shouldn't eat that cupcake because it's 800kcal. You can also curb your sugar addiction so you don't feel so hungry for cupcakes.
That being said I agree with you: "mindfulness" in isolation is just a buzzword, which is what this article is trying to say.
I've looked into Buddhism generally and come to the conclusion that, while it provides about as useful a framework for living well as Stoicism, it's a more complete religious system than I'm interested in. I don't want to treat Buddhism like a buffet and then call myself a Buddhist. Stoic physics, for a contrasting example, are taken literally by no one and can be safely left out of the daily practice of Stoicism (though pneuma and logos are often useful as metaphors).
Don't think you deserve the downvotes though you do come off snarky =D
But I always reply the same way to people who preach mindfulness and meditation to me.
I've independently studied the stoics, the east etc etc for years. And always made my time for "vita contemplativa" which doesn't necessarily mean sitting down trying to escape thought.
I am generally much more grounded than anyone even telling me to do it.
Can't find the matching references, but he speaks of meditation actually beginning as a walking ritual. There is also a chapter on the Taoist's who found mindfulness through being drunk aha
Edit: Also obligatory Nietzche quote -> "Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world"
Thanks for the recommendation. A more thorough investigation of Chinese history, philosophy, and literature is on my list of long term reading goals. From what I understand already, we have lost a large amount of literature from the same period as Laozi, but we have surviving later commentaries on that literature and on the Daodejing (which give some context).
I can tell it’s a billion dollar business, I launched a Meditation app two months ago, we had good retention and users were loving the app. Then the guy we hired to do the voice over disappeared with no explanation so we couldn’t fulfill our promise of “daily meditation” because the voice was not the same. 15 days later I understood why: We received a Cease and Desist from one of the companies behind the top meditation and mindfulness apps in the AppStore. They certainly don’t want anybody to enter that niche.
The cease and desist included, in addition to some screens they said we copied from their design, part of the scripts which I wasn't aware they copyrighted.
We didn't copy anything, the text from the meditation we took it from Shunryu Suzuki's book.
We hired him in a talent website, when I say he disappeared is because he was just unavailable to continue doing the voice over for us, he was not available for booking anymore. I suspect this company reached out to him, booked him heavily or something so he was not available for us.
My guess is that their voiceover guy had an exclusivity agreement with the other company.
He could live in a jurisdiction that enforces non-compete agreements, or he could have been currently employed by the competitor with a full-employment clause in it.
If I ever have more money then I know what to do with, I would love to bankroll some of these legal battles pro bono like Peter Thiel so that when someone sends a frivolous cease and desist they end up regretting it.
Mindfulness brings no advantage except the realization that we are not our mind, that we exist as a being beyond it, that our thoughts are mostly response to stimulus. If you ignore stimulus, there are no thoughts. If you observe the mind intently, it inevitably struggles to do much thinking about anything. What is profound about this conclusion?
Nothing.
It does not lead to better memories. It does not lead to more satisfaction. It does not bring more joy. It does not make you more productive. Does it help you focus better? Maybe. But practicing to actually focus is much more efficient.
There is a difference between knowing something objectively and experiencing it subjectively. The really hardcore meditators do it not just so they can recount the experience of emptiness to someone but so they can actually feel it and learn from the experience itself firsthand.
It's like asking someone who did psychedelics to explain it to you. They'll always tell you the experience is not something you can understand with words alone.
The comments here so far seem to be focusing on the click-baity title... the article is actually a good review of mindfulness research and next steps in the field
TLDR
There are other things necessary for mindfulness/meditation to really take off. Things like ethics, right view and other parts of Eightfold Path (buddhist practice). Those give a mind basic clarity and joy necessary for successful practice.
Well, mindfulness certainly has been overhyped. Apps and gurus have pushed it as a cure-all and people have eaten it up because our society is broken and people are over stressed. Mindfulness is simply an introductory technique meant to be expanded upon.
Personally, I've still found it very useful. When I'm meditating frequently, I'm less reactive -- it's like there's this new sense of "self" that is observing and controlling my brain, whereas before, or when my meditation habit lapses, my brain is just doing it's thing in a more reactive way. This has been incredibly useful both personally and professionally.
I'd argue that the broken society narrative is a subjective opinion and not objectively quantfiable. One man's broken society is another man's utopia, it's all dependent on your personal beliefs.
Steven Pinker's latest book, "Enlightenment Now", has a pretty good treatment on suicide rates and other "broken-ness" indicators. The data-driven conclusion is that on almost every metric civilization is less broken than before, if it could indeed be called broken at all.
Ah, I dunno. I can only speak for North America, but I personally feel like between the rise of identity politics, our youngest generation reporting record high levels of depression and anxiety, a massive divide between left wing and right wing and the rise of the far left and alt right.. it feels like a lot of people have lost their mind over here.
Edit: Not really sure what HN dislikes about this post. My goal here was to offer some actual aspects of North American society which many would agree to be worse than they were in recent history as opposed to simply saying "society is broken". I was expecting some actual discussion here.
