I think mindfulness and meditation are useful for some people. It's important to remember it doesn't work for everyone, and there's a small risk of harm for a few people.
I'm interested to know if you can cite specific evidence for that? I've heard that some certain yoga practices (i.e. traditional yoga. Not the westernized kind where you do stretches and talk about positive energy) can be harmful especially to beginners (e.g. kundalini), but that's not what's being discussed here.
Mindfulness just means being aware and non-reactive. All humans experiences mindfulness. Any time we choose to go against our initial impulses is a moment of expressing mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation simply strengthens and expands on that so it holds up under greater pressure and for greater periods of time. It's nothing mystical or psychedelic.
I would not classify “mindfulnes” as going against “initial impulses” but rather as being aware of the impulsive reactions and the effect on mind and body to situations and then making a conscious decision on what to do next. This next action can then be in line with the initial impulse or not, it will be mindful either way.
In your description, it sounds like building a fence around a hungry tiger. I think, understanding those impulses and directing them into a useful way is a healthier approach.
If psychoanalysis has taught us anything, it's that if you're the tiger, it doesn't disappear until confronted.
Recent years has also seen an increase in studies surrounding the sociological concept of `Mobbing'. This has taught us that the tiger only goes away if there is outside help, often in the form of fellow students, teachers, and so on.
Willoughby Britton is a meditation teacher and researcher who studies adverse effects of meditation and mindfulness. There is a risk of diverse mental problems, especially - but not only - for people with a history of trauma.
As a meditator myself I think it would be helpful if this were more well-known.
If you search for her name, you'll find more information and studies. Here's an interview and article:
What do you mean of traditional yoga? Yoga sutra of patanjali, which consist of 8 limbs? In USA most yoga studio only touches Asana, which is one limb of Yoga Sutra.
Research into mindfulness emphasises the benefits, but tends to minimise the harm. Some research fails to mention any risk at all. This makes it hard to devise a mindfulness program that doesn't cause harm.
Mindfulness in schools is applied to the entire school population.
Mindfulness in schools is usually delivered by teachers, and not trained therapists or psychologists.
The combination of taking the entire population, including children at higher risk of harm, and not understanding how that harm can be caused, and using people with minimal training to provide the programme, means that some people get harmed.
Mindfulness is supposed to be a practice, and it's not necessarily an easy thing you can do with all benefits and minimal work. It's also deeply personal and not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing.
I think schools should treat meditation like prayer, because it's essentially the same function, and we should just avoid it in the classroom.
Perhaps the real tragedy here is that many students will learn about mindfulness in schools and dismiss it as useless nonsense, when there actually may be something of value in there somewhere.
Prayer and meditation are completely different. There are studies which demonstrate a causal connection between meditation and mental health benefits, and even structural changes in the brain. It demonstrably helps with anxiety and depression. The same cannot be said for prayer.
The example works even if the rapist has been convicted and is now in prison and Mary is no longer being raped. She deserves access to an evidence-based therapy such as EMDR, and she's not getting that because (in the UK) Government thinks mindfulness in schools is equivalent.
For example, meditation can lead to addiction (to do meditation). This is a certain contradiction, very often to find in the teachings/techers themselves. Meditation lets things pass. This is also true for meditation sessions itself, this is what is sometimes forgotten - it has to end.
I've practised meditation in the past and it made my depression worse. Specifically, my thoughts would flow too freely between associations made in the past and made me think about things that I would prefer to have never experienced in my life. Thinking about those things only worsens my condition. I stopped meditating and now I'm much better at compartmentalizing, I have "fences" in my mind which stop me from wandering into dangerous territories by accident. I'd have to make an effort to go past them. I won't do that. Had enough of it already. I know what's good or bad for me.
I recommend the book "Altered Traits". It looks at some benefits of meditation documented using scientific methods. But it also says that it may not be good for everyone. Specifically, it may be dangerous for people struggling with depression.
I think your view is extremely under appreciated, especially as it applies to group settings.
The trendy idea is about "being present" in physical form and acknowledge (but not engage) with any random thoughts that might come your way. I don't want that feeling unless I'm very specifically seeking it out.
Whenever I've had to participate in the "group" versions of these things, I try to think of literally anything else to keep myself distracted until it's over, for fear of wandering into unpleasant territory and causing a mood change when I'm actually supposed to be at work.
I wish there was a word for "sitting in silence with others, frantically searching for anything to think about to avoid letting your mind wander into terrifying places". If this mindfulness thing takes off, maybe someone can come up with a clever way to sum that up. It's a very uneasy feeling.
Also, why my employer would want me to take a mid-day break to meditate is beyond me. It's like they're trying to make me rethink my life decisions and quit.
Sorry I might be wrong here but I feel you are not doing it right. I am told to "not think" during meditation, while you mention "Thinking about those things" which seems not "not think".
Obviously I am no expert or actually even any good at meditating, but maybe try learning from a different teacher who might be able to help you out in this.
Just to reiterate, I might be wrong here and if that's the case just ignore my comment :)
Edit: the following is based on my experience, I can't make claims about all meditation.
It takes a lot of practice to actually be able to do that. The distraction is the meditation - you need to learn notice it and bring your mind back. The drowsiness is the meditation - you need to learn to notice it and raise your energy.
And as you learn to calm your brain without falling asleep, deeper and deeper repressed and ignored thoughts and feeling will come to the surface, because as you're gradually calming all the parts of your mind you are also calming the parts that are repressing the other parts which are enraged and demand a seat at the table. And part of meditation is getting punched in the face by those parts that you have been repressing, until you have faced them, dealt with them, accepted them and integrated them. (Although part of it is also learning when you need to ignore them and not try to "face" or "deal" with them.)
It's impossible not to think, unless you're dead. You even think while you dream! It is possible to avoid thinking concrete thoughts, but when concrete boundaries around acceptable thoughts are protecting you from trauma that's not a useful thing to do.
yeah you are right, so probably an expert meditator might be able to "not think". what we were told to do is think of a single thing/tought/phrase and just keep repeating it, basically minimise the storm of thoughts to one.
Collecting quotes from the article: "'Some people [mindfulness] helps, some it can make ’em feel worse. ... [T]hey don’t listen to us, they just tell us to do mindfulness.' ... "Sharp, eloquent, indignant, the students explain what does help them when they are stressed or upset: talking to people they trust, being listened to, having fun. ... They have many ideas about what their school can do to help them, but it seems like no one is listening."
Generally speaking, if you're in a bad environment, getting more in tune with your feelings and how you react to your environment can make you feel more acute pain. Conversely, becoming numb and unaware of your feelings can help avoid the pain, and possibly help you remain more functional, at least in the short term.
Of course, pain tends to signify a problem that has significance beyond the pain itself (pain for pain's sake would seem to have negative evolutionary value, but e.g. pain that encourages you to avoid sharp objects has positive value), so ignoring it seems like a bad thing in the medium and long term. However, if you have no practical options for fixing the underlying problem, then it may just be pain without gain.
This post seems controversial to the community based on voting. I’m wondering how it does not contribute to the discussion. It seems like an obvious statement? Am I wrong in thinking that no behavioral technique is going to be ubiquitously beneficial?
It doesnt contribute because it is making a claim with no evidence, no discussion of what the harm is, and how common it is. You can basically make that reply to every post on hacker news, ever.
Sometimes, for whatever reason, people post terse comments.
When that happens, it’ll often spark a thread that then fills in the gaps.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
I submitted the article. My comment explains why I submitted the article. The article talks about some of the harms.
"‘Mindfulness doesn’t help me,’ says Tyler, a 13-year-old student in a deprived area of southwest England. ‘Some people it helps, some it can make ’em feel worse.’ Gathered around a table in a large, cluttered classroom, five other students nod. Kayleigh cuts in: ‘Sometimes other things help me more. But they don’t listen to us, they just tell us to do mindfulness.’ "
mindfulness and meditation seems to be all the rage in recent years but looking at the physical state of many students these days and the stated goal:
>"The goal is to help them develop resilience, improve their attention and self-regulation, and prevent everyday stress spiralling into major psychological problems. "
I'd maybe recommend greatly expanding physical exercise and team sports because not only does it address many of the points above it also will reduce obesity and balance out general inactivity. Physical education seems to be severely neglected. Both quality and quantity.
Having to take part in team sports were a negative part of schooling for me. Activities that can be done together but with the goal of self improvement / competing with yourself being the main goal always felt better. Like track and field / some kind of cardio / anything in the gym.
I'm going to argue that it wasn't team sports, it was the infrequency with which you played them that caused the negativity.
Working as a team is part of the human experience. Some people are more inclined to it than others, but given enough time and frequency working with the same unit, almost everyone becomes a comrade, a brother-in-arms, bonded through shared experiences.
Team sports help develop social bonds and trust between peers, and those relationships help quite a few people deal with personal issues they would otherwise get stuck in their own heads trying to fight. Teamwork and working towards goals bigger than oneself are important to the psyche.
I’ve always hated sports. No matter how much I tried, I was horrible. All my school stress stemmed from PE and sports, and with how much of a focus “coolness” in school stems from sports performance, pressure simply grew and grew until I finally graduated. After graduating, I actively rejected sports and fitness because I associated it with the people who were good and I hated to be around, and it was nothing but negative connections in my mind.
It wasn’t until a friend introduced me to weightlifting that I learned that I can not only enjoy exercise, but I can do it completely alone without anybody looking at me. A weight set and a bench to sit on are as close to meditation as exercise can get for me.
I’m stronger than the average person. Visibly fit to the point that people comment on it. But every time someone has expected me to catch something or throw something to them, it’s a disaster. People can’t believe it because there’s the association of fitness level == sports ability, but there’s as connected as math and programming. It’s definitely good to be good at both and they definitely benefit each other, but you can also be incompetent at one and good at the other. I’ve definitely known some people who’ve never cared about basketball and don’t really exercise but almost never miss a shot if someone asks them to try.
This is a great story. On my part, I enjoyed playing soccer with my friends when I was a kid: We didn't have to perform or run fast, but we just did our best, and it was fun and fulfilling. On the other hand, our PE classes were often bland and not very fun: running, pull ups, push ups, occasionally basketball, which I struggled with a lot. (It was not in the US, so no one was getting much social benefits from being good at sports. But I see why your experience with school PE and sports feels so devastating.)
> I'm going to argue that it wasn't team sports, it was the infrequency with which you played them that caused the negativity
I am not the one you responded to, but I very much disliked team sports. I liked individual sports, including the ones I was bad at. Other kids did not became comrades in team sport, kids that did same individual sport became friends.
I was the kid that had trouble to be assertive and had trouble to fight over ball with teammates. Because other kids in same team wont give the ball to someone else when they have fun with it. They want it for themselves, even when you are at good position. Team sports just sucked from social standpoint.
The only shared experience always ended up being feeling that I don't belong here. The only thing I learned was to avoid the experience.
It did worked for some other kids, but don't tell us it works for everyone. It does not.
>it was the infrequency with which you played them that >caused the negativity.
At UK highschool we were forced to play football once / twice a week.
All the kids who wanted to do this also played more through the week so they were good at it.
The once/twice a week-ers were rubbish and it was just not fun.
>but given enough time and frequency working with the same >unit, almost everyone becomes a comrade, a brother-in-arms, >bonded through shared experiences.
This is complete bullshit, you've obviously never had players on the team screaming at you to do something with the ball and then messing it up. These kids are not your 'comrades' they play with you once or twice a week then go back to class.
