7 ms·

My sister is a mental health professional and she has recommended meditation and headspace (an app) to me a year ago. I've found it to be a great help and to th

by inglor 9y ago

My sister is a mental health professional and she has recommended meditation and headspace (an app) to me a year ago. I've found it to be a great help and to the exercises to have a measurable impact on my life. It provides techniques (reflection, visualization, noting etc) that offer tools to deal with day to day stress related information. There are a lot of studies about meditation's effectiveness: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29110263 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29110263 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29126747 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29126747 I'm always surprised that when people discuss it with me they're surprised I do it. Somehow it has a reputation for pseudoscience but there are easily a hundred articles supporting the benefits.

moxious 9y ago
I think it has a reputation as a pseudo science because it's derived from religious practice. While religious practice isn't always bunk (as is the case here) assuming that religious practices are bunk is a pretty damn effective heuristic.
- beager 9y ago
  > [A]ssuming that religious practices are bunk is a pretty damn effective heuristic. Maybe, but if I take your statement seriously, I would surmise that it's only an effective heuristic because being excessively distrusting/cynical has less downside in cases where the practice is actually sound. That aside, you have to work a little bit harder to discern religious practices that are rooted in activities that are observably and directly beneficial to individuals and society (meditation, compassion), and activities that are either antiquated (not eating shellfish/pork) or were created to perpetuate the religion or its leaders (tithing).
  - subatomic 9y ago
    > That aside, you have to work a little bit harder to discern religious practices that are rooted in activities that are observably and directly beneficial to individuals and society (meditation, compassion) Leaving meditation out of this, I think the religious practices you're implying were basic human moral practices adopted _by_ religion, not the other way around.
- tlb 9y ago
  In our Western post-Enlightenment society, most of the beneficial aspects of Christian practice were adopted into secular practice. Consider: charity for the needy, monogamous marriage, burial of the dead, a 7th day of rest. We haven't adopted as many practices from other religions. We eventually (1800s) adopted regular washing from Islam, but adoption was slowed by its taint of foreignness, much to the chagrin of millions of people who died of disease. The stretching aspects of yoga became mainstream within the last 50 years. Meditation and yoga breathing are still exotic. Perhaps some day they won't be, and our descendants will wonder how people from our era stayed sane without daily meditation. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_Living_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_Living_Foundation teaches meditation and yoga breathing worldwide, including regular classes in the Bay Area, if you want to try it yourself.
  - zamalek 9y ago
    Another example: if you don't want worms or salmonella, don't eat poorly cooked white meat. No doubt the meat was considered cursed after people consistently fell ill after eating it. When it comes to eastern practices (yoga, meditation and so forth) my bullshit barometer is calibrated much, much higher. I'm far more likely to approach their practices with an open mind. Take spirit guides as an example; while I certainly don't agree that there are spirit guides, it is a religious explanation for the subconscious - your autopilot that guides you through small decisions every day. I can't see why you wouldn't try to wield it to your advantage (obviously with the appropriate care that eastern religions have unwittingly formulated). Even the core of Christianity can be helpful. Life is far less stressful if you are generous in the most insignificant ways. Simple acts like letting traffic enter in front of you, over time, drastically erodes the stress that you feel in those situations. From my perspective, religious texts have at least a few pragmatic observations - even if they lack scientific explanations.
    - KozmoNau7 9y ago