The concepts aren't new, the fact that they're now mainstream is new. Do you think Trump would have been elected 20 years ago? Do you think comedians would actually be scared to perform on college campuses 20 years ago?
The insanity was always there, but has become mainstream.
These things come in waves and it happened in the early 90 late 80's also. We get ultra PC it goes to far we over correct and the start inching back to it.
I don't know, did we actually over correct from the "ultra PC" movements of the 80s and 90s? I don't think we've seen anything like what's happened lately.
I never said it was new. I don't see why this makes it matter more or less anyway? It's sort of irrelevant whether we have seen this social phenomenon before. What is relevant is the impact it is having on society now.
> You would disagree that American politics has become more polarized in the last two decades?
Yes. American politics is not notably more polarized now than in the time immediately preceding the Clinton impeachment. (Now, had you said either 10 or 30 instead of 20, the answer would be different.)
Sure, do you disagree with any of my statements on a timescale of the past 2 decades? My point is, there are some aspects of North American society that have gotten notably worse. To be sure, other aspects have gotten notably better in the same time period. But the fact that a lot of the craziness I mentioned is now mainstream I personally find to be troublesome.
You're spot on. Anyone who thinks our society is broken now compared to the past is being ignorant of how downright terrible life was for most of humanity throughout history.
This society has given me, a female individual, full autonomy over my body, my education, and my career prospects (for most anything short of being a catholic priest!) and protects my right to that autonomy via law. My grandmother didn't even have that. This society has produced and distributed vaccines that protect my entire generation from devastating illness. This society has seen the harm that inhumane treatment towards people of color and homosexual people has and legislated protections for both (cultural norms are still behind in some places, but vastly improved over previous generations).
You may think that too many facebook notifications is stressful, but how stressed do you think Alan Turing felt when he was tried for indecency and medically castrated for being gay? Heck, compared to many generations before that (and some deeply conservative societies that still exist in theocracies today), he was lucky to not be murdered by the government.
I freaking love modern western society and refuse to shrug off all the progress we've made and cast it aside as "broken".
I wrote another post with my own negative perspective on the current state of affairs in North America, but I agree with you as well that we shouldn't forget all the progress we have made in other domains. Good post.
I agree with you, except that mostly everything you say seems to be applicable to individuals and not the society they live it.
You are far more better off than in the past, but maybe because of that you (and everyone else) sometimes (unknowingly) are performing actions that are degrading their society as a whole.
Maybe you're having children later, having them raised by a nanny because you're wealthy and/or are working more, maybe you're not allowing them outside to play/grow. Maybe because you're using Facebook you're connecting far more superficially with your friend circle. Your grandmother had the support of all her family, community and neighbors, whereas in the modern world we're going to be going through a lot of things by ourselves.
I think ultimately we can't really know if society is broken, we can only compare it what we had before and what we imagine it can be like. That maybe casts a very negative light on it, when in reality we're doing relatively decently.
Its fairly easy to go to a less developed country today and see that people often appear much happier here than in the West. But as other people have pointed out its very subjective.
If you think nothing is wrong with society and everything is great, that's interesting to me. It makes me wonder how much luck you've experienced in your life. I have certainly experienced a ton.
For most Americans, their reality is massive income inequality, insane healthcare expenses, working shitty jobs for 40+ hours a week, suffering from some kind chronic or preventable illness, and numbing the pain with 5 hours of TV per day. It's total shit.
Granted, it's less shit than it was 50 years ago in terms of social progress, medical advances, etc. But fundamentally, I believe it's still broken for the vast majority of people, if you were to somehow measure the NPS of being a human. ("Would you recommend being a human to a friend or colleague?")
I never said nothing is wrong. I said that compared to every point in time before now it is fundamentally much better, especially for people who were invisible or oppressed due to sex, race or disability. Because it is so improved calling it broken is meaningless, because it has always been broken.
Working your life away for a substandard living is not a new thing. Not by a mile. It's the norm for history. Someone is always getting exploited. The 40 hour work week was a right that we fought for. The fact that we even have treatments and preventions for illnesses (and get new ones every day, that hep C cure for example) means we are improving, and ensuring people have access is a problem many people are invested in fixing (millenials are big supporters of universal healthcare, it will be a thing one day).
I do think I'm lucky though. I was the first person in my family to grow up middle class. I never had to rely on food banks or welfare, I didn't have to spend all my free time caring for my siblings while my parents worked. My mom had to do those things growing up, but she escaped it because she earned a scholarship to a state university and could get by with that and a part time job. Society is the one who built that college and gave her that chance, even when her family would not or could not. I am thankful for that, because at least I now have the knowledge and opportunity to fix things that do need fixing. And there are plenty. But I don't think for a second that I would have had more opportunity to do that if I had been born at any point in time before.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. You're completely right about life being fundamentally better for the invisible/oppressed. I take your point -- it was always broken for them.
'Broken' should be read as people not having great relationships and mental health as once people used to have; families falling apart, couples divorcing, more single-parent families, less people marrying, much higher depression rates, high suicide rates, people reporting not having any friends, lots more people shutting in. Note that I am talking about several modern societies at once, Asian and Western societies.