>Team sports help develop social bonds and trust between >peers, and those relationships help quite a few people deal >with personal issues they would otherwise get stuck in >their own heads trying to fight. Teamwork and working >towards goals bigger than oneself are important to the >psyche.
Yeah my first thought before and after reading the article is that these kids don't need "mindfulness" to connect with their bodies and feelings, they need an extra 60-90 minutes of exercise.
Particularly the boys. Preferably at the beginning of the day.
It funny, because at least in our local playground and in class my kids go to, girls are outside more then boys. Which applies especially when weather is not good, despite boys clothes being typically more suited to bad weather and easier to find.
Maybe it is just anomaly, but I found it odd. Especially when everyone here is like "boys are so different and more wild".
And I always think "why don't you take them outside then and why don't limit their sit-on-couch-with-tablet-game the way girls have it limited".
Interesting counterexample, and a good exemplar of the phenomenon that the nature of distributions is that occasionally one finds outliers such as this.
I don't think it can reasonably be disputed though that in the average case it is true that boys are more physically active and spend more time outside than girls.
I am not saying that boys are not physically active more.
Whether kids are outside depends way more on parents then on kids. And for whatever reasons, boys parents around here take them outside less. I think that very related is that parents are more content with boys spending a lot of time with videogames. Which cuts to physical activity and makes kid content sitting for hours.
And maybe parents are also more conscious with girls not getting enough of physical movement. Or it is also about friends.
I personally think that boys would be better off if they were outside and moving more.
1) The teachers were invariably bullies. They would belittle students that they did not feel “performed well.” Also, because of the nature of the class, this bullying could manifest in physical (not just verbal) form. PE was my “horror” class. I was terrified of it.
2) In the US, there is tremendous pressure to compete. Scoring is everywhere. I have never been a competitive person; always preferring consensus and cooperation. This attitude was highly discouraged in PE (often by nasty remarks from the teacher, and their “pets”).
3) I’m “on the spectrum,” and one of the manifestations of that, is rather poor coordination. I have never been able to perform well in any sport; no matter how hard I tried. I could get fit, but not good.
Sour grapes? Maybe.
But I do feel that bullying is a big problem in every society, and it is often done by the “winners,” so there’s no will to address it. No one wants to “hobble” their “stars.”
I don’t see how deep breathing exercises will address that.
I believe that at some point in our nation's history PE lost it's bearing and no longer became about "physical education" per se and became more about sports and game type classes. Games like dodgeball allowed the bullies – teachers included – to flourish.
Physical education should be just that, an education on the body. How it moves, how to retain mobility, how to get stronger, etc.
There are books on this, I don't have any references at the moment sorry.
I used to be a personal trainer. I stopped being amazed at how little people knew about their bodies and how to move them pretty quickly.
It's a sad state of affairs. While I don't think physical fitness will "cure" people with clinical depression and anxiety I believe it's an important tool in the toolkit.
> While I don't think physical fitness will "cure" people with clinical depression and anxiety I believe it's an important tool in the toolkit.
I completely agree. Physical fitness, when taught without a focus on competition, is extremely valuable.
I'm sure that a big reason for my non-competitive stance, is because I learned, quite early on, that I would never be able to do particularly well in any physically competitive arena, and it wasn't even worth trying.
I am also of Irish/Scottish/English heritage. Pretty much the Platonic Ideal of "white."
I live in NY, with a significant percentage of folks of Mediterranean descent.
I don't tan. I stroke.
I get sick of people telling "You can tan, just take sun in fifteen minute increments."
For me, it is:
Fifteen minutes -Ghost white
Fifteen minutes -Ghost white
Fifteen minutes -Ghost white
Fifteen minutes -Bright red, peeling, and screaming
No in-between.
The same goes for my friends (and not-friends) that have normal coordination. I took six years of tennis lessons, and never got beyond "suck." I took a year of Kung-Fu, and never got beyond white belt.
"Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win, and never quit are idiots." -From a Despair, Inc. Demotivator
Were you one of the kids who was good at sports? I remember school PE as being horrible for mental health. Anyone awkward, uncoordinated, unpopular, unhappy with their body, or just totally uninterested in competitive sports spent those lessons being ignored at best, shouted at at worst. Funny how in primary school we all happily ran about and played together at lunchtime, but enforced sports days and team sports made it very clear who was “good” and who was “bad”, and that those of us who were bad should just stay out of the way and not inconvenience our teammates. COMPETITIVE sports are obviously going to make those at the bottom miserable and foster resentment towards them: that’s kind of the point.
e: oh, and let’s not forget the horrifying combinations of changing rooms, showers and puberty... and for those of us with glasses there was a whole extra dimension of being forced to swim or dodge flying balls in the rain while literally semi-blind...!
PE is a bad example case. Infrequent, with random team assignments, playing random new sports and activities each class is obviously and definitely skewed towards those who are predisposed to coordination and teamwork traits.
What the parent, and I in another comment are talking about is team sports with the same team, playing the same sport on a regular basis.
Not many people are good at "red scooter dodge chicken" after 5 minutes of it. But playing the same thing day in, day out for a while (practice) makes you better at it. You start noticing you're improving, your teammates may not out you in the starting rotation, but they're going to start bonding with you because of proximity and the shared feeling of progress.
You don't need to have the same competitive zeal as the top performers, but you need to want to be part of the group.
I never saw anyone get ostracized in a team unless they continually refused to be part of it.
So, what are you going to do with the kids who don’t want to be a part of it and will simply never enjoy the experience of whiffing a ball every time? (Yes, it really is possible not to improve - see the other commenter who is on the spectrum, or anyone with dyspraxia, etc). Will you just say they deserve what they get? We’re presumably still talking about a situation where they’re forced to take part.
> never saw anyone get ostracized in a team unless they continually refused to be part of it.
This is the "I never see sexual harassment so it doesn't happen" argument applied to childhood bullying.
All education suffers from trying to motivate kids to do something voluntarily when really it isn't, but only in team sports is this enforced against the body.
(How well do schools handle gender mixed sport these days, or is there a strict partition still?)
Yes but I also had a good teacher who was good at setting up teams and so on in ways that avoid the typical pitfalls of not picking the awkward kid etc. With the teacher I had there wasn't any of the bad dynamics many people here seem to associate with PE. Which I think speaks to the quality aspect. Those issues are not inherent to sports but simply the result of teachers failing to do their jobs right.
In a general sense though I think the slightly challenging aspect of competitive sports and the physicality around it is a good thing for development if it's done right. The unathletic kid needs to learn to deal with it just like the stuttering kid needs to learn to speak in front of audiences and the shy kid needs to learn to do a presentation or a play.
These things prepare people to not avoid and get through things they're not good at and the social dynamics around it in a safe way ideally.
This feels very much like mindfulness is trying to be used as a bandaid to cover the (metaphorical) sucking chest wound of student mental health. Schools can be absolutely miserable places for many students. Bullying is rampant, both from students and staff, students are forced to be there, and have very little choice in how to spend their days. If we want to improve mental health in young people, look closely at how we run schools. Reduce class sizes, give students self determination. These aren’t easy steps though.
While I agree with your points, I’d reframe them slightly: it’s a sucking chest wound of teenage mental health.
Schools are having to deal with young people who come to them with problems from outside. Schools can make them better or worse, but that’s loading a responsibility onto schools way beyond education. The fact that we are even having to consider non-traditional subjects/activities like mindfulness as a treatment to help kids get through the day, rather than to help prepare them for adult life, is a huge red flag.
We can look closely at how we run schools, but where is the scrutiny on parenting? There is a ton of assessment of teachers and metrics on school performance (whether they are a good thing or not in improving outcomes is a different matter). Serious problems in the home are generally picked up by social services – and you could say that they function as a bandaid to cover the sucking chest wound of adult mental health - but straightforward poor parenting is far more widespread, how do we fix that?
If we want to improve mental health in young people we need to look closely at how we run society. Schools could help, but only if they were adequately funded for everything they are being expected to deliver.
Schools are in loco parentis. Schools are parents. That's what day care is -- part time parenting. They should do their part, with appropriate staff and resources. Parents at home should be supported as well. But this all costs money that is being diverted to the military industrial complex and other graft.
No, schools are not parents. Acting in loco parentis means acting in the place of the parent while they aren’t there, not becoming the parent. It places a duty of care to safeguard the child and act in its best interests. It does not mean raising the child. It is the misguided attitude of some parents that somehow the school is responsible for parenting children that is probably half the problem.
And yes, parents should have support. This used to come from much stronger, multigenerational family units. Where that isn’t the case, few would consider attending parenting classes even if they were available. But don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s necessarily just about that, as I said originally, I think adult mental wellbeing is a bigger problem than is generally recognised. Anxiety, aggression, apathy, these transfer from the parent to the child.
Lowering the GINI coefficient in a country would be a good start while maintaining or increasing GDP. An example of countries that have done this are Scandinavian countries.
Historically, the GINI coefficient was much lower in the US post WWII, with increased GDP while keeping the GINI coefficient low through benefits conferred to GIs in homesteading, education, loans, and healthcare.
I go (went?) to a very competitive STEM magnet school. We had 5 minutes of meditation at the start of class once a week. Sometimes it was nice, other times it was actively harmful. If there was a test we had to make up for lost time by staying in during lunch/passing time. Once our teacher was giving us last minute review before a test and she had to just talk over the broadcasted meditation instructions
As my grandmother used to say, you can't fool dogs and children.
>> As Jack, a 13-year-old student at a school in a post-industrial town in the UK, explained: ‘They’re trying to teach us to choose what we want but then not letting us choose anything at all.’
Students are very quick to see through their teachers' bullshit as they have years of practice by the time they are adolescents.
The current convention seems to be that if students can't life-hack their school then there must be something wrong with them. That lack of self-reflection on the part of teachers and schools is telling, and probably a big reason for student anxiety in the first place.
Yep. Mindfulness helps to lower your self-inflicted stress and worries, but it is not a solution when you have a concrete issue, like being where you don't want to be, with people you don't want to be with, doing what you don't want to do. Put another way, mindfulness doesn't mend bone, nor put food on the table.
Schools, teachers and parents are in a very difficult position these days because of how fast things are changing. They are constantly overloaded with info about what's good for the kid. Even developmental psychologists,pedagogy experts and edu depts get overloaded and feel pressure to pass opinions on everything under the sun without serious evaluation. Learning takes Time. So evaluation of any method takes time. But the pressure to try X Y or Z builds up so quickly that anyone pushing back can easily be labeled a dinosaur and kicked out the room.
And its all happening in the useless attention arms race type environment the tech sector has created where what and who gets propped up depends on whose TED talk got more views, how much time they self promote, and 'what can scale faster'.
Such an environment will keep producing a whole lot of failed experiments.
All this bearing in mind we haven’t really seen any sustainable improvement in test scores in the last ~50 years. What is even the point of having an education arms race while the same people groups average pretty much the same aptitude for the tests? SAT scores for language have worsened while math has remained fairly consistent since the 70s, which suggests to me that those scores are loosely (if at all) related to educational strategy.
I may not have a popular opinion, but I think our focus should be more on supporting families to raise their children instead of what amounts in my mind to free day care, especially for children 10 and under.
Wait, drop out rates are down. People are more likely to finish education then they used 50 years ago. Maybe the top who goes to college did not raised up that much, but average if you include low performers did.
