18 ms·

Sometimes mindlessness is better than mindfulness

160 points by prostoalex 5y ago

kayodelycaon 5y ago
One thing to be mindful of is mindfulness is a fad. It’s not a silver bullet for fixing problems.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  Think about what other things today are cool but ultimately a fad in the future. When mindfulness was on the rise sometime in 2017, dare if you would question it! Corporations sold mindfulness like hot cakes. I’ve read some arguments that it can psychologically destroy you.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    Along these lines, my psychiatrist was all about mindfulness. I’d spent my entire life working on being mindful of my actions and reinvented Cognitive Behavior Therapy in the process. For all the good it did me. Without executive function, mindfulness is pretty much useless for self-improvement. People misapply mindfulness all over the place and it drives me nuts. Maybe if we called it “paying attention to detail”, people would understand it better.
    - brigandish 5y ago
      Mindfulness (in the Buddhist tradition, at least) is not a synonym for "paying attention to detail". From[1]: > The practice of Satipatthana meditation centers on the methodical cultivation of one simple mental faculty readily available to all of us at any moment. This is the faculty of mindfulness, the capacity for attending to the content of our experience as it becomes manifest in the immediate present. I can't speak to what your psychiatrist applied the term to, nor how it's been popularised. [1] https://accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/soma/wayof.html https://accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/soma/wayof.html
    - artificialLimbs 5y ago
      >> self-improvement I don't see mindfulness as being for self improvement. Its most precious function is for self observation and self learning. It is intended for one to 'wake up' to be able to see oneself as one is. In our 'normal' state of functioning, we are completely divorced from most of our own internal perceptions most of the time. Do you realize that you have a foot right now? Likely no, but when you read that sentence, you are able to remember that you have a foot, and you can feel it and sense it. Mindfulness is intended to grow the experiencing of oneself to encompass all aspects of ones own reality including the physical body, intellectual activity, and emotional states. At the extreme end of the practice, one may perceive these things singularly and at all times. Where self improvement involves changing oneself and trying to achieve, mindfulness involves acceptance and not trying to force something. >> Without executive function ...however, some people are damaged and will not be able to realize self observation. We do not expect those without feet to run. Edit: formatting
      - andi999 5y ago
        Beeing aware of the sound you hear in your ear when it is silent and focusing on it is the best way to increase the volume, making it permanent and driving you nuts according to my ear doctor. Being oblivious to your body is in my opinion the healthy state.
        artificialLimbs 5y ago
        Tinnitus is an interesting state. I've had it for quite a time, having had loud car audio systems and attending rock concerts in my teen years. I've tried doing as you say and focusing on the noise. It does seem to be more noticeable when I focus on it, but I've never had the experience of it getting louder when I stop. There is also the case of bleeding as a direct experiment one can do. Next time you cut yourself and suspect you may have some blood, try not looking at it (reduces the mentation/expectation of blood), and focus exclusively on the feeling of the pain as much as possible. You'll find the bleeding stops substantially faster.
- drooby 5y ago
  True that it’s not a silver bullet.. I don’t really see it as a fad though. It’s been around for thousands of years. It’s probably not going anywhere.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    A lot of the talk about mindfulness is a fad. The actual practice is extremely old. Same with meditation.
  - it_citizen 5y ago
    I see his point though. More and more I am associating mindfulness as one of many over-marketed self-help practices to cope with the stress of modern life. This mountain of books and methods to find calm or happiness appear to me as a stigma of how insane some aspects of modern life can be. Somehow, our society create a problem and sell you a way to deal with it. Sometimes I am even thinking it is one of the built-in mechanism helping to keep the system stable.
  - zentropia 5y ago
    Astrology has been thousands of years, too. So it's not a proof is not a fad.
    - mandmandam 5y ago
      Fads aren't things you personally find no use in, they're things that get wide attention very fast and lose it quickly.
- bin_bash 5y ago
  I think it's the thinking that it must be a silver bullet to be of any use that has you calling it a fad.
- kragen 5y ago
  A 26-century-long fad.
brigandish 5y ago
Concentration (sustained attention) has many stages. For example, at the lowest stage and in an unpracticed individual, one must fight to keep attention placed on an object. Someone who is well practised will either pass over that stage immediately upon beginning to concentrate or they will not be in that stage for long. As concentration sustains it becomes easier to the point that no will is required for it to remain, it becomes automatic and arises as if you are being concentrated by the object. Sportsmen call this flow. Are these studies comparing this difference? Do they first ascertain the level of skill in concentration that the subject has? Are they going to go against what all sportsmen who've experienced flow have to say on the matter? Personally, I find much of the science world's attempts to look at mindfulness and/or meditation as incredibly clumsy, and frankly, arrogant. Just because people who have written extensively on the subject were not scientists is no reason to dispense with their insights (ha).