There is also a lot of stress we don't have to deal with - at least here in the west, like keeping food stocked for winter, worrying about bears and wolves, worrying about various crippling or deadly diseases that used to be commonplace etc etc.
Those are some things we don't have to deal with, but what's the connection with "stress"? Did people actively worry about getting leprosy or polio? Was that really a cause of "stress"? Perhaps it was; I don't know. For me, driving in bad traffic, when I'm late for an appointment, can be stressful, but thinking that I might get Alzheimer's, so perhaps I should sort out wills and power of attorney... not so much. And if we didn't have today's complex legal system, they'd be nothing to worry about at all, because what could I possibly do about it, except perhaps attend mass and say my prayers?
Opt out is not a real option. The world is not set up for that anymore. What are you going to do -- go squat illegally somewhere until someone chases you away? Eat pigeons? It's not as easy as you make it sound to escape the framework of our society. I'd love to be proven wrong.
Agreed. I would summarize modern society the same way. In some ways life is vastly improved over prior generations, but I think that masks an alarming amount of b societal decay.
Mindfulness isn't overhyped, but it also doesn't work if you're not committed. Mindfulness seminars or apps aren't going to change you, they might be a nice introduction, but meditation is a practice that you need to make part of your life to truly get results.
Mindfulness isn't over-hyped. Mindfulness takes effort. There's crazy videos of buddhist monks walking on their thumbs. People can raise their body temperature several degrees at will (and it's how a lot of open ocean swimmers survive, say, crossing the english channel). But it takes practice, every day, for years and you can't fake it - you're body knows you're cheating and can't be bribed.
Given that - how do you do a statistical analysis across the population of mindfulness meditation vs. pill popping? Pills always work, often with horrible debilitating side effects (yay Opioids!). Meanwhile the monk I met who learned to walk again after being confined to a wheelchair (gymnastics injury) had to sit under a tree for several years doing muscle exercises and willing the pain away.
So of course science can't rationalize it. How do you measure the strength of will of people? It's not so easy to put these sorts of things into a study. So I guess we'll keep eating the poison pill. Shrug.
People heal from injuries using physical therapy on a regular basis.
I also don't know what walking on ones thumbs has to do with mindfullness.
You don't need to do a statistical analysis. We have other tools that can be used like double blind trials comparing meditation and medication.
Anyways, I think you should be very careful about placing much stock in anything that can't be studied in a scientific way. Such a thing would by definition have no measurable effect on the world or be unchangeable.
This seems to be a phenomenon similar to "agile washing". It actually works if you internalize it, turn it over in your mind and make it your own. It doesn't work if you just hire a trainer and otherwise treat it as a necessary evil.
Based on the opinion of a friend who reports good results from reading a book about mindfulness and practicing it.
There are a bunch of similar comments here, this is just a slightly different angle on it.
Yes, extracting the mindfulness techniques out of vipassana practice and then trying to use it to cure PTSD, anxiety, and poor work performance is bound to fail. Being mindful of your neurotic behavior is useful, but it does not help unless you act and change the circumstances that is causing the problem.
Can letting go be the change that qualifies under this definition? For most of my users the problem making them (and me) miserable is not the absence of the minor, nice-to-have feature which they have turned into a major defect in their mind. It's the neurosis itself. The change they need to make is to lighten up rather than dancing in the entryway of my cube on tiptoes like they have to tinkle until I break down and work on their pet priority.
The article gives examples of how it helps with PTSD. It doesn’t “fail”. It doesn’t totally cure it, it that’s a high bar for any psychological intervention.
I have PTSD and practice mindfulness/buddhism and while it doesn't cure it, it certainly does help a lot. You can only act and change the circumstances when you have some new insights and there is where mindfulness/buddhism helps me. It is certainly not the case of I'm meditating and miraculously all my problems go away...
Personally I don't think that mindfulness/medition/... is overhyped but the tools/apps/courses are. There is really no need to spends hunderds of euro's to being mindfull or learn the practices.
$$$ via attention seeking articles : First X gets hyped thanks to tons of articles from publications like this, then there are counter articles calling X overhyped. Then there are articles calling for balance/nuance in X.
X = AI, mindfulness, blockchain, health tracking apps, self driving cars, yoga...
News businesses will create a hype curve for every phenomenon.
I realized this the other day in the shower: media outlets basically argue with themselves to create their own hype cycles.
First it’s a fringe crazy idea, then it’s the new hotness, then it should be a part of your daily life, then someone decides they’re edgy and it’s not for them, then it’s basically cancer, then a story of how it grew too fast and has collapsed.
And the funny thing is, it’s almost a negative signal of what’s valuable. By the time The Guardian or CNN is talking about bitcoin, you have no chance of making a dime.
As someone who meditates daily, I would be surprised if meditation had substantial therapeutic benefit for anything beyond some behavioral disorders.
Meditation for me is about truth seeking. I emerge from zazen feeling as though I understand myself and the world around me more honestly. It has long term implications for how I think and behave, certainly, but probably not in any medically interesting sense.
I don't expect studying physics or building a deck to change my health outcomes measurably. Meditating isn't different in kind.