I haven’t seen that data, and it is a fair point. Still, I would argue that at least part of that shift is a result of changes in employability. When my parents were in school, a college degree was not yet considered a pre-requisite for so many people who are entering the work force. In fact, neither of my parents had a degree, yet we were able to live comfortably on just my father’s income. And for those who still carry that view, the situation is much worse today than it was then.
> SAT scores for language have worsened while math has remained fairly consistent since the 70s, which suggests to me that those scores are loosely (if at all) related to educational strategy.
how is this possible? aren't SAT scores curved to achieve a normal distribution?
I've seen it suggested in other articles here before that mindfulness programs for employees are often a way for employers to try and get their staff to be more accepting of crappy conditions, or unpleasant, meaningless or unethical work.
It sounds to me like the same kind of thing might also apply in schools.
I'm sure the school teachers and administrators mean well. I'm sure they don't consciously realise what a nightmare their institutions have become for many of the students in their care. Even if they do realise, they didn't choose for it to be that way.
The sad fact is that modern life has become a horrible nightmare for many people, grownups and kids alike. Mindfulness has become a popular attempt to paper over the problems, but in truth, many people who are having coping problems or exhibiting "mental illness" are really having understandable reactions to the dysfunction they're sensing in the world.
To be clear: I'm in no way averse to emotional wellbeing techniques that are effective and that increase the agency of participants. I've gone very deep on this kind of work in my own life, and have benefited greatly.
But I think the outcomes, and indeed the intentions, of mainstream mindfulness programs are quite different to this, and are sadly far more focused on maintaining the status quo for institutions and modern mainstream society.
>mindfulness programs for employees are often a way for employers to try and get their staff to be more accepting of crappy conditions
^This. I don't need mindfulness, gyms, free junky snacks, team building events, parking spaces as perks, I need work conditions that don't grind my mind and body so much for me to require therapy afterwards (realistic deadlines, no open office, no rush hour commutes, remote work, comfy monitors, chairs and desks, time off to spend with my family).
Unfortunately due to ever increasing wealth inequality, most of the workforce, even in the west, is stuck in a meatgrinder where the only escape being dangled in front of you is climbing the ladder high enough until you become the one one to turn the handle.
i wish i could upvote more than once. the company i work for recently started surveying people about “return to office”. the company has been really good about work from home during COVID but they really haven’t taken into consideration a permanent distributed workforce. the survey results will speak for themselves. People are less stressed without a daily commute, see their families more and have more balance - oh and get the same amount of work or more.
i think any company that’s not seriously evaluating distributed teams permanently is going to lose talent.
Before the lockdown, my company always provided the option of working from home if needed. Maybe you had childcare, maybe your car was in the garage. But the general default was to be in the office. How we worked reflected this - often we'd try to resolve problems or ask for advice face to face. Some people could get frustrated if others were frequently working from home on short notice.
With hindsight, I haven't felt many blocks to working remotely. Hardware issues, like a laptop charger failing, tend to be the more difficult things to get sorted. It's how things have to be, and people get on with it. What I do miss is the corridor conversations and find that I have a more narrow view of what's going on in the company because I'm simply not exposed to it.
Also, I neglected to invest in my home office setup because it wasn't a common thing to use. If working remotely does because more of a norm, that's where I'd spend some money going forward.
People like the change working from home for a few months. This is not socially sustainable though. People will begin to feel isolated and lonely (which is already an epidemic in itself). Working from home for years on end is something only a handful of people are really cut out for, and the problem is that most people don't realize they're not one of those people until they've been doing it for quite a while.
Maybe it isn't for some, like you, but for many/most forced WFH I believe the outcome will in fact be lasting and socially fruitful.
(Personally, I've WFH 10+ years so not the best example because it was always my preference and had no cares about missing out on potential social interactions or relationships with co-workers)
But plenty of people I know about have been recently forced to WFH are finding various new hobbies and thus discovering and developing new social circles (Online & IRL) even w/ CV19 circumstances. Not to mention just going outside to do things and meeting others is happening a lot - at least where I live.
Between observing this and thinking through it more...I'm not convinced that coworkers are really the best types of relationships anyways. Indeed they can provide us with some superficial temporary social stimuli and primitive reinforcement, though not sure relationships by default/proximity are not built to last regardless. And they often come with the consummate 'shop talk' and 'office politics' or 'gossip' trade-offs - all childish stuff to be concerned with in or outside of work.
My hunch is that we're all better off getting to know people outside our own little bubbles :)
Right now, so many people's social outlets are work, which seems the bad part. Take that away and either now there's nothing, or norms change and people make more social outlets to meet people outside of work. I'm sure hoping for the latter, which I see as better than the status quo.
I wish I could find/found a sort of engineering collective, owned by the employees and with a focus on work/life balance to alleviate the meat grinder that is modern work. I’d be ok taking a pay cut.
The modern workplace is a sick system [1] designed to push you to your limits holding onto a semblance of a comfortable life as inequality rises.
> I've seen it suggested in other articles here before that mindfulness programs for employees are often a way for employers to try and get their staff to be more accepting of crappy conditions, or unpleasant, meaningless or unethical work.
I'm not sure I buy this. I suppose it's true that being better able to tolerate unpleasant situations does mean you might put up with them for longer. And while meditating, yes, the goal is to not react to things you're feeling.
But for me, a big benefit of mindfulness is more clarity on where my emotions are coming from. I'd sometimes feel tense, or upset, or nervous, but couldn't even really notice I was feeling that way, let alone why I was feeling that way.
I think clarity there generally helps people change their conditions more than it urges them to just accept them.
> But for me, a big benefit of mindfulness is more clarity on where my emotions are coming from
That's what I'd say about the emotional work I do, so I'm not criticising that kind of work if that is the actual outcome, and if it leads to more authentic perception of one's surroundings and increased ability to make decisions that are best for one's self and the world long-term.
I'm just questioning whether that really is the outcome or indeed the intention for programs branded as "mindfulness" in workplaces, schools, etc.
How would you encourage genuine mindfulness in an organization without opening up this kind of concern/criticism of the potential motivations behind it?
I think in many cases it's a valid criticism - perhaps due to practitioners who don't communicate how to apply mindfulness clearly, or staff who fail to understand the true goals and attempt to use it to suppress complaints and problems.
My understanding is that there is an actual definition and research of mindfulness that can be used to evaluate and I guess even benchmark whether a given program actually is using the methods as intended?
>I think clarity there generally helps people change their conditions more than it urges them to just accept them.
It can work either way. Any mental approach can be used for clarity and motivation or as an opiate - or something worse (justification for harm, etc.). It depends on what you emphasize. For kids in school, they're probably not going to be able to change their own conditions, particularly at school.
I've experienced both in myself. Meditation, discovery, and self reflection helped me deal with very bad work situations, but it also eventually made it clear where balance was lacking and the motivation to find better balance, which is very difficult in the US (and I'm sure most of the world).
I also think there's a big difference between wanting it for yourself and having it pushed on you. If I didn't seek it out but instead had school or work force it down my throat, I doubt I would have benefited much from it. I'm sure there are kids and adults who were ready for it anyway, so when it was forced on them, they scooped it up and ran, but I doubt that's the typical experience. Balance is different for different people, because we're all off balance in different ways, so I might need to learn a little this way or a lot that way to find balance, and you may need to lean in the opposite directions. Mindfulness is vague enough to give people room to adjust according to their needs, but in an institutional setting, it will be filtered through the balances of whoever is presenting it. Because some of these approaches helped me, I'm inclined to want other people to experience them, but I also understand that different things work for different people and that I shouldn't expect my experiences to translate to everyone else.
Actual mindfulness is not about numbing yourself to annoying conditions or subservience. It is, for me at least, the exact opposite. It makes me more secure and firm in grounding, allowing me to better question authority in my mind, see things for what they are beyond the surface level knee jerk reactions, it gives space to break out of the "fire!!" mentality, see the work in context or what else is also important etc.
Now, of course it depends on what they sell under the label of mindfulness. You can slap that label on any kool-aid cult indoctrination if you want. Not any session where people tell you how to use your mind will be beneficial for sure.
I can't find the exact quote, but George Carlin had a great bit on this. It goes something like:
"Before you start taking powerful psychoactive medication for your depression, anxiety, or other neuroses, do a quick head count of the people around you. You know, take a quick poll before you pop the pills. Make sure that everyone around you isn't just a complete asshole."
I think the intentions of mainstream mindfulness programs are to introduce the very concept of meditation to those who wouldn’t otherwise consider it. If firms reached out with less practical forms of meditation, there would be lower uptake. Compare a weeklong silent meditation retreat vs easy mindfulness training that you can do 10 minutes/day. There’s just going to be more workers taking up the more efficient option.
Through that lens, mainstream mindfulness programs make sense as part of a work/life benefits package.
It's the exact same reason why businesses have been pushing mindfulness at work as well. They don't want to actually reduce stress or solve the problems workers are facing; they'd rather try and teach them to not break as fast while under stress.
This isn't to discount the benefits of being mindful or meditating for people. But you should be very wary when someone's trying to sell you on it because usually there's a greater reason for it.
Whatever the intent, or the side effects, mindfulness is still beneficial for individuals. Skepticism is healthy, but sometimes we need to place more weight on first-order effects, otherwise we’re paralyzed obsessing over which and how bad guys will benefit from the things that benefit us.
Any mindfulness for children or adults must be just offering. You should't make it regular thing that everyone must attend. You can't motivate mindfulness from the outside.
Some people just have very bad reactions to mindfulness even if they try it voluntarily. It may be ongoing psychological issue or something else. People seem more or less similar on the outside, but they have very different experiences when they turn their mind inwards.
One example in the article was trauma, which seems reasonable. Home situations for children vary wildly and I wouldn't expect children to be mentally equipped if they're exposed to abuse, bereavement, etc. Teaching them to virtually bottle up their emotions is something I'd expect to end badly sooner or later.
I don't have any examples, but the general idea is that if you have issues that you aren't paying attention to and you start meditating, you relax and become quiet inside, and these issues you've been ignoring start to come up.
For some people, especially if they're previously unaware of their issues, it can seem like meditation itself has caused some bad reaction.
It's like if you're listening to the radio really loud and then turn it off and hear the smoke alarm. Turning off the radio didn't cause the smoke, but it might sound that way if you're not familiar with what's really going on.
>In many programmes, students learn that emotions such as anger, anxiety and fear stem from reactions in a brain region called the amygdala. They are taught that mindfulness helps them identify and manage these emotions by activating the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain associated with behavioural regulation. In doing so, students are taught that mindfulness creates space in which we can ‘choose our response’ as opposed to reacting or lashing out. In the words of one programme, mindfulness gives us ‘the freedom to choose’.
> These might sound like reasonable claims, but they imply a dichotomy between emotions and reason, and the superiority of ‘rational’ responses to distress. This idea derives not from traditional mindfulness but from liberal Western ideals. Historically, these ideals have served to undermine oppressed groups, as anger and resistance is perceived as irrational.
The article's commentary here seems out-of-touch with most mindfulness instruction I've experienced. It's usually emphasized to notice things in as non-judgmental a way as possible; you're definitely not encouraged to label anger or any other emotion as "irrational".
Mindfulness does give you the freedom to choose. It wouldn't be freedom to choose if the choice was always to ignore anger: sometimes anger is useful, other times it isn't; mindfulness helps you notice that and act accordingly.