      > Even the core of Christianity can be helpful. Life is far less stressful if you are generous in the most insignificant ways. Simple acts like letting traffic enter in front of you, over time, drastically erodes the stress that you feel in those situations. I believe James May (of Top Gear fame) specifically calls this "Christian driving". It's amazing how much more relaxed you are after a drive, if you simply stop thinking of traffic as a race or a competition. You're not going to change your arrival time by any significant amount anyway, so you might as well just relax. In traffic, the only winning move is to not play.
- andreareina 9y ago
  Another problem is that it's difficult to measure to the standards that we would like. You can't blind, so it's difficult to separate the placebo effect. Results take time to manifest, so you have long-running studies with problems with drop-out and survivorship bias.
  - geomark 9y ago
    I'm wondering, isn't it the same as placebo effect? In that it's not a change that occurs from taking a medication. It's a change that is the result of mental state change. Both can produce a physical change, as studies have shown (no link, sorry). But one is entirely the result of mental processes, though those mental processes were not induced by a placebo pill. So it's basically the same as the placebo effect, isn't it?
  - hennsen 9y ago
    What would you consider a placebo for meditation?
    - aaavl2821 9y ago
      a "placebo" generally refers to an inactive control arm of a study of a drug. For studying something like meditation, you would use a different kind of control arm. The most common example is "treatment as usual". So half of ppl get meditation therapy for a given condition (say, depression), half get "treatment as usual" (pills and Or therapy). This has lots of problems as "treatment as usual" varies a lot from patient to patient, doctor to doctor A better control is basically taking every aspect of mindfulness based therapy except for the mindfulness (i.e. You educate the patient about the condition, have a group therapy session with a healthcare provider, have at-home therapy assignments, etc). You standardize this "active control" and compare how patients do with this intervention compared to the mindfulness based intervention. This isolates the effect of mindfulness vs other potential confounding effects, and also should reduce physician to physician variability In the one large study of mindfulness interventions using this active control, there was no measurable benefit to the mindfulness arm
- coldtea 9y ago
  >assuming that religious practices are bunk is a pretty damn effective heuristic. Only if naively only count goals as stated by the religion itself, and only first order effects. (E.g. if one examines whether there's really a heaven people go to, as opposed to examining whether the thought of such a place existing providing great psychological and personal benefit to the believer -- among tons of other similar things, I'm not even touching upon the impact on society, ethics, etc).
- aaavl2821 9y ago
  I'm not religious, but I know many many people who practice religion because it helps them in very real ways. From having a community to providing meaning to taking comfort in rituals to praying as a form of meditation, there are many religious practices that are psychologically and emotionally healthy. Religion has played such a huge role in human history not just bc some power hungry priests brainwashed people, but because it actually helps people
aaavl2821 9y ago
i fully support mindfulness and meditation as tools with real potential benefit, but the literature on clinical effectiveness leaves a lot to be desired. see a good overview of this issue here by one of the leaders in mindfulness research: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26436311 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26436311 overall, the body of literature on therapeutic benefits of mindfulness to date does not refute the hypothesis that mindfulness is "pseudoscience" (though it doesn't confirm this hypothesis either). there has been a surge in publications related to therapeutic applications of mindfulness in recent years, and nearly all of them are small, single-center, uncontrolled studies. as far as i know, there has only been one large, well designed randomized controlled clinical study of mindfulness based interventions (don't recall the paper, but it is in the grossman et al 2003 