The value that I gain from "just sitting" is not something I can articulate very well in words. I would certainly encourage others to meditate daily, but meditation won't mend broken bones or unclog arteries or replace neurotransmitters the body can't produce enough of naturally. It's just sitting, after all.
The article talks a lot about PTSD but mindfulness meditation was not designed for that so it's maybe not surprising it doesn't fix it. Funnily enough they recently seem to have found a fix with MDMA https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/mdma-ecstasy-mdma-...
Mindfulness, according to Wikipedia:
>In Buddhist teachings, mindfulness is utilized to develop self-knowledge and wisdom that gradually lead to what is described as enlightenment
Id consider the induced state when I've tried MDMA to be very similar to mindfulness. It feels like I have better communication with my body, and it's easier to listen to it.
There is too much analysis of mindfulness and meditation. So you'll end up with analyzing yourself too much while looking for that glorious state of detaching your self from your self to get into that witness mode and apply all the philosophies, ideals, influences crammed into your head to each thought you have.
So my suggestion is while meditating, drop all that stuff, sit alone at home/indoor, or quiet outdoor area, and just be meditative while listening to your breath instead of "meditating", and trust you understand basic human decency. Being yogic-like, or whatever, doesn't mean you have to be what people commonly think that means. Just be you.
That's how I've always viewed yoga/tantra as at it's core. There is more to yoga and tantra than that but there is no need to go there unless you're interested. For most people, they just want to de-stress and heal their mind and body and be themselves. The regular practice of meditation like this extends into regular activities and has improved my productivity, tempered my reactivity to shit, etc.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 320 ms ] threadRunning is somewhat similar in that at first it is uncomfortable but your body learns to lean into it.
That being said, prolonged periods of mindfulness and focus can bring about unparalleled states of bliss, but those are fleeting.
That's what being mindful is all about! It teaches you how to be present in the moment and let those negative anxious thoughts pass by rather than consume you.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/25/mental-healt...
There is no letting go unless your meditation practice has first allowed you to fully express that which is holding you back.
Meditation isn’t just getting into the zone.
Have you tried? It's not easy. It's taken months but my anxiety has noticeably decreased, though there's still a long way to go. Several times I've "let my guard down" and relapsed, thinking that I didn't have to try so hard anymore. I've come to admit that it's going to be a daily thing that I have to watch for, though it does get easier.
> There is no letting go unless your meditation practice has first allowed you to fully express that which is holding you back.
Yes, that's exactly what you have to do. You can't let something go if you don't know what it is. Maybe you have an inaccurate idea of what mindfulness is?
Lol, I'd much rather prefer for those negative anxious thoughts to not occur in the first place (and there is a superior method to achieve this), much less having to have to let them pass by or consume me. This is why meditation is not a solution.
I suspect you're doing this without realizing it; you're analyzing your anxieties until you understand them, and then they stop happening over time as you stop giving them so much attention.
[1] https://github.com/ActualFreedom/home/wiki
Also, while negative thoughts are not pleasant, learning to maintain your sense of self while under duress (whether internally or externally derived) can be very useful.
I'm curious to hear about your solution / "superior" method though, even if I am skeptical for the reasons given above.
See my other comment about the method I practice.
That this can facilitate less "holding on" to thoughts and emotional states is a nice side effect.
For me and the communities I am a part of - I've noticed something that feels "deeper", here, which is that I've learned to not try to avoid things that feel negative - really, to befriend and even welcome every and all emotional state with curiosity and compassion. In this way, I've felt much less reactive, and much more capable of introspecting on what is going on within myself. This, combined with various other practices, support, and therapy, has been uncovering some really big changes in my life, both internally and externally.
This reminds me of a concept that is frequently discussed by a teacher and author I recommend - Tara Brach (she has a great podcast series).
She talks about the twin wings of compassion and awareness that are fundamental to many schools of Buddhism. Awareness === mindfulness, mastery of the mind and thought. Without compassion, i.e., opening of the heart - mindfulness doesn't have the same kind of potency for cultivation. It's hard to fly with only one wing. There's been a very large push for mindfulness but less so for unconditional love. Probably because we are a very cognitively-focused society, with many, many powerful disembodying influences.
To stay connected to ones heart is a somatic experience. In my own experience and, again, hearing from many others, this is much more challenging than practicing different kinds of mindfulness meditation on a regular basis. Certainly not even remotely close to impossible - it's a natural state of our physiology that's often been deconditioned. There are many tools, techniques, and systems to help us re-access this state.
With compassion, unconditional love can be brought to all aspects of yourself, all parts of experience that our egoic states might want to categorize as "bad" (or "good"). And, if we can really give this to ourselves, then we bring it out into the world, to share with as many beings as possible.
Anxiety went away from the moment that I've read and accepted that there is no right or bad way to being mindful or meditate. Also not being negative against bad feelings that could arise when practicing and just observe was a big step for me and made it easier to make it go away or make it less powerfull.
1. Useful $THING gets mentioned in the news (mindfulness, AI, cryptocurrency, ...)
2. $THING gets hyped into orbit ($THING consultants, $THING apps, $THING books, $THING as a way of life, ...)