Mindfulness should focus first on observing and not judging/labeling things as good/bad. That just leads to more misery!!
The instructors should certainly realize that mindfulness and it’s experiences are very subjective and each individual has different experiences. One must be careful not to compare two students and say one is a better example of mindfulness than the other.
You can see the same misconceptions when people expect mindful meditation to always:
- relax them
- make them happy
- make them less emotional
But with practice I learned that some sessions are extremely emotional, full of stress or sorrow. It's not uncommon to feel pain, distress or to cry deeply during intense meditation retreats.
The process improves one existence by making us live those aspects of our life better. Not by taking them away.
Now of course, on the long run, it will make people more relaxed, happier, etc. Making you fitter to live with yourself.
But not by removing, ignoring or suppressing suffering.
It's still here. It will always be here. That's the point of meditating.
Mindfulness forces us to observe it as it is. You see your contradictions, your scars and your urges. You see your masks, conditioning and reflexes.
If anything, it removes dichotomy. Not add to it.
In fact, from what I witnessed, meditation tends to make people remove layers in general. I rarely hear meditators talking about adding ones.
And mindfulness is certainly not emotions vs reason.
It has nothing to do with either.
Emotions and reason are here. You observe them, and yourself using them. But the fact you use them is not part of the technique. It's just a part of you, and like all parts of you, you are invited to observe it.
Like everybody, when I started years ago, I confused "be detached" with "don't feel", "label it unimportant", "try to relax". That's not it.
What you feel or the label you use are just not part of the teaching. They don't matter at all (for the practice). What matters is that you observe it.
Thank you, this is the most compelling argument for meditation I've ever seen.
Don't want to sound too ignorant (although I might be), but more often than not I encounter much simpler interpretations of meditation and its goals that (to me) sound more like instructions to wall off rather than to find peace with yourself. They also sometimes come with a tacit shaming of strong emotions, but as the saying goes: "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". I think that pushing for no strong emotions at all (at least on the surface) does promote walling off rather than actually understanding yourself better, which sometimes requires you to be out of balance. Like in math, always going up can lead you to a local maximum only, and to reach a global maximum you have to walk downhill once in a while.
> more often than not I encounter much simpler interpretations of meditation and its goals that (to me) sound more like instructions to wall off rather than to find peace with yourself.
I've notice this at several occasions.
It is not specific to meditation though.
Agile software development, as practiced behind corporate walls, is very different what Beck and Schwaber talked about in the 90'.
Thanks to MMA, we know now that many modern martial art teachings are not practical from a self-defense perspective.
Many may claim they follow the ideal of the same famous religious figure, and confronted with each others, will end up with opposite opinions on how to live one life.
As soon as something become mainstream, it is bound to be adapted into different variations of what it was initially intended. Yet we keep the same name for it.
For what I know, what I'm practicing is also a variation of a variation of a variation of something.
> Thanks to MMA, we know now that many modern martial art teachings are not practical from a self-defense perspective.
I don't disagree with the general point that there are martial art schools that do not teach effective self defense - but I'm not sure how MMA figures in to it.
Self defense is about situational awareness, coping with multiple attackers, probably armed. Often you may have a way of de-escalating the situation (eg: give them your wallet).
I suppose in the instance of a single un-armed rapist (often the case when the victim knows the attacker) MMA has increased the focus on grappling (ie: judu/jujutsu/bjj and various wrestling techniques).
I'm not sure what else the popularity of MMA has thought us about self defense.
Now, if your talking about ring fighting with a particular ruleset, one on one, with a referee... That might be something else.
Walls get such a bad rap. They are how we do resilience. They are how we prevent cascade failure. They are how we can keep sailing even when a compartment floods.
I am not an expert, but some sources on meditation describe states of extreme emotion, as intermediate steps towards enlightenment. In Wikipedia, the first and second jhana are described as "rapture and non-sensual pleasure" (with or without internal speech respectively). So the proper path to balance seems to lead through mastery of the emotions, not suppressing them.
I think the idea is that you are not your emotions, and you don't have to be ruled by your emotions, but rather the emotions are something that happens to you, and something you can control. Doesn't mean you have to turn them off, it just means you have the option to do so if necessary. Or perhaps you feel the emotion, but are not compelled to act on it.
That is a great description of the reality and mirrors my experience doing a lot of meditation for mindfulness in college.
Three years ago, I picked it up again for about 18 months years and once again let it slip.
It took me a long time to realize why, which is this: I have not found meditation to have been very useful in actual day to day life despite the multiple attestations from people that it brought them ... something. I got something out of meditation also, but unlike weightlifting, for me it has never been a continuing something.
There's the eye-opening moment of really becoming aware of the ephemeralness of so many impulses that inflict us day-to-day. That is a great lesson and probably helped a lot with self control. It's like the first time you realize that you can change your mood - you don't have to ride the tiger, you can stop the process, it is subject to your conscious influence if you want it to be, but you don't need to practice this once you learn it.
In practical terms, I think those impulses are actually very valuable because they tap into faster, broader lower-tier reasoning, and mindfulness, at least as I understood it and practiced it, ended up disempowering them in a way that was mildly negative, especially in interpersonal situations where the side-effects of added latency and inevitably reduced amplitude have consequences.
Very lazy too, so I get it. I try to take so many shortcuts, and often it leads me taking more time that I would have if I did the hard thing first.
I've been meditating for 13 years, and sometimes I meet people with 3 years of practice that seem decades ahead of me.
One time, I think after my 2nd or 3rd retreat, I practiced in such a way that instead of helping myself, I got into depression. Took me a few months to change course.
I don't thing there is a "standard experience" for meditating. YMMV seems like a good summary for it.
> out-of-touch with most mindfulness instruction I've experienced
The premise that emotions, be it anger, desire or rumination, are harmful, is almost aways the selling point and the reason people choose to start or are given such training.
The training itself might include non-judgement/compassion but that isn’t why you are sat there in the first place.
It’s difficult for me to see non-judgement as anything but a tool to pacify anger rather than as actual legitimisation of a state of anger as a way of being.
I think it may be because culturally we mix anger with the causes and consequences of anger.
Meditation can, little by little, albeit very slowly in my experience, decorrelate those 3.
I've seen it to result in meditators subject to a lot of anger:
- producing less anger
- maintaining anger for smaller amounts of time
- acting less dramatically over anger
And so it seems logical that people draw the conclusion that meditation tells you not to be angry. That angers it bad, or that you should control it.
To my knowledge, that's not the teaching.
Note that I think it's as good as a reason as any to start practicing. The practice will shift your point of you over time anyway. It's what it does.
And it will help with the suffering related to anger on the long run.
However, confusion can arise if people with little to no experience with meditation make quick judgement of the technic and build definitive ideas on top of that.
Appart from kindly explaining that it's a different story, there is not much one can do about it, though.
I believe meditation has taken too much oxygen from intellectual action e.g. writing exercises where you try to fully describe what is happening, the feelings, the causes, consequences and possible actions.
If you do this, you gain insight, empowerment and actionable plans. Meditation might claim something similar but I don’t think it delivers to the same degree.
Self-development in general is a very efficent excuse to avoid taking action.
You can certainly use "meditation" to work on yourself forever, in preparation for doing things, and never, ever, actually do anything.
But in itself, it's not the nature of meditation.
In a way, meditation share similarities with physical exercice.
Doing your morning run doesn't make you less fit to take action, make a plan or to apply critical thinking. I would say it's the opposite.
A lot of my most productive periods in my life are right after meditation retreats.
During those times, I use GTD a lot, to support my efforts. Writting, descripting, listing causes and consequences are in no way in competition with meditation.
To be frank, I don't know what could be in competition with meditation. It's pretty much orthogonal to everything by essence.
IME it does deliver. Not necessarily directly (like, you're not going to come up with an action plan white meditating), but, over time, it helps cultivate a state of mind where those things are easier to do.
I think it does take time, though, like between 1 week and 1 month of daily practice, to start noticing the effects.
I agree, but I'll add that in my opinion a writing exercise such as OP describes is half-way meditation anyways.
different activities involve different degrees of mindfulness, and I believe making a sharp distinction, while sometimes useful, is usually harmful.
You can take a shit mindfully, way I see it. it might not be something you call 'meditation' most of the time, but I imagine it's even possible to do a proper meditative shit.
the point of the article is how the UK's version of mindfulness "mass produced" for public education carries all of those things as implied ideological baggage.
Of course mindfulness practice is not about labeling emotion as irrational, but the reasoning behind implementing it in the education system is very close to this.
Maybe, but the article is kinda just saying that -- I don't see the quoted sentences from the instructors as evidence that they just want to suppress anger or think that anger is always irrational.
I've heard this rebuttal a few times, that western values try to suppress emotions, and anger is sometimes good. Eliezer makes this point too. I'm still not sure I fully understand it.
The anger I feel when I'm cut off in traffic is distinct enough from the anger that I feel at oppression or injustice to really deserve its own label. Like, anger1 and anger2.
Since they feel so different, I have slightly different thoughts about each.
I never want to drive with anger1 instead of safety. Driving with anger, or "road rage," is not an interesting value-neutral way to experience the world.
I think that driving anger is a distinct emotion that is always unhealthy and just happens to share the name "angry" with other emotions because of superficial similarities. People will probably say that's just a different context, I think that's overgeneralizing, but even in other contexts I worry about the call to set aside rationality. (Instead of anger1 and anger2 you could call one rage and the other indignation.)
When I'm angry ("angry2") about senseless human suffering, I agree it should move people, people should not just tune out. But that seems like a straw man of the rationalist approach. There too I'd rather channel that feeling into a thought process that maximizes my impact, rather than just attempt to satisfy the emotional call to yell or cry or punch a wall. Those may be important therapeutic responses, but if you can feel satisfaction by just getting to work to try to correct the injustice, that would be better.
I'm rarely physically threatened, but my system still occasionally floods me with fight or flight adrenaline. What's so wrong about saying that's a quirk of evolution, and thoughtful responses are going to leave me better off, absent some weird fringe scenarios?
I've heard the opposite perspective from people smarter and calmer than me though, so maybe I'm wrong and it just hasn't clicked for me yet.
That's an interesting perspective and I think I mostly agree. The way I think about it is that anger is helpful for setting goals ("angry2" in your formulation). But it clouds the mind and is unhelpful for forming strategy and action, which relates more to "angry1." For example, reading something hateful online activates both "angry1" and "angry2" but responding in the moment uses "angry1" and is mostly unhelpful for forming a rebuttal that helps move hearts and minds.
Mindfulness is somewhat analogous to breaking out the profiler or debugger/introspection on a program you're running. You step through each state of mind deliberately, looking at the callstack and variable that brought you to this point. Introspecting with mindfulness or a debugger isn't in itself going to make your program work better, though you might learn enough about the way the program is working that your initial unhappiness with it subsides because you see that the program is working as well as can be expected. Other times you might see a program with many unnecessary calls and in need of a great deal of change, which in itself might make you blow your top upon discovery - especially if the change will be difficult or nearly impossible. That people find problems with the program doesn't mean that the debugger is broken or debugging is something to be avoided.
We use these tools and while they might not always guarantee a pleasant experience, or even that you can change anything, they allow us to discover something about the program or ourselves that can be of some benefit often enough that we keep these tools around.