meta analysis), but that study did not include a positive control. a more recent study (similar in size and design, but including a positive control), failed to show a therapeutic benefit for mindfulness based intervention vs the control (study is jmg williams et al 2014 in journal of consulting and clinical psychiatry). so there are two high quality studies on clinical benefits of mindfulness interventions, one is positive and one is not with respect to the less well designed (and more numerous) recently published clinical studies of mindfulness, the results are almost always positive. with small poorly controlled studies, this is always a red flag. one of the markers of "science" vs "pseudoscience" is the definition of the limitations of an intervention. if something seems too good to be true, it probably is dont mean to rant or be a wet blanket. i personally believe mindfulness has great clinical potential, but to convince the medical community (and payers) of this, the field needs to focus on quality vs quantity of evidence
- kirab 9y ago
  I just looked up the study with positive control you mentioned. Are you deliberately portraying the study in a false light? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3964149/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3964149/ The study literally says: "MBCT provided significant protection against relapse for participants with increased vulnerability due to history of childhood trauma, but showed no significant advantage in comparison to an active control treatment and usual care over the whole group of patients with recurrent depression." Which means: in some cases MBCT is SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER than the compared treatments and overall it is AS GOOD AS the compared treatments (i.e. cognitive psychological education (CPE) and treatment as usual (TAU)). Now, looking back at your post, you said "failed to show a therapeutic benefit" which is strange, because the mentioned study shows that the therapeutic benefit is about the same and sometimes it is even better compared to CPE and TAU. So why would you say that MBCT does not show therapeutic benefit if it has the same results as the other (best?) known treatment methods? PS: I would really like to turn your biased question around: Do you know of any treatment method which is better than MBCT?
KozmoNau7 9y ago
> Somehow it has a reputation for pseudoscience I can only speak from personal experience, but my company tried a big mindfulness push a couple of years ago. Maybe we just had a bad instructor, but everything was just wishy-washy and felt like a giant waste of time, full of tautologies and wrapping perfectly ordinary common sense (you're more relaxed when you allow yourself to relax, WELL DUH!) up in some sort of vague mysticism. I am perfectly capable of relaxing and unburdening my mind, but it just ain't happening during a normal workday with deadlines and badly defined business processes. If you just let me be and let me listen to some music without being disturbed, I'll be perfectly calm and relaxed, no mysticism needed.
- kamac 9y ago
  > If you just let me be and let me listen to some music without being disturbed, I'll be perfectly calm and relaxed, no mysticism needed. Meditation is more than just relaxation. It's about a state of mind. About being in the present moment, letting go, looking inward and reflecting about oneself. I don't think you do any of those things when just relaxing while listening to music. Also, > I am perfectly capable of relaxing and unburdening my mind, but it just ain't happening during a normal workday with deadlines and badly defined business processes. That means you are not perfectly capable of relaxing your mind.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    > Meditation is more than just relaxation. It's about a state of mind. About being in the present moment, letting go, looking inward and reflecting about oneself. I don't think you do any of those things when just relaxing while listening to music. Well, it's obviously that you don't know me. I am in fact in the moment and I do in fact let go and reflect when I listen to music. Or when I go for a walk or any of a multitude of other non-stressful activities that let me ignore the annoyances of daily life and other people, for a little while. > That means you are not perfectly capable of relaxing your mind. Like I said, it's obvious that you don't know me at all.
    - kamac 9y ago