3. We start seeing articles like "$THING has been over-hyped" or "$THING results not replicated".
4. $THING drops out of the limelight, sometimes into a worse position than it started in because of the 'negative' press.
5. A new $THING emerges ...
Edited: not trying to be snarky here (see below for the actual term I was looking for). It's just that this is a pattern I've seen repeated so many times, in tech. and elsewhere.
Basically, when you practice meditation of type X, you should ask what are the benefits. If you practice as told, and get the benefits, you know for yourself it's working.
Similarly, if you're working remote I can't really tell if you are programming or on facebook, but at the end some task must be accomplished.
Walk with dousing rod until it twitches down, then start digging. If you don't reach water: dig deeper until you do.
If you are meditating with the goal of relaxing your mind, for example, you can easily fail at that, and will likely fail at it more often than not given how much the mind can wander. Meditating with that goal in mind can be extremely frustrating. So a useful thing to know is that intentions matter a lot when meditating.
These hype cycles only serve the people that peddle the hype.
Of course people are totally free to do what they want in their own time and if they feel like spending that on 'mindfulness' (which conveniently is so vague it could mean just about anything) then that's fine. Back in the 80's everybody seemed to have their personal Guru, now we have this. 20 years from now we'll probably have something else that takes its place.
There's a 65 year old guy that just finished his 30,000th big mac [1] and meanwhile people are trying to tell me that the piece of toast I had for breakfast is causing systemic inflammation and killing me.
SMH.
[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/wisconsin-man-eats-...
Fries and sodas are much worse for you.
While there's only 540 calories in it that's really a function of the big Mac being quite small.
A burger isn't inherently bad but chain burgers are laced with oil and sugar.
It's still just another "my grandpa smoked a pack a day for sixty years and he lived to be 91" story though. Irrelevant.
Science based on feelings is pseudoscience and should be treated as such.
A mindfulness consultant forced onto a workforce sounds about as effective as forcing all your employees to run five miles every week. But that doesn't mean that running is bad for you.
The "baby" is the ability to recognize the tens of thousands of thoughts you are thinking every day without knowing that you are. This can offer tremendous insight into your mood and personality (and how to change them if you wish).
The general position here seems to be that because the ancient herbalist didn't have a notion of acetylsalicylic acid, the willow bark he dispensed for pain wasn't even "wrong", despite its being the correct treatment from the tools he had available.
Huh?
Exactly. Its correctness is.
The "general position" I'm seeing is that if a piece of knowledge wasn't premised on a contemporary understanding of the world (which is itself, with a probability that approaches unity, also wrong in critical and meaningful ways), it can't have been "right".
Even when it turns out it was, when examined through the lens of that understanding. Hence the mention of willow bark: we didn't even understand aspirin's mechanism of action until the last ~half century. Does that make every doctor who prescribed it before that point wrong, or even just "not right", for having done so?
EDIT: Phrasing
Ancient people and people 50 years ago were both wrong about a lot of things, as we no doubt are today, but there is a very different sort of wrong between the pre-scientific world of mythology and the self-correcting methodology we have today.
That said, I'm not the one painting the hard and bright distinction between "right" and "wrong". I know the dude who thinks the earth is flat is "more wrong" than the person who thinks it's spherical.
I'm instead trying to point out the presumption structurally inherent in "we know more than those benighted, unenlightened sods that came before us did" being not merely a reason, but a requirement to dismiss anything said sods might have to offer.
Consider: all of the out-of-hand dismissal of meditation, or mindfulness in general, in this thread. As far as I can tell, the dismissal boils down to taking "We didn't invent it", "The evidence is generally at best weakly supportive, and doesn't conclusively refute the thesis", and, "But unscrupulous people do unscrupulous things and hide their misdeeds behind these concepts" as sufficient cause to nope right on past with prejudice.
The thing is, if you're properly playing "science", you don't get to "nope" out like that. Replicate it or refute it, sure, but not repudiate it. Empirically demonstrated results that run counter to our intuitions, and are at all replicable, are the things we should be paying the most attention to, because that's where we're most likely to learn something new. (Even if it's just about our intuitions...)
We've instead somehow made a more-or-less collective, and as far as I can tell unexamined choice somewhere along the way to interpret skepticism not as, "I will neither believe nor disbelieve without evidence" but rather as, "If something doesn't comport with my [certainly limited and probably incorrect] understanding of our [certainly limited and probably incorrect] understanding of reality, it should be mocked and dismissed."
And, no matter how hard I try, I can not wrap my head around how the latter follows from anything except yet another case of over-privileging our own perspective, and patting ourselves on the back for being so clever as to have inherited the trials-and-errors of aeons of ancestors, without crediting more than a token named few of them for any of that work (and often in some backhanded way that undercuts them as much as credits them. "That Newton. He sure was smart. Too bad he drank so much mercury...").
So, yes, Asimov was right. Of course our knowledge improves and is refined over time — assuming we're pursuing correct-enough theories that we don't get stuck in various local minima of understanding. But I wasn't disagreeing with him in the first place.