If you force people to drop down to the debugger every day, be prepared to get some clear feedback. Is an industrial school system ready to take on that sort of thing? It seems the goals is to turn out students to spec efficiently than the concerns of students mental life (e.g. You might not have much agency over doing X, but do it anyway because it furthers our graduation/testing/cost goals). If you're really interested in the students wellbeing (e.g. my parents are having problems at home, or I'm having problems with my classmates), I think the debugger can be a helpful tool. If you're debugger sessions are perfunctory with a stated goal of helping improve the program, but in fact discovered problems aren't addressed or are expected to be minimized, then you won't have much success with the debugger and I wouldn't diagnose it as a problem with the debugger or debugging per se.
> It's usually emphasized to notice things in as non-judgmental a way as possible; you're definitely not encouraged to label anger or any other emotion as "irrational".
Identifying thoughts as "distortions" or "unrealistic" is a major point of CBT. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these programs are carelessly mixing it in.
Maybe true mindfulness training has the subtleties you describe. But when it is mass-packaged and standardized such that it can be taught in schools, it will lose a lot of nuance. The approach can’t be judged in terms of its best form, but rather in terms of the average form available (in this case) to students.
Totally agree. It's a strange consultant money grab that has managed to gain stream. It appears to be useful for people with anxiety issues, but is being touted as a cure all by snake oil salesmen all over the place. It's like the astrology crowd has a new toy and revenue source.
It is not because it does not even claim to be science. The often associated religious or/and esoteric part is something, putting me off for years (it still does). But the thing itself has a quite rational essence. Helpful for me:
At the end it comes also to dukkha and other Buddhist concepts I don't care much about. But before, it served me very well in his quite accessible approach to what I would call 'mind cleansing'.
On-topic: In my opinion the whole thing is nothing for very young people, in particular not for children.
Learning how to observe emotions arise and react more reasonably and rationally is valuable. You seem to have a personal grudge or possibly just don't know anything about the subject.
Yup. It isn't even one defined thing. And in the sense that it barely is definable it's no different from placebo. Probably because it is placebo: have an authoritive source tell people if they think some way it'll make them feel better.
As an "old guy" who has been meditating since the 70's, Mindfulness is merely a popular fad, and a money grab, and is doing a terrible job is claiming to be a cure all. It latches onto people with anxiety issues and claims to be a cure all. Be like Public Enemy and Don't Believe The Hype.
It time to let kids be kids and kids are relaxed when playing outside, with friends, getting dirty. Adults are as well, but we force ourselves into a more structured live. Thus we need mindfullness. But maybe we also need to play outside, in nature, with others, getting dirty.
education should not be made cost efficient by means of having one teacher specialized in a grade per every 30+ students.
It shold be more personal with far less students per teacher; but this is too costly and for some reason it doesn't seem like anyone is willing to pay for this premium
Weird article. It's thesis is that kids have some problems that mindfulness doesn't solve. Like, OK, that's obvious. Those problems should be addressed.
Yet another case of pitting good things against each other by denying appropriate funding.
Forcing someone to sit and be mindful is incredibly offensive to the idea of mindfulness. Goes to show that whatever good thing mandatory schooling touches, it perverts or corrupts. They should just stick to sciences.
Taken literally, you're leaping from arguing kids' whims are sub-optimal to saying they're an absolute minimum in terms of long-term beneficial behavioral outcomes.
Kids jumping off bridges is probably worse than them eating ice cream cones or whatever.
You don’t have to tell me that, I have a 12 year old.
Yet often times as a father I see that guidance is best achieved by reasoning, not compulsion. Compulsion breeds long term resistance and aversion, which can damage relationships with certain topics and activities way more than whatever short term benefit was achieved by it.
From the article, I wonder just who these mindfulness teachers are? I had to spend hundreds of hours of practice and multiple teachers to unlock a few ‘treasures’ of meditation... and that was with teachers who weren’t laying a thick amount of judge mental indoctrination.
I absolutely believe the kid’s responses to the program, and I’m afraid this experience will turn them off for life, like so many do with a bad year of math. Nevertheless, I think exposing kids to mindfulness is worthwhile.
> students are taught that mindfulness creates space in which we can ‘choose our response’ as opposed to reacting or lashing out. [...] These might sound like reasonable claims, but they imply a dichotomy between emotions and reason, and the superiority of ‘rational’ responses to distress. [...] Historically, these ideals have served to undermine oppressed groups, as anger and resistance is perceived as irrational.
Sometimes anger and resistance is rational, sometimes it's not. If mindfulness gives you the "mental space" to decide whether you are right to be angry, that's a good thing, and it absolutely is superior to purely acting emotionally.
I'm frankly struggling to see how anyone could think that modulating your emotions with reason is a bad idea.
Possibly because constantly thinking “am I right to feel this way? How should I respond?” also describes the thinking patterns of anxious/autistic people. ‘Normal’ people generally just feel and act. They aren’t constantly modulating themselves. Maybe that means they make some suboptimal choices, but they also aren’t wasting time and making themselves feel bad by internally interrogating themselves non-stop.
Anxious people can't help negative thought patterns. They happen despite their desires. That's the complete opposite of this case, so I'm not sure that's it.
Mindfulness is primarily Zen Buddhism stripped of the appearance of religion. As much as I encourage anyone to try either traditional Zen or Mindfulness, pushing it on someone who doesn't want it is absurd.
Mindfulness is a tool which various schools of Buddhism emphasize to a greater or lesser degree.
Second part I agree with. Mindfulness practice requires a pretty diligent application of intention. I don't think it can work as another subject at school or an ad hoc therapy.
> Within educational contexts, being well-behaved is seen as rational and ‘good’, while resistance to authority is seen as irrational or ‘bad’. Since mindfulness encourages young people to be calm, complacent and attentive, it can promote these moral hierarchies: of good or bad behaviour, and hence, well-behaved or naughty students.
This seems to me much more like a problem with typical "educational contexts" than with mindfulness. In my experience, you try and be more mindful of your emotions so you can make better (perhaps more efficient) decisions and changes in your life in response to those emotions. And that naturally conflicts with environments where the expectations are very rigid and more or less set in stone e.g. where there's a clear "authority" (like a teacher) in control and very precise boundaries about what kind of behavior is acceptable.
> As Kelly, 13, explained: I really hated it when I had to close my eyes … I felt really uncomfortable because there were people in the group that I didn’t trust … Some of the practices did help me but it would be better if you could choose to do it with people you like.
Again, I think this is much more a problem with the typical school environment than with mindfulness. What does it say that a child doesn't feel comfortable simply closing their eyes momentarily in some environment? Not good things if you ask me. Frankly, I've often thought it's cruel and unusual to place large numbers of children together for large periods of time as is done in a public school setting. Children can be ruthless when they bully each other and readily succumb to their worst instincts.
The fact that someone doesn't feel comfortable about something doesn't mean that their feelings are warranted. When dealing with anxiety disorders or phobias, the last thing experts recommend is avoidance of that which causes anxiety. In fact, exposure therapy helps drastically with it.
Wiki sez: "Exposure therapy is based on the principle of respondent conditioning often termed Pavlovian extinction.[16] The exposure therapist identifies the cognitions, emotions and physiological arousal that accompany a fear-inducing stimulus and then tries to break the pattern of escape that maintains the fear. This is done by exposing the patient to progressively stronger fear-inducing stimuli.[17] Fear is minimized at each of a series of steadily escalating steps or challenges (a hierarchy), which can be explicit ("static") or implicit ("dynamic" — see Method of Factors) until the fear is finally gone.[18] The patient is able to terminate the procedure at any time."
That is, to my interpretation, the idea is to expose the patient to the scary stimulus under conditions that are kept as nice, safe, and comfortable as possible, so that the Pavlovian part of their brain will learn to stop associating the stimulus with fear.
This is entirely different from "keep throwing them into the feared situation, against their will and without any particular effort to make it more safe or pleasant".
I've been through so many educational fads, in my time as a teacher, that it's difficult not to be cynical.
When I first started teaching it was all about Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic learners. Then brain gyms, then multiple intelligences, then personality typing. To be honest, I've lost track of the number of new strategies that I've had CPD for in those first few days back at school every September.
Mindfulness was just starting to creep in when I quit the formal education game. I'd bet that it'll be gone within five years, replaced with some new and shiny fad.
It sounds like they didn't teach the parents, teachers, and school administrators first.
Meditation is a very valuable thing to learn but this is not the way to learn it. To me it seems like these kids are being subjected to a fad.
To the extent that it works for them (to become more mindful) it will only throw the intrinsic bullshit of the school system into stark relief, as the quotes from the kids indicate.
I'm going to repeat myself, because I didn't see it mentioned in the article: if the parents, teachers, and school admin staff didn't go through a year or two of "mindfulness" themselves before pushing it on their kids then this is foolish.
158 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadMindfulness just means being aware and non-reactive. All humans experiences mindfulness. Any time we choose to go against our initial impulses is a moment of expressing mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation simply strengthens and expands on that so it holds up under greater pressure and for greater periods of time. It's nothing mystical or psychedelic.
Recent years has also seen an increase in studies surrounding the sociological concept of `Mobbing'. This has taught us that the tiger only goes away if there is outside help, often in the form of fellow students, teachers, and so on.
As a meditator myself I think it would be helpful if this were more well-known.
If you search for her name, you'll find more information and studies. Here's an interview and article:
https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/trauma-meditation/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/the-dark-...
Perhaps if $historical_bad_actor meditated / exercised / ate better we wouldn’t be here having this conversation.
I’m not trying to be flippant here.
Mindfulness in schools is applied to the entire school population.
Mindfulness in schools is usually delivered by teachers, and not trained therapists or psychologists.
The combination of taking the entire population, including children at higher risk of harm, and not understanding how that harm can be caused, and using people with minimal training to provide the programme, means that some people get harmed.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01410768166441...
https://www.brown.edu/research/labs/britton/sites/britton-la...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027273581...
> Mindfulness just means being aware and non-reactive
Mary is a 10 year old girl. She is raped once a week by her step-father. You can see how being "aware" and "non-reactive" might cause extra harm.
I think schools should treat meditation like prayer, because it's essentially the same function, and we should just avoid it in the classroom.
Perhaps the real tragedy here is that many students will learn about mindfulness in schools and dismiss it as useless nonsense, when there actually may be something of value in there somewhere.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/04/harvard-resea...
If meditation causes Mary to freak out and the rapes to by discovered, that's a pretty huge win for Mary.
What harm from meditation ?
I recommend the book "Altered Traits". It looks at some benefits of meditation documented using scientific methods. But it also says that it may not be good for everyone. Specifically, it may be dangerous for people struggling with depression.
The trendy idea is about "being present" in physical form and acknowledge (but not engage) with any random thoughts that might come your way. I don't want that feeling unless I'm very specifically seeking it out.
Whenever I've had to participate in the "group" versions of these things, I try to think of literally anything else to keep myself distracted until it's over, for fear of wandering into unpleasant territory and causing a mood change when I'm actually supposed to be at work.
I wish there was a word for "sitting in silence with others, frantically searching for anything to think about to avoid letting your mind wander into terrifying places". If this mindfulness thing takes off, maybe someone can come up with a clever way to sum that up. It's a very uneasy feeling.
Also, why my employer would want me to take a mid-day break to meditate is beyond me. It's like they're trying to make me rethink my life decisions and quit.
Obviously I am no expert or actually even any good at meditating, but maybe try learning from a different teacher who might be able to help you out in this.