by inglor 9y ago

moxious 9y ago

I think it has a reputation as a pseudo science because it's derived from religious practice. While religious practice isn't always bunk (as is the case here) assuming that religious practices are bunk is a pretty damn effective heuristic.

beager 9y ago
> [A]ssuming that religious practices are bunk is a pretty damn effective heuristic. Maybe, but if I take your statement seriously, I would surmise that it's only an effective heuristic because being excessively distrusting/cynical has less downside in cases where the practice is actually sound. That aside, you have to work a little bit harder to discern religious practices that are rooted in activities that are observably and directly beneficial to individuals and society (meditation, compassion), and activities that are either antiquated (not eating shellfish/pork) or were created to perpetuate the religion or its leaders (tithing).
- subatomic 9y ago
  > That aside, you have to work a little bit harder to discern religious practices that are rooted in activities that are observably and directly beneficial to individuals and society (meditation, compassion) Leaving meditation out of this, I think the religious practices you're implying were basic human moral practices adopted _by_ religion, not the other way around.
tlb 9y ago
In our Western post-Enlightenment society, most of the beneficial aspects of Christian practice were adopted into secular practice. Consider: charity for the needy, monogamous marriage, burial of the dead, a 7th day of rest. We haven't adopted as many practices from other religions. We eventually (1800s) adopted regular washing from Islam, but adoption was slowed by its taint of foreignness, much to the chagrin of millions of people who died of disease. The stretching aspects of yoga became mainstream within the last 50 years. Meditation and yoga breathing are still exotic. Perhaps some day they won't be, and our descendants will wonder how people from our era stayed sane without daily meditation. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_Living_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_of_Living_Foundation teaches meditation and yoga breathing worldwide, including regular classes in the Bay Area, if you want to try it yourself.
- zamalek 9y ago
  Another example: if you don't want worms or salmonella, don't eat poorly cooked white meat. No doubt the meat was considered cursed after people consistently fell ill after eating it. When it comes to eastern practices (yoga, meditation and so forth) my bullshit barometer is calibrated much, much higher. I'm far more likely to approach their practices with an open mind. Take spirit guides as an example; while I certainly don't agree that there are spirit guides, it is a religious explanation for the subconscious - your autopilot that guides you through small decisions every day. I can't see why you wouldn't try to wield it to your advantage (obviously with the appropriate care that eastern religions have unwittingly formulated). Even the core of Christianity can be helpful. Life is far less stressful if you are generous in the most insignificant ways. Simple acts like letting traffic enter in front of you, over time, drastically erodes the stress that you feel in those situations. From my perspective, religious texts have at least a few pragmatic observations - even if they lack scientific explanations.
  - KozmoNau7 9y ago
    > Even the core of Christianity can be helpful. Life is far less stressful if you are generous in the most insignificant ways. Simple acts like letting traffic enter in front of you, over time, drastically erodes the stress that you feel in those situations. I believe James May (of Top Gear fame) specifically calls this "Christian driving". It's amazing how much more relaxed you are after a drive, if you simply stop thinking of traffic as a race or a competition. You're not going to change your arrival time by any significant amount anyway, so you might as well just relax. In traffic, the only winning move is to not play.
andreareina 9y ago
Another problem is that it's difficult to measure to the standards that we would like. You can't blind, so it's difficult to separate the placebo effect. Results take time to manifest, so you have long-running studies with problems with drop-out and survivorship bias.
- geomark 9y ago
  I'm wondering, isn't it the same as placebo effect? In that it's not a change that occurs from taking a medication. It's a change that is the result of mental state change. Both can produce a physical change, as studies have shown (no link, sorry). But one is entirely the result of mental processes, though those mental processes were not induced by a placebo pill. So it's basically the same as the placebo effect, isn't it?
- hennsen 9y ago
  What would you consider a placebo for meditation?
  - aaavl2821 9y ago
    a "placebo" generally refers to an inactive control arm of a study of a drug. For studying something like meditation, you would use a different kind of control arm. The most common example is "treatment as usual". So half of ppl get meditation therapy for a given condition (say, depression), half get "treatment as usual" (pills and Or therapy). This has lots of problems as "treatment as usual" varies a lot from patient to patient, doctor to doctor A better control is basically taking every aspect of mindfulness based therapy except for the mindfulness (i.e. You educate the patient about the condition, have a group therapy session with a healthcare provider, have at-home therapy assignments, etc). You standardize this "active control" and compare how patients do with this intervention compared to the mindfulness based intervention. This isolates the effect of mindfulness vs other potential confounding effects, and also should reduce physician to physician variability In the one large study of mindfulness interventions using this active control, there was no measurable benefit to the mindfulness arm
coldtea 9y ago
>assuming that religious practices are bunk is a pretty damn effective heuristic. Only if naively only count goals as stated by the religion itself, and only first order effects. (E.g. if one examines whether there's really a heaven people go to, as opposed to examining whether the thought of such a place existing providing great psychological and personal benefit to the believer -- among tons of other similar things, I'm not even touching upon the impact on society, ethics, etc).
aaavl2821 9y ago
I'm not religious, but I know many many people who practice religion because it helps them in very real ways. From having a community to providing meaning to taking comfort in rituals to praying as a form of meditation, there are many religious practices that are psychologically and emotionally healthy. Religion has played such a huge role in human history not just bc some power hungry priests brainwashed people, but because it actually helps people