Regarding leeches and bloodletting, of course it helps in some cases, in the same way that executing random actions sometimes helps: by chance. To get from anecdata to systematic application, you need scientific inquiry to form a model of why it helps.
This doesn't follow, you can be smart and also wrong. It's also possible to be smart and not have good enough tools. The randomized controlled trial (RCT), for instance, is a marvelous tool that might sound obvious to you, but that's only because you received the kind of education which wasn't possible for most of history. Those ancestors from a millenia ago, however smart they were, didn't have RCTs and didn't have the world-view which would make them value RCTs and even if they did their peers certainly didn't have the right world-view to value things learned from RCTs and as a result, through no fault of their own, those ancestors had a much harder time understanding reality than we do.
Religion doesn't even have to be based in fact to have merit. The fact that it has been around forever indicates that it is quite beneficial for it's adherants.
Why was everyone doing burnt offerings? The Old Testament mentions them and ancient peoples in many geographically isolated parts of the world were doing them.
It's really weird, there must be something in the human psyche that resonates with the idea of burnt offerings. Or maybe burning offerings produced effects from the gods, but I'm guessing it didn't do anything but be a ceremony or totem. It's still weird and has me puzzled but I'm pretty sure objectively it wasn't all that great of an idea and certainly don't think we should take up doing burnt offerings now even though it was pretty common practice in ancient times.
Though of course there have always been ephemeral fads surrounding Buddhism, which have come and gone. Employer-provided mindfulness consulting is likely one of them.
Interleaving quotes from various semi-related conversations plumps up the word count, grab that quote from a conversation about a shoe marketing campaign and segue it into a quote from a blogger who thinks barefoot running cures cancer.
Boom, there's your content production done for the day. Sweet. You can get a head start of reading the wikipedia entries on "incels" and "crypto" as you will be solving those questions tomorrow, so you should probably find out what those words mean.
That’s on purpose, because Jon Kabat-Zinn intended it to be a placeholder term. Also why I flagged the article, because epistemologically the idea of researching whether mindfulness works doesn’t even make sense. And there is no shortage of content on this topic that’s actually good, e.g. Willoughby Britton’s talks and interviews.
They're the ones choosing to pay the (presumably, in your conception at least) hucksters. Who keeps hucksters in business, but the people who give them money? What if the people paid for this mindfulness training were on the level, but the culture at the hiring organization was so rotten it would never stick? How does that blame fall at meditation's feet? Or even just the sheer fact that in the West we are inculcated from the youngest ages that validation, authority, and meaning are all external?
Your apparent lack of understanding of what mindfulness work actually is doesn't invalidate the concept, and your seeming biases against it probably preclude your ability to meaningfully grasp it.
Just because there's a hype cycle doesn't mean there's no value in the thing being hyped, and I'm genuinely dismayed that I should have to say that aloud in a forum dedicated to technology entrepreneurship, a thing that more or less wouldn't exist — or would, at a minimum, be unrecognizable — without them.
Yes, hype cycles are problematic. But they're the problem, more than the thing being hyped. Let's think more critically than that, hmm?
If you separate the things you think you need from the stuff you really need, then a lot of incidental stressors don't really affect you most of the time. But a lot of really big stresses (like your company's antics) that seemed like "have to" turn out to be "choose to".
They've hired a guru because they think it's cheaper than fixing the real problems. If the guru does the job properly, boy are they screwed. Instead of their little cogs thinking, "these problems aren't so bad" they may find themselves thinking, "these problems don't have to be my problems."
Btw, It is not meant for some random company to improve productivity. ;)
When your agile consultant gives up where do you turn?
Happier employees are more productive! Mindfulness to the rescue, at least it will look like we care.
There's a difference between over-hyped and nonsense. Mindfulness might be over-hyped, but its not nonsense.
It's a bit unfair to apply it where it's not meant to be applied and discard it for being useless, isn't it?
Considering mindfulness meditation has been around for millenia, I kind of doubt it's going away. You seem to be very pessimistic of mindfulness meditation. Have you given it a chance? It really has helped a lot of people.
I believe that "mindfulness" is also used in more than one way, and as a result may or may not refer to a kind of meditation.
I have a book "The Mind Illuminated", which discusses meditation (i) in great detail, and suggests a self-check as you begin meditating, though with different steps than HALT.
Disclaimer: I know very little about meditation, and some of this might be wrong. But it's certainly complicated, and words refer to many different things.
Mindfulness practice encompasses cultivating awareness of internal states, so the HALT thing can be seen as a limited form of that. The meditation aspect is typically used more to practice non-reactivity, body awareness, and to understand the temporary nature of things. For example, in one practice you sit still and make a mental note of all the sounds you hear. You hear them start and end, consider the qualities of the sound (loud, rhythmic, high pitch, etc) and you notice your reaction to them (do you get startled when the ice maker goes off? Are the sounds of birds calming?). You allow yourself to welcome new sounds into your perception, and try not to linger or dwell on old ones when they're gone. Obviously it's not directly practical to most things, but the idea is that you learn to feel alright with the temporary nature of things, pleasant or unpleasant, and can then apply that to your own emotions or other external situations.