Just to reiterate, I might be wrong here and if that's the case just ignore my comment :)
It takes a lot of practice to actually be able to do that. The distraction is the meditation - you need to learn notice it and bring your mind back. The drowsiness is the meditation - you need to learn to notice it and raise your energy.
And as you learn to calm your brain without falling asleep, deeper and deeper repressed and ignored thoughts and feeling will come to the surface, because as you're gradually calming all the parts of your mind you are also calming the parts that are repressing the other parts which are enraged and demand a seat at the table. And part of meditation is getting punched in the face by those parts that you have been repressing, until you have faced them, dealt with them, accepted them and integrated them. (Although part of it is also learning when you need to ignore them and not try to "face" or "deal" with them.)
It's impossible not to think, unless you're dead. You even think while you dream! It is possible to avoid thinking concrete thoughts, but when concrete boundaries around acceptable thoughts are protecting you from trauma that's not a useful thing to do.
Generally speaking, if you're in a bad environment, getting more in tune with your feelings and how you react to your environment can make you feel more acute pain. Conversely, becoming numb and unaware of your feelings can help avoid the pain, and possibly help you remain more functional, at least in the short term.
Of course, pain tends to signify a problem that has significance beyond the pain itself (pain for pain's sake would seem to have negative evolutionary value, but e.g. pain that encourages you to avoid sharp objects has positive value), so ignoring it seems like a bad thing in the medium and long term. However, if you have no practical options for fixing the underlying problem, then it may just be pain without gain.
When that happens, it’ll often spark a thread that then fills in the gaps.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"‘Mindfulness doesn’t help me,’ says Tyler, a 13-year-old student in a deprived area of southwest England. ‘Some people it helps, some it can make ’em feel worse.’ Gathered around a table in a large, cluttered classroom, five other students nod. Kayleigh cuts in: ‘Sometimes other things help me more. But they don’t listen to us, they just tell us to do mindfulness.’ "
>"The goal is to help them develop resilience, improve their attention and self-regulation, and prevent everyday stress spiralling into major psychological problems. "
I'd maybe recommend greatly expanding physical exercise and team sports because not only does it address many of the points above it also will reduce obesity and balance out general inactivity. Physical education seems to be severely neglected. Both quality and quantity.
Working as a team is part of the human experience. Some people are more inclined to it than others, but given enough time and frequency working with the same unit, almost everyone becomes a comrade, a brother-in-arms, bonded through shared experiences.
Team sports help develop social bonds and trust between peers, and those relationships help quite a few people deal with personal issues they would otherwise get stuck in their own heads trying to fight. Teamwork and working towards goals bigger than oneself are important to the psyche.
It wasn’t until a friend introduced me to weightlifting that I learned that I can not only enjoy exercise, but I can do it completely alone without anybody looking at me. A weight set and a bench to sit on are as close to meditation as exercise can get for me.
I’m stronger than the average person. Visibly fit to the point that people comment on it. But every time someone has expected me to catch something or throw something to them, it’s a disaster. People can’t believe it because there’s the association of fitness level == sports ability, but there’s as connected as math and programming. It’s definitely good to be good at both and they definitely benefit each other, but you can also be incompetent at one and good at the other. I’ve definitely known some people who’ve never cared about basketball and don’t really exercise but almost never miss a shot if someone asks them to try.
I've said it in other comments, but PE class is skewed towards those who can do well in random, infrequent "games".
That's not the same as playing the same sport, with a team, every morning or afternoon.
I am not the one you responded to, but I very much disliked team sports. I liked individual sports, including the ones I was bad at. Other kids did not became comrades in team sport, kids that did same individual sport became friends.
I was the kid that had trouble to be assertive and had trouble to fight over ball with teammates. Because other kids in same team wont give the ball to someone else when they have fun with it. They want it for themselves, even when you are at good position. Team sports just sucked from social standpoint.
The only shared experience always ended up being feeling that I don't belong here. The only thing I learned was to avoid the experience.
It did worked for some other kids, but don't tell us it works for everyone. It does not.
At UK highschool we were forced to play football once / twice a week.
All the kids who wanted to do this also played more through the week so they were good at it.
The once/twice a week-ers were rubbish and it was just not fun.
>but given enough time and frequency working with the same >unit, almost everyone becomes a comrade, a brother-in-arms, >bonded through shared experiences.
This is complete bullshit, you've obviously never had players on the team screaming at you to do something with the ball and then messing it up. These kids are not your 'comrades' they play with you once or twice a week then go back to class.
>Team sports help develop social bonds and trust between >peers, and those relationships help quite a few people deal >with personal issues they would otherwise get stuck in >their own heads trying to fight. Teamwork and working >towards goals bigger than oneself are important to the >psyche.
You can do all of this without team sports.
Particularly the boys. Preferably at the beginning of the day.
Maybe it is just anomaly, but I found it odd. Especially when everyone here is like "boys are so different and more wild".
And I always think "why don't you take them outside then and why don't limit their sit-on-couch-with-tablet-game the way girls have it limited".
It is kind of absurd.
I don't think it can reasonably be disputed though that in the average case it is true that boys are more physically active and spend more time outside than girls.
Whether kids are outside depends way more on parents then on kids. And for whatever reasons, boys parents around here take them outside less. I think that very related is that parents are more content with boys spending a lot of time with videogames. Which cuts to physical activity and makes kid content sitting for hours.
And maybe parents are also more conscious with girls not getting enough of physical movement. Or it is also about friends.
I personally think that boys would be better off if they were outside and moving more.
1) The teachers were invariably bullies. They would belittle students that they did not feel “performed well.” Also, because of the nature of the class, this bullying could manifest in physical (not just verbal) form. PE was my “horror” class. I was terrified of it.
2) In the US, there is tremendous pressure to compete. Scoring is everywhere. I have never been a competitive person; always preferring consensus and cooperation. This attitude was highly discouraged in PE (often by nasty remarks from the teacher, and their “pets”).
3) I’m “on the spectrum,” and one of the manifestations of that, is rather poor coordination. I have never been able to perform well in any sport; no matter how hard I tried. I could get fit, but not good.
Sour grapes? Maybe.
But I do feel that bullying is a big problem in every society, and it is often done by the “winners,” so there’s no will to address it. No one wants to “hobble” their “stars.”
I don’t see how deep breathing exercises will address that.
Physical education should be just that, an education on the body. How it moves, how to retain mobility, how to get stronger, etc.
There are books on this, I don't have any references at the moment sorry.
I used to be a personal trainer. I stopped being amazed at how little people knew about their bodies and how to move them pretty quickly.
It's a sad state of affairs. While I don't think physical fitness will "cure" people with clinical depression and anxiety I believe it's an important tool in the toolkit.
I completely agree. Physical fitness, when taught without a focus on competition, is extremely valuable.
I'm sure that a big reason for my non-competitive stance, is because I learned, quite early on, that I would never be able to do particularly well in any physically competitive arena, and it wasn't even worth trying.
I am also of Irish/Scottish/English heritage. Pretty much the Platonic Ideal of "white."
I live in NY, with a significant percentage of folks of Mediterranean descent.
I don't tan. I stroke.
I get sick of people telling "You can tan, just take sun in fifteen minute increments."
For me, it is:
Fifteen minutes -Ghost white
Fifteen minutes -Ghost white
Fifteen minutes -Ghost white
Fifteen minutes -Bright red, peeling, and screaming
No in-between.
The same goes for my friends (and not-friends) that have normal coordination. I took six years of tennis lessons, and never got beyond "suck." I took a year of Kung-Fu, and never got beyond white belt.
"Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win, and never quit are idiots." -From a Despair, Inc. Demotivator
https://despair.com/collections/retired/products/stupidity (That's me, at tennis)
e: oh, and let’s not forget the horrifying combinations of changing rooms, showers and puberty... and for those of us with glasses there was a whole extra dimension of being forced to swim or dodge flying balls in the rain while literally semi-blind...!
What the parent, and I in another comment are talking about is team sports with the same team, playing the same sport on a regular basis.
Not many people are good at "red scooter dodge chicken" after 5 minutes of it. But playing the same thing day in, day out for a while (practice) makes you better at it. You start noticing you're improving, your teammates may not out you in the starting rotation, but they're going to start bonding with you because of proximity and the shared feeling of progress.
You don't need to have the same competitive zeal as the top performers, but you need to want to be part of the group.
I never saw anyone get ostracized in a team unless they continually refused to be part of it.
This is the "I never see sexual harassment so it doesn't happen" argument applied to childhood bullying.
All education suffers from trying to motivate kids to do something voluntarily when really it isn't, but only in team sports is this enforced against the body.
(How well do schools handle gender mixed sport these days, or is there a strict partition still?)
Yes but I also had a good teacher who was good at setting up teams and so on in ways that avoid the typical pitfalls of not picking the awkward kid etc. With the teacher I had there wasn't any of the bad dynamics many people here seem to associate with PE. Which I think speaks to the quality aspect. Those issues are not inherent to sports but simply the result of teachers failing to do their jobs right.
In a general sense though I think the slightly challenging aspect of competitive sports and the physicality around it is a good thing for development if it's done right. The unathletic kid needs to learn to deal with it just like the stuttering kid needs to learn to speak in front of audiences and the shy kid needs to learn to do a presentation or a play.
These things prepare people to not avoid and get through things they're not good at and the social dynamics around it in a safe way ideally.
PE classes are mostly disgrace and a reason why I wasn't very fond of sports (ok not all sports).
- Focus on "collective/team sports"
- Absolutely no catering for different levels of skills
- Bullies usually enjoy this classes because it's the one activity where they are good
- Limited choices.
Physical exercise is an extremely well documented treatment for many cases of depression.
This is nowhere to be found in my comment
> Physical exercise is an extremely well documented treatment for many cases of depression.
Sure let me know how that works out when you're being heckled or generally feeling embarrassed or uncomfortable while exercising
I like exercise, but PE is a joke
Schools are having to deal with young people who come to them with problems from outside. Schools can make them better or worse, but that’s loading a responsibility onto schools way beyond education. The fact that we are even having to consider non-traditional subjects/activities like mindfulness as a treatment to help kids get through the day, rather than to help prepare them for adult life, is a huge red flag.
We can look closely at how we run schools, but where is the scrutiny on parenting? There is a ton of assessment of teachers and metrics on school performance (whether they are a good thing or not in improving outcomes is a different matter). Serious problems in the home are generally picked up by social services – and you could say that they function as a bandaid to cover the sucking chest wound of adult mental health - but straightforward poor parenting is far more widespread, how do we fix that?
If we want to improve mental health in young people we need to look closely at how we run society. Schools could help, but only if they were adequately funded for everything they are being expected to deliver.
And yes, parents should have support. This used to come from much stronger, multigenerational family units. Where that isn’t the case, few would consider attending parenting classes even if they were available. But don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s necessarily just about that, as I said originally, I think adult mental wellbeing is a bigger problem than is generally recognised. Anxiety, aggression, apathy, these transfer from the parent to the child.
Historically, the GINI coefficient was much lower in the US post WWII, with increased GDP while keeping the GINI coefficient low through benefits conferred to GIs in homesteading, education, loans, and healthcare.
>> As Jack, a 13-year-old student at a school in a post-industrial town in the UK, explained: ‘They’re trying to teach us to choose what we want but then not letting us choose anything at all.’
Students are very quick to see through their teachers' bullshit as they have years of practice by the time they are adolescents.