aaavl2821 9y ago

i fully support mindfulness and meditation as tools with real potential benefit, but the literature on clinical effectiveness leaves a lot to be desired. see a good overview of this issue here by one of the leaders in mindfulness research: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26436311 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26436311 overall, the body of literature on therapeutic benefits of mindfulness to date does not refute the hypothesis that mindfulness is "pseudoscience" (though it doesn't confirm this hypothesis either). there has been a surge in publications related to therapeutic applications of mindfulness in recent years, and nearly all of them are small, single-center, uncontrolled studies. as far as i know, there has only been one large, well designed randomized controlled clinical study of mindfulness based interventions (don't recall the paper, but it is in the grossman et al 2003 meta analysis), but that study did not include a positive control. a more recent study (similar in size and design, but including a positive control), failed to show a therapeutic benefit for mindfulness based intervention vs the control (study is jmg williams et al 2014 in journal of consulting and clinical psychiatry). so there are two high quality studies on clinical benefits of mindfulness interventions, one is positive and one is not with respect to the less well designed (and more numerous) recently published clinical studies of mindfulness, the results are almost always positive. with small poorly controlled studies, this is always a red flag. one of the markers of "science" vs "pseudoscience" is the definition of the limitations of an intervention. if something seems too good to be true, it probably is dont mean to rant or be a wet blanket. i personally believe mindfulness has great clinical potential, but to convince the medical community (and payers) of this, the field needs to focus on quality vs quantity of evidence

kirab 9y ago
I just looked up the study with positive control you mentioned. Are you deliberately portraying the study in a false light? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3964149/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3964149/ The study literally says: "MBCT provided significant protection against relapse for participants with increased vulnerability due to history of childhood trauma, but showed no significant advantage in comparison to an active control treatment and usual care over the whole group of patients with recurrent depression." Which means: in some cases MBCT is SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER than the compared treatments and overall it is AS GOOD AS the compared treatments (i.e. cognitive psychological education (CPE) and treatment as usual (TAU)). Now, looking back at your post, you said "failed to show a therapeutic benefit" which is strange, because the mentioned study shows that the therapeutic benefit is about the same and sometimes it is even better compared to CPE and TAU. So why would you say that MBCT does not show therapeutic benefit if it has the same results as the other (best?) known treatment methods? PS: I would really like to turn your biased question around: Do you know of any treatment method which is better than MBCT?

KozmoNau7 9y ago

> Somehow it has a reputation for pseudoscience I can only speak from personal experience, but my company tried a big mindfulness push a couple of years ago. Maybe we just had a bad instructor, but everything was just wishy-washy and felt like a giant waste of time, full of tautologies and wrapping perfectly ordinary common sense (you're more relaxed when you allow yourself to relax, WELL DUH!) up in some sort of vague mysticism. I am perfectly capable of relaxing and unburdening my mind, but it just ain't happening during a normal workday with deadlines and badly defined business processes. If you just let me be and let me listen to some music without being disturbed, I'll be perfectly calm and relaxed, no mysticism needed.

kamac 9y ago
> If you just let me be and let me listen to some music without being disturbed, I'll be perfectly calm and relaxed, no mysticism needed. Meditation is more than just relaxation. It's about a state of mind. About being in the present moment, letting go, looking inward and reflecting about oneself. I don't think you do any of those things when just relaxing while listening to music. Also, > I am perfectly capable of relaxing and unburdening my mind, but it just ain't happening during a normal workday with deadlines and badly defined business processes. That means you are not perfectly capable of relaxing your mind.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  > Meditation is more than just relaxation. It's about a state of mind. About being in the present moment, letting go, looking inward and reflecting about oneself. I don't think you do any of those things when just relaxing while listening to music. Well, it's obviously that you don't know me. I am in fact in the moment and I do in fact let go and reflect when I listen to music. Or when I go for a walk or any of a multitude of other non-stressful activities that let me ignore the annoyances of daily life and other people, for a little while. > That means you are not perfectly capable of relaxing your mind. Like I said, it's obvious that you don't know me at all.
  - kamac 9y ago