The idea was that in the west, we would take these ideas and try to fit them into a western world which is a world where time == money. So you get these things like 'mindfulness classes' where, for one hour, you practice being in a state of mindfulness whilst the rest of the week you go through your life as usual.
I guess that when we took the idea of mindfulness and put it in a package that fit our society, it might have gotten hyped and more distant from its essence. This just to state that mindfulness might still be worth your time - just not the 'prepackaged' version.
* Small disclaimer: I do not practice it, I'm just being a parrot of some philosophy classes that I thought were interesting.
> I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.
Since reading that ten years ago I've done that almost daily. Often I'm only saying it to my dog but it certainly has made me appreciate the small moments that can be wonderful.
"Dude, you should check out mindfulness. You'd really be into it."
Nope. As best I could ever tell, mindfulness was a pop-psych pastiche of various bits of Buddhism, Daoism, and Stoicism designed to sell self-help books and consulting hours.
I can't speak for Buddhism and I've heard that the Daodejing appears cryptic now because the body of contemporary Chinese literature it frequently alludes to has been largely lost to history. But the surviving late stoic works are surprisingly accessible, even in stilted translations, making it much easier to see through attempts to repackage old ideas and make a quick buck.
In practice, and to draw a shitty analogy: using logic, you know you shouldn't eat that cupcake because it's 800kcal. You can also curb your sugar addiction so you don't feel so hungry for cupcakes.
That being said I agree with you: "mindfulness" in isolation is just a buzzword, which is what this article is trying to say.
But I always reply the same way to people who preach mindfulness and meditation to me.
I've independently studied the stoics, the east etc etc for years. And always made my time for "vita contemplativa" which doesn't necessarily mean sitting down trying to escape thought.
I am generally much more grounded than anyone even telling me to do it.
Highly recommend these two scholarly volumes about Eastern philosophy -> https://www.amazon.com/History-Chinese-Philosophy-Vol-Philos...
Can't find the matching references, but he speaks of meditation actually beginning as a walking ritual. There is also a chapter on the Taoist's who found mindfulness through being drunk aha
Edit: Also obligatory Nietzche quote -> "Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world"
We didn't copy anything, the text from the meditation we took it from Shunryu Suzuki's book.
He could live in a jurisdiction that enforces non-compete agreements, or he could have been currently employed by the competitor with a full-employment clause in it.
I hate companies like this because they only care about exploiting trends to suck out money.
I find these articles very frustrating.
"Maybe it's good, sounds like of good, right? But studies are inconclusive!"
So what are you saying? And why so many stock photos?
Nothing.
It does not lead to better memories. It does not lead to more satisfaction. It does not bring more joy. It does not make you more productive. Does it help you focus better? Maybe. But practicing to actually focus is much more efficient.
It's like asking someone who did psychedelics to explain it to you. They'll always tell you the experience is not something you can understand with words alone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGjXEM1HZ54&t=1s
TLDR There are other things necessary for mindfulness/meditation to really take off. Things like ethics, right view and other parts of Eightfold Path (buddhist practice). Those give a mind basic clarity and joy necessary for successful practice.
Personally, I've still found it very useful. When I'm meditating frequently, I'm less reactive -- it's like there's this new sense of "self" that is observing and controlling my brain, whereas before, or when my meditation habit lapses, my brain is just doing it's thing in a more reactive way. This has been incredibly useful both personally and professionally.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/health/us-suicide-rate-su...
Edit: Not really sure what HN dislikes about this post. My goal here was to offer some actual aspects of North American society which many would agree to be worse than they were in recent history as opposed to simply saying "society is broken". I was expecting some actual discussion here.
The insanity was always there, but has become mainstream.
Yes. American politics is not notably more polarized now than in the time immediately preceding the Clinton impeachment. (Now, had you said either 10 or 30 instead of 20, the answer would be different.)
Naked, dancing in the moonlight insane as it gets.
This society has given me, a female individual, full autonomy over my body, my education, and my career prospects (for most anything short of being a catholic priest!) and protects my right to that autonomy via law. My grandmother didn't even have that. This society has produced and distributed vaccines that protect my entire generation from devastating illness. This society has seen the harm that inhumane treatment towards people of color and homosexual people has and legislated protections for both (cultural norms are still behind in some places, but vastly improved over previous generations).
You may think that too many facebook notifications is stressful, but how stressed do you think Alan Turing felt when he was tried for indecency and medically castrated for being gay? Heck, compared to many generations before that (and some deeply conservative societies that still exist in theocracies today), he was lucky to not be murdered by the government.
I freaking love modern western society and refuse to shrug off all the progress we've made and cast it aside as "broken".
You are far more better off than in the past, but maybe because of that you (and everyone else) sometimes (unknowingly) are performing actions that are degrading their society as a whole.
Maybe you're having children later, having them raised by a nanny because you're wealthy and/or are working more, maybe you're not allowing them outside to play/grow. Maybe because you're using Facebook you're connecting far more superficially with your friend circle. Your grandmother had the support of all her family, community and neighbors, whereas in the modern world we're going to be going through a lot of things by ourselves.