The current convention seems to be that if students can't life-hack their school then there must be something wrong with them. That lack of self-reflection on the part of teachers and schools is telling, and probably a big reason for student anxiety in the first place.
Schools, teachers and parents are in a very difficult position these days because of how fast things are changing. They are constantly overloaded with info about what's good for the kid. Even developmental psychologists,pedagogy experts and edu depts get overloaded and feel pressure to pass opinions on everything under the sun without serious evaluation. Learning takes Time. So evaluation of any method takes time. But the pressure to try X Y or Z builds up so quickly that anyone pushing back can easily be labeled a dinosaur and kicked out the room.
And its all happening in the useless attention arms race type environment the tech sector has created where what and who gets propped up depends on whose TED talk got more views, how much time they self promote, and 'what can scale faster'.
Such an environment will keep producing a whole lot of failed experiments.
I may not have a popular opinion, but I think our focus should be more on supporting families to raise their children instead of what amounts in my mind to free day care, especially for children 10 and under.
how is this possible? aren't SAT scores curved to achieve a normal distribution?
It sounds to me like the same kind of thing might also apply in schools.
I'm sure the school teachers and administrators mean well. I'm sure they don't consciously realise what a nightmare their institutions have become for many of the students in their care. Even if they do realise, they didn't choose for it to be that way.
The sad fact is that modern life has become a horrible nightmare for many people, grownups and kids alike. Mindfulness has become a popular attempt to paper over the problems, but in truth, many people who are having coping problems or exhibiting "mental illness" are really having understandable reactions to the dysfunction they're sensing in the world.
To be clear: I'm in no way averse to emotional wellbeing techniques that are effective and that increase the agency of participants. I've gone very deep on this kind of work in my own life, and have benefited greatly.
But I think the outcomes, and indeed the intentions, of mainstream mindfulness programs are quite different to this, and are sadly far more focused on maintaining the status quo for institutions and modern mainstream society.
^This. I don't need mindfulness, gyms, free junky snacks, team building events, parking spaces as perks, I need work conditions that don't grind my mind and body so much for me to require therapy afterwards (realistic deadlines, no open office, no rush hour commutes, remote work, comfy monitors, chairs and desks, time off to spend with my family).
Unfortunately due to ever increasing wealth inequality, most of the workforce, even in the west, is stuck in a meatgrinder where the only escape being dangled in front of you is climbing the ladder high enough until you become the one one to turn the handle.
i think any company that’s not seriously evaluating distributed teams permanently is going to lose talent.
With hindsight, I haven't felt many blocks to working remotely. Hardware issues, like a laptop charger failing, tend to be the more difficult things to get sorted. It's how things have to be, and people get on with it. What I do miss is the corridor conversations and find that I have a more narrow view of what's going on in the company because I'm simply not exposed to it.
Also, I neglected to invest in my home office setup because it wasn't a common thing to use. If working remotely does because more of a norm, that's where I'd spend some money going forward.
Maybe it isn't for some, like you, but for many/most forced WFH I believe the outcome will in fact be lasting and socially fruitful.
(Personally, I've WFH 10+ years so not the best example because it was always my preference and had no cares about missing out on potential social interactions or relationships with co-workers)
But plenty of people I know about have been recently forced to WFH are finding various new hobbies and thus discovering and developing new social circles (Online & IRL) even w/ CV19 circumstances. Not to mention just going outside to do things and meeting others is happening a lot - at least where I live.
Between observing this and thinking through it more...I'm not convinced that coworkers are really the best types of relationships anyways. Indeed they can provide us with some superficial temporary social stimuli and primitive reinforcement, though not sure relationships by default/proximity are not built to last regardless. And they often come with the consummate 'shop talk' and 'office politics' or 'gossip' trade-offs - all childish stuff to be concerned with in or outside of work.
My hunch is that we're all better off getting to know people outside our own little bubbles :)
The modern workplace is a sick system [1] designed to push you to your limits holding onto a semblance of a comfortable life as inequality rises.
[1] http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html
I'm not sure I buy this. I suppose it's true that being better able to tolerate unpleasant situations does mean you might put up with them for longer. And while meditating, yes, the goal is to not react to things you're feeling.
But for me, a big benefit of mindfulness is more clarity on where my emotions are coming from. I'd sometimes feel tense, or upset, or nervous, but couldn't even really notice I was feeling that way, let alone why I was feeling that way.
I think clarity there generally helps people change their conditions more than it urges them to just accept them.
That's what I'd say about the emotional work I do, so I'm not criticising that kind of work if that is the actual outcome, and if it leads to more authentic perception of one's surroundings and increased ability to make decisions that are best for one's self and the world long-term.
I'm just questioning whether that really is the outcome or indeed the intention for programs branded as "mindfulness" in workplaces, schools, etc.
I think in many cases it's a valid criticism - perhaps due to practitioners who don't communicate how to apply mindfulness clearly, or staff who fail to understand the true goals and attempt to use it to suppress complaints and problems.
It can work either way. Any mental approach can be used for clarity and motivation or as an opiate - or something worse (justification for harm, etc.). It depends on what you emphasize. For kids in school, they're probably not going to be able to change their own conditions, particularly at school.
I've experienced both in myself. Meditation, discovery, and self reflection helped me deal with very bad work situations, but it also eventually made it clear where balance was lacking and the motivation to find better balance, which is very difficult in the US (and I'm sure most of the world).
I also think there's a big difference between wanting it for yourself and having it pushed on you. If I didn't seek it out but instead had school or work force it down my throat, I doubt I would have benefited much from it. I'm sure there are kids and adults who were ready for it anyway, so when it was forced on them, they scooped it up and ran, but I doubt that's the typical experience. Balance is different for different people, because we're all off balance in different ways, so I might need to learn a little this way or a lot that way to find balance, and you may need to lean in the opposite directions. Mindfulness is vague enough to give people room to adjust according to their needs, but in an institutional setting, it will be filtered through the balances of whoever is presenting it. Because some of these approaches helped me, I'm inclined to want other people to experience them, but I also understand that different things work for different people and that I shouldn't expect my experiences to translate to everyone else.
Now, of course it depends on what they sell under the label of mindfulness. You can slap that label on any kool-aid cult indoctrination if you want. Not any session where people tell you how to use your mind will be beneficial for sure.
"Before you start taking powerful psychoactive medication for your depression, anxiety, or other neuroses, do a quick head count of the people around you. You know, take a quick poll before you pop the pills. Make sure that everyone around you isn't just a complete asshole."
Through that lens, mainstream mindfulness programs make sense as part of a work/life benefits package.
This isn't to discount the benefits of being mindful or meditating for people. But you should be very wary when someone's trying to sell you on it because usually there's a greater reason for it.
Any mindfulness for children or adults must be just offering. You should't make it regular thing that everyone must attend. You can't motivate mindfulness from the outside.
Some people just have very bad reactions to mindfulness even if they try it voluntarily. It may be ongoing psychological issue or something else. People seem more or less similar on the outside, but they have very different experiences when they turn their mind inwards.
This is interesting. Can you share any particular examples?
For some people, especially if they're previously unaware of their issues, it can seem like meditation itself has caused some bad reaction.
It's like if you're listening to the radio really loud and then turn it off and hear the smoke alarm. Turning off the radio didn't cause the smoke, but it might sound that way if you're not familiar with what's really going on.
If it helps in some scenarios then what else can be done in addition to this?
I see a gaping flaw in the “this doesn’t work in these cases therefore tear it all down” logic.
Absolutely replace it if something better comes along but the answer can’t be go back to square one because its not perfect.
> These might sound like reasonable claims, but they imply a dichotomy between emotions and reason, and the superiority of ‘rational’ responses to distress. This idea derives not from traditional mindfulness but from liberal Western ideals. Historically, these ideals have served to undermine oppressed groups, as anger and resistance is perceived as irrational.
The article's commentary here seems out-of-touch with most mindfulness instruction I've experienced. It's usually emphasized to notice things in as non-judgmental a way as possible; you're definitely not encouraged to label anger or any other emotion as "irrational".
Mindfulness does give you the freedom to choose. It wouldn't be freedom to choose if the choice was always to ignore anger: sometimes anger is useful, other times it isn't; mindfulness helps you notice that and act accordingly.
Mindfulness should focus first on observing and not judging/labeling things as good/bad. That just leads to more misery!!
The instructors should certainly realize that mindfulness and it’s experiences are very subjective and each individual has different experiences. One must be careful not to compare two students and say one is a better example of mindfulness than the other.
- relax them
- make them happy
- make them less emotional
But with practice I learned that some sessions are extremely emotional, full of stress or sorrow. It's not uncommon to feel pain, distress or to cry deeply during intense meditation retreats.
The process improves one existence by making us live those aspects of our life better. Not by taking them away.
Now of course, on the long run, it will make people more relaxed, happier, etc. Making you fitter to live with yourself.
But not by removing, ignoring or suppressing suffering.
It's still here. It will always be here. That's the point of meditating.
Mindfulness forces us to observe it as it is. You see your contradictions, your scars and your urges. You see your masks, conditioning and reflexes.
If anything, it removes dichotomy. Not add to it.
In fact, from what I witnessed, meditation tends to make people remove layers in general. I rarely hear meditators talking about adding ones.
And mindfulness is certainly not emotions vs reason.
It has nothing to do with either.
Emotions and reason are here. You observe them, and yourself using them. But the fact you use them is not part of the technique. It's just a part of you, and like all parts of you, you are invited to observe it.
Like everybody, when I started years ago, I confused "be detached" with "don't feel", "label it unimportant", "try to relax". That's not it.
What you feel or the label you use are just not part of the teaching. They don't matter at all (for the practice). What matters is that you observe it.
Don't want to sound too ignorant (although I might be), but more often than not I encounter much simpler interpretations of meditation and its goals that (to me) sound more like instructions to wall off rather than to find peace with yourself. They also sometimes come with a tacit shaming of strong emotions, but as the saying goes: "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". I think that pushing for no strong emotions at all (at least on the surface) does promote walling off rather than actually understanding yourself better, which sometimes requires you to be out of balance. Like in math, always going up can lead you to a local maximum only, and to reach a global maximum you have to walk downhill once in a while.
I've notice this at several occasions.
It is not specific to meditation though.
Agile software development, as practiced behind corporate walls, is very different what Beck and Schwaber talked about in the 90'.
Thanks to MMA, we know now that many modern martial art teachings are not practical from a self-defense perspective.
Many may claim they follow the ideal of the same famous religious figure, and confronted with each others, will end up with opposite opinions on how to live one life.
As soon as something become mainstream, it is bound to be adapted into different variations of what it was initially intended. Yet we keep the same name for it.
For what I know, what I'm practicing is also a variation of a variation of a variation of something.
I don't disagree with the general point that there are martial art schools that do not teach effective self defense - but I'm not sure how MMA figures in to it.
Self defense is about situational awareness, coping with multiple attackers, probably armed. Often you may have a way of de-escalating the situation (eg: give them your wallet).
I suppose in the instance of a single un-armed rapist (often the case when the victim knows the attacker) MMA has increased the focus on grappling (ie: judu/jujutsu/bjj and various wrestling techniques).
I'm not sure what else the popularity of MMA has thought us about self defense.
Now, if your talking about ring fighting with a particular ruleset, one on one, with a referee... That might be something else.
