I completely agree, and would like to highlight one part of your comment and build on it a bit: > I was introduced to mindfulness practice as a therapy for dep

I completely agree, and would like to highlight one part of your comment and build on it a bit: > I was introduced to mindfulness practice as a therapy for depression several years ago at my university Compare that to the other scenarios described in the article, or how another commenter here mentions "mindfulness events for executives and corporate". I think that just shows how mindfulness is not the real issue, but how it is applied (or worse: how things that are not mindfulness being sold as mindfulness). To give an illustration of effective mindfulness that (hopefully) does not come across as pseudoscience, I'll describe how my anger would explode in the past, and how mindfulness helped me solve that (note that "anger management" was not listed in the article). Mindfulness was suggested to me by a therapist (so not a magazine selling snake-oil), and despite my extreme skepticism at the time, it was very effective when I actually sat down to do it. And if you look at how my angry emotions would run away from me, this makes a lot of sense. One cause was a reinforcing loop: upsetting thoughts causing hyper-focus on other upsetting thoughts and memories, causing more anger, bringing up more thoughts/memories. So basically, what we all have, but the feedback loop was amplified and out of balance (years later I have been diagnosed with ADD, and hyper-focus is one of the symptoms - I would not be surprised if this was the main cause of anger management issues that many ADD/ADHD people suffer from). The other issue was me trying to control these escalating emotions, which was so frustrating that it became another source of anger in itself. As others noted, mindfulness is mostly about becoming consciously aware of where attention is drawn to, being able to step back, and guiding attention where you want it to go to. This is different from trying to directly control the emotions triggered by whatever I end up paying attention to; I can let my emotions freely sort themselves out, as a result there is no frustrating self-inhibition. That is all that the ten-minute-breathing exercise is for: practicing the ability to step back from the thoughts as they appear to you. That is what lets you take control of where your attention goes, allowing you to guide it elsewhere. I don't think the meditation does much else, except maybe letting out bottled-up emotions. The funny thing is that practicing this awareness for myself has also helped me to be more aware of what others are saying and thinking during conversations, and making sure that we are actually talking about the same things. So my inter-personal communication has improved too. Anyway, my point is that yes, mindfulness has helped me tremendously, and there is nothing mysterious about why it did: the main source of my anger was the way I processed my thoughts. Mindfulness can be great for helping with problems caused by that. However, if the main causes are external factors, like a lack of social interactions, or being in an abusive relationship at home or at work, then what would the problems be that mindfulness can solve?