I think ultimately we can't really know if society is broken, we can only compare it what we had before and what we imagine it can be like. That maybe casts a very negative light on it, when in reality we're doing relatively decently.
https://twitter.com/asymmetricinfo/status/992463509534453760...
Cherry picking.
For most Americans, their reality is massive income inequality, insane healthcare expenses, working shitty jobs for 40+ hours a week, suffering from some kind chronic or preventable illness, and numbing the pain with 5 hours of TV per day. It's total shit.
Granted, it's less shit than it was 50 years ago in terms of social progress, medical advances, etc. But fundamentally, I believe it's still broken for the vast majority of people, if you were to somehow measure the NPS of being a human. ("Would you recommend being a human to a friend or colleague?")
An interesting video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO0v_JqxFmQ
Working your life away for a substandard living is not a new thing. Not by a mile. It's the norm for history. Someone is always getting exploited. The 40 hour work week was a right that we fought for. The fact that we even have treatments and preventions for illnesses (and get new ones every day, that hep C cure for example) means we are improving, and ensuring people have access is a problem many people are invested in fixing (millenials are big supporters of universal healthcare, it will be a thing one day).
I do think I'm lucky though. I was the first person in my family to grow up middle class. I never had to rely on food banks or welfare, I didn't have to spend all my free time caring for my siblings while my parents worked. My mom had to do those things growing up, but she escaped it because she earned a scholarship to a state university and could get by with that and a part time job. Society is the one who built that college and gave her that chance, even when her family would not or could not. I am thankful for that, because at least I now have the knowledge and opportunity to fix things that do need fixing. And there are plenty. But I don't think for a second that I would have had more opportunity to do that if I had been born at any point in time before.
You are confusing identifying, debating and solving serious social problems with "shrugging off all the progress".
Given that - how do you do a statistical analysis across the population of mindfulness meditation vs. pill popping? Pills always work, often with horrible debilitating side effects (yay Opioids!). Meanwhile the monk I met who learned to walk again after being confined to a wheelchair (gymnastics injury) had to sit under a tree for several years doing muscle exercises and willing the pain away.
So of course science can't rationalize it. How do you measure the strength of will of people? It's not so easy to put these sorts of things into a study. So I guess we'll keep eating the poison pill. Shrug.
We are clearly on different things.
I also don't know what walking on ones thumbs has to do with mindfullness.
You don't need to do a statistical analysis. We have other tools that can be used like double blind trials comparing meditation and medication.
Anyways, I think you should be very careful about placing much stock in anything that can't be studied in a scientific way. Such a thing would by definition have no measurable effect on the world or be unchangeable.
There are a bunch of similar comments here, this is just a slightly different angle on it.
(edit for clarity)
Personally I don't think that mindfulness/medition/... is overhyped but the tools/apps/courses are. There is really no need to spends hunderds of euro's to being mindfull or learn the practices.
News businesses will create a hype curve for every phenomenon.
First it’s a fringe crazy idea, then it’s the new hotness, then it should be a part of your daily life, then someone decides they’re edgy and it’s not for them, then it’s basically cancer, then a story of how it grew too fast and has collapsed.
And the funny thing is, it’s almost a negative signal of what’s valuable. By the time The Guardian or CNN is talking about bitcoin, you have no chance of making a dime.
Meditation for me is about truth seeking. I emerge from zazen feeling as though I understand myself and the world around me more honestly. It has long term implications for how I think and behave, certainly, but probably not in any medically interesting sense.
I don't expect studying physics or building a deck to change my health outcomes measurably. Meditating isn't different in kind.
The value that I gain from "just sitting" is not something I can articulate very well in words. I would certainly encourage others to meditate daily, but meditation won't mend broken bones or unclog arteries or replace neurotransmitters the body can't produce enough of naturally. It's just sitting, after all.
That sounds like it could be rather therapeutic for many folks. Small changes in perspectives can make a big difference, I think.
Meanwhile at University of Wisconsin, Madison:
Study reveals gene expression changes with meditation
https://news.wisc.edu/study-reveals-gene-expression-changes-...
Mindfulness, according to Wikipedia:
>In Buddhist teachings, mindfulness is utilized to develop self-knowledge and wisdom that gradually lead to what is described as enlightenment
(by the way there were recent discussions of meditation, more of the get thing done variety, by the Sapiens guy here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905249 and a link to Seinfeld on Meditation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909346 which I'm having a look at)
So my suggestion is while meditating, drop all that stuff, sit alone at home/indoor, or quiet outdoor area, and just be meditative while listening to your breath instead of "meditating", and trust you understand basic human decency. Being yogic-like, or whatever, doesn't mean you have to be what people commonly think that means. Just be you.
That's how I've always viewed yoga/tantra as at it's core. There is more to yoga and tantra than that but there is no need to go there unless you're interested. For most people, they just want to de-stress and heal their mind and body and be themselves. The regular practice of meditation like this extends into regular activities and has improved my productivity, tempered my reactivity to shit, etc.