I think the idea is that you are not your emotions, and you don't have to be ruled by your emotions, but rather the emotions are something that happens to you, and something you can control. Doesn't mean you have to turn them off, it just means you have the option to do so if necessary. Or perhaps you feel the emotion, but are not compelled to act on it.
Meditation at its core is a very mundane activity, no more special than taking a shower, going hiking or talking to your therapist.
However, humans love to create mythology or add deep meaning to anything. In doing that, we can turn a simple healthy practice into a load of BS.
That doesn't mean showering doesn't have benefits though.
Three years ago, I picked it up again for about 18 months years and once again let it slip.
It took me a long time to realize why, which is this: I have not found meditation to have been very useful in actual day to day life despite the multiple attestations from people that it brought them ... something. I got something out of meditation also, but unlike weightlifting, for me it has never been a continuing something.
There's the eye-opening moment of really becoming aware of the ephemeralness of so many impulses that inflict us day-to-day. That is a great lesson and probably helped a lot with self control. It's like the first time you realize that you can change your mood - you don't have to ride the tiger, you can stop the process, it is subject to your conscious influence if you want it to be, but you don't need to practice this once you learn it.
In practical terms, I think those impulses are actually very valuable because they tap into faster, broader lower-tier reasoning, and mindfulness, at least as I understood it and practiced it, ended up disempowering them in a way that was mildly negative, especially in interpersonal situations where the side-effects of added latency and inevitably reduced amplitude have consequences.
YMMV, obviously. Possibly I am just lazy.
I've been meditating for 13 years, and sometimes I meet people with 3 years of practice that seem decades ahead of me.
One time, I think after my 2nd or 3rd retreat, I practiced in such a way that instead of helping myself, I got into depression. Took me a few months to change course.
I don't thing there is a "standard experience" for meditating. YMMV seems like a good summary for it.
Could be a t-shirt.
"Your Meditation May Vary"
The premise that emotions, be it anger, desire or rumination, are harmful, is almost aways the selling point and the reason people choose to start or are given such training.
The training itself might include non-judgement/compassion but that isn’t why you are sat there in the first place.
It’s difficult for me to see non-judgement as anything but a tool to pacify anger rather than as actual legitimisation of a state of anger as a way of being.
Meditation can, little by little, albeit very slowly in my experience, decorrelate those 3.
I've seen it to result in meditators subject to a lot of anger:
- producing less anger
- maintaining anger for smaller amounts of time
- acting less dramatically over anger
And so it seems logical that people draw the conclusion that meditation tells you not to be angry. That angers it bad, or that you should control it.
To my knowledge, that's not the teaching.
Note that I think it's as good as a reason as any to start practicing. The practice will shift your point of you over time anyway. It's what it does.
And it will help with the suffering related to anger on the long run.
However, confusion can arise if people with little to no experience with meditation make quick judgement of the technic and build definitive ideas on top of that.
Appart from kindly explaining that it's a different story, there is not much one can do about it, though.
If you do this, you gain insight, empowerment and actionable plans. Meditation might claim something similar but I don’t think it delivers to the same degree.
You can certainly use "meditation" to work on yourself forever, in preparation for doing things, and never, ever, actually do anything.
But in itself, it's not the nature of meditation.
In a way, meditation share similarities with physical exercice.
Doing your morning run doesn't make you less fit to take action, make a plan or to apply critical thinking. I would say it's the opposite.
A lot of my most productive periods in my life are right after meditation retreats.
During those times, I use GTD a lot, to support my efforts. Writting, descripting, listing causes and consequences are in no way in competition with meditation.
To be frank, I don't know what could be in competition with meditation. It's pretty much orthogonal to everything by essence.
I think it does take time, though, like between 1 week and 1 month of daily practice, to start noticing the effects.
different activities involve different degrees of mindfulness, and I believe making a sharp distinction, while sometimes useful, is usually harmful.
You can take a shit mindfully, way I see it. it might not be something you call 'meditation' most of the time, but I imagine it's even possible to do a proper meditative shit.
Of course mindfulness practice is not about labeling emotion as irrational, but the reasoning behind implementing it in the education system is very close to this.
And if the teaching frees the student from that idea, then we can see that as an opportunity to give it a try.
But I can see how it could do harm if the teaching is also twisted to the point that it reinforces that idea.
Going mainstream almost always implies loosing something important in the process. It's hard to condence years of teaching in a few hours.
The anger I feel when I'm cut off in traffic is distinct enough from the anger that I feel at oppression or injustice to really deserve its own label. Like, anger1 and anger2.
Since they feel so different, I have slightly different thoughts about each.
I never want to drive with anger1 instead of safety. Driving with anger, or "road rage," is not an interesting value-neutral way to experience the world.
I think that driving anger is a distinct emotion that is always unhealthy and just happens to share the name "angry" with other emotions because of superficial similarities. People will probably say that's just a different context, I think that's overgeneralizing, but even in other contexts I worry about the call to set aside rationality. (Instead of anger1 and anger2 you could call one rage and the other indignation.)
When I'm angry ("angry2") about senseless human suffering, I agree it should move people, people should not just tune out. But that seems like a straw man of the rationalist approach. There too I'd rather channel that feeling into a thought process that maximizes my impact, rather than just attempt to satisfy the emotional call to yell or cry or punch a wall. Those may be important therapeutic responses, but if you can feel satisfaction by just getting to work to try to correct the injustice, that would be better.
I'm rarely physically threatened, but my system still occasionally floods me with fight or flight adrenaline. What's so wrong about saying that's a quirk of evolution, and thoughtful responses are going to leave me better off, absent some weird fringe scenarios?
I've heard the opposite perspective from people smarter and calmer than me though, so maybe I'm wrong and it just hasn't clicked for me yet.
You shouldn't be angry at either. For the first issue accept it. The second do something about it.
This is backwards. You may as well tell people not to be hungry.
We use these tools and while they might not always guarantee a pleasant experience, or even that you can change anything, they allow us to discover something about the program or ourselves that can be of some benefit often enough that we keep these tools around.
If you force people to drop down to the debugger every day, be prepared to get some clear feedback. Is an industrial school system ready to take on that sort of thing? It seems the goals is to turn out students to spec efficiently than the concerns of students mental life (e.g. You might not have much agency over doing X, but do it anyway because it furthers our graduation/testing/cost goals). If you're really interested in the students wellbeing (e.g. my parents are having problems at home, or I'm having problems with my classmates), I think the debugger can be a helpful tool. If you're debugger sessions are perfunctory with a stated goal of helping improve the program, but in fact discovered problems aren't addressed or are expected to be minimized, then you won't have much success with the debugger and I wouldn't diagnose it as a problem with the debugger or debugging per se.
It's hard to not be cynical.
From the article:
"Kayleigh cuts in: ‘Sometimes other things help me more. But they don’t listen to us, they just tell us to do mindfulness.’"
Of course.
https://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/
Identifying thoughts as "distortions" or "unrealistic" is a major point of CBT. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these programs are carelessly mixing it in.
Is it true freedom of choice or the illusion of choice?
Whether we have free will is very debatable, and there are many reasons for thinking we don't.
https://www.amazon.com/Mindfulness-Plain-English-Revised-Exp...
At the end it comes also to dukkha and other Buddhist concepts I don't care much about. But before, it served me very well in his quite accessible approach to what I would call 'mind cleansing'.
On-topic: In my opinion the whole thing is nothing for very young people, in particular not for children.
It shold be more personal with far less students per teacher; but this is too costly and for some reason it doesn't seem like anyone is willing to pay for this premium
Yet another case of pitting good things against each other by denying appropriate funding.
Kids jumping off bridges is probably worse than them eating ice cream cones or whatever.
Yet often times as a father I see that guidance is best achieved by reasoning, not compulsion. Compulsion breeds long term resistance and aversion, which can damage relationships with certain topics and activities way more than whatever short term benefit was achieved by it.
I absolutely believe the kid’s responses to the program, and I’m afraid this experience will turn them off for life, like so many do with a bad year of math. Nevertheless, I think exposing kids to mindfulness is worthwhile.
OK boomer.
when mindfulness doesn't work, maybe the school system can try mixing in some disco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U13xOvDa19U
On-topic: I agree that reducing stress is more likely to be effective than attempting to teach kids coping methods for stress.
Sometimes anger and resistance is rational, sometimes it's not. If mindfulness gives you the "mental space" to decide whether you are right to be angry, that's a good thing, and it absolutely is superior to purely acting emotionally.
I'm frankly struggling to see how anyone could think that modulating your emotions with reason is a bad idea.
Second part I agree with. Mindfulness practice requires a pretty diligent application of intention. I don't think it can work as another subject at school or an ad hoc therapy.
Apparently that's not enough for the author though?
Like anything, it will never be useful for 100% of everyone regardless of age or place in time.
This seems to me much more like a problem with typical "educational contexts" than with mindfulness. In my experience, you try and be more mindful of your emotions so you can make better (perhaps more efficient) decisions and changes in your life in response to those emotions. And that naturally conflicts with environments where the expectations are very rigid and more or less set in stone e.g. where there's a clear "authority" (like a teacher) in control and very precise boundaries about what kind of behavior is acceptable.
> As Kelly, 13, explained: I really hated it when I had to close my eyes … I felt really uncomfortable because there were people in the group that I didn’t trust … Some of the practices did help me but it would be better if you could choose to do it with people you like.
Again, I think this is much more a problem with the typical school environment than with mindfulness. What does it say that a child doesn't feel comfortable simply closing their eyes momentarily in some environment? Not good things if you ask me. Frankly, I've often thought it's cruel and unusual to place large numbers of children together for large periods of time as is done in a public school setting. Children can be ruthless when they bully each other and readily succumb to their worst instincts.
Wiki sez: "Exposure therapy is based on the principle of respondent conditioning often termed Pavlovian extinction.[16] The exposure therapist identifies the cognitions, emotions and physiological arousal that accompany a fear-inducing stimulus and then tries to break the pattern of escape that maintains the fear. This is done by exposing the patient to progressively stronger fear-inducing stimuli.[17] Fear is minimized at each of a series of steadily escalating steps or challenges (a hierarchy), which can be explicit ("static") or implicit ("dynamic" — see Method of Factors) until the fear is finally gone.[18] The patient is able to terminate the procedure at any time."
That is, to my interpretation, the idea is to expose the patient to the scary stimulus under conditions that are kept as nice, safe, and comfortable as possible, so that the Pavlovian part of their brain will learn to stop associating the stimulus with fear.
This is entirely different from "keep throwing them into the feared situation, against their will and without any particular effort to make it more safe or pleasant".
See this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656380
When I first started teaching it was all about Visual, Auditory and Kinaesthetic learners. Then brain gyms, then multiple intelligences, then personality typing. To be honest, I've lost track of the number of new strategies that I've had CPD for in those first few days back at school every September.
Mindfulness was just starting to creep in when I quit the formal education game. I'd bet that it'll be gone within five years, replaced with some new and shiny fad.
It sounds like they didn't teach the parents, teachers, and school administrators first.
Meditation is a very valuable thing to learn but this is not the way to learn it. To me it seems like these kids are being subjected to a fad.
To the extent that it works for them (to become more mindful) it will only throw the intrinsic bullshit of the school system into stark relief, as the quotes from the kids indicate.
I'm going to repeat myself, because I didn't see it mentioned in the article: if the parents, teachers, and school admin staff didn't go through a year or two of "mindfulness" themselves before pushing it on their kids then this is foolish.