- mtalantikite 5y ago
  Yeah I feel like equating sati with just attention or concentration like is done in so many of these studies misunderstands the teaching. Tilopa’s advice might help them understand this sort of meditative “concentration” a little more: don’t recall, don’t imagine, don’t think, don’t examine, don’t control, rest. A high level professional athlete is probably doing something along those lines in relation to their sport, so asking them to examine and control is of course going to knock them out of it. There is a reason why it’s called samma-sati.
  - brigandish 5y ago
    I agree with everything you've written except "misunderstands the teaching", I think they've ignored the teaching and instead decided to investigate what they think the teaching is without having researched the teaching. Misunderstanding would be understandable and easier to forgive. Preconception certainly is a terrible affliction!
- agumonkey 5y ago
  Apology for the slight detour, I wonder if pianists/drummers have a leg up on this. The multiple parallel layers (hands/melody/chords for piano, polyrythms mapped over all limbs). This forces your brain to handle many things at once yet focus on a single whole. In my small experience it was highly meditative (and very deeply stimulating for the brain).
emersonrsantos 5y ago
What is concentration? Is to have your attention totally directed to one thought. The goal of meditation is to have no thoughts, which is totally different from mindfulness, which is just attention on everything you do. Samadhi or illumination is attained without thoughts, mostly with a help of a 'koan' like: 'we know that all things can be reduced to unity. What unity is reduced to?' Then the mind cannot answer and will start to evade and even give illogical answers, then the mind, when tired, stops looking for answers and go quiet, and that's the goal of meditation.
artificialLimbs 5y ago
>> Underlying this state of “automaticity” (as cognitive psychologists call it) are mental processes that can be executed without paying attention to them. These processes run off without conscious awareness—a chain reaction of mental events. We don’t perform all tasks automatically, but many can be performed this way once they are well practiced. It is not the case that we do not pay attention to the tasks, but that we pay attention to them with different faculties than the mind. For chopping cucumbers, if we are chopping cucumbers and talking to our mother at the same time or singing a song in our head, we are utilizing our physical functions rather than mental. It is not that we do not pay attention to the chopping, but that we use our body to do the paying of attention while we use mind elsewhere. >> this is one reason why some experts appear to “choke under pressure”: they think too much about the mechanics of the task at hand. If you're trying to do physical tasks while also doing mental tasks at all, then you are thinking too much. >> skilled golfers performed substantially worse when they focused on their swing Now they are realizing they have bodies, and trying to see what they are doing, mentating while also trying to use that physical-only skill that they had developed under very different circumstances (without mentation). One may also hear about how meditation or mindfulness 'destroyed' someone's life or 'made them crazy'. It is the case that many are unable to process the pain/unpleasantness of fully experiencing one's being in all its horrror. Truly looking at oneself can probably be achieved by more if they were to take it in small doses with plenty of mindlessness interspersed throughout their practice, rather than trying to 'drink the ocean'. Edit: clarity/verbiage.
anozer 5y ago
What happens when CEOs and Political leaders who become mindless? Can we get a score on how mindless they are based on decision-making history? Feels like they repeat the same set of rules so many times to climb the ladder, that certain the networks in the brain have been reinforced so many times it appears as high skill in some scenarios and massive weakness in others. Just like dumb over trained neural nets.
hprotagonist 5y ago
“Don't think. Feel! It is like a finger pointing at the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all that heavenly glory.” (and never take your eyes off your opponent, even when you bow)
hnzix 5y ago
Unwanted mindfulness when you are trying to get into the flow state - also known to sports psychologists as "the yips". Come to think of it, I wonder if coding burnouts / writer's block / analysis paralysis has the same underlying mechanism.
bedobi 5y ago
Is there any evidence mindfulness as taught and practiced by, well, those who teach and practice it, is good for anything? Keep in mind (no pun intended) - if your example is someone who was already successful, and they remain successful, that's not terribly good evidence.
- BoHerfVJrEsq 5y ago
  > Is there any evidence mindfulness as taught and practiced by, well, those who teach and practice it, is good for anything? Well, the 26 centuries of Buddhism, and all those monks and laypeople. I'm not sure if you consider all that they've said and written to be evidence, but I think you should.
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    What’s so special about buddhists? What’s the evidence? Is there some scientific research demonstrating something unique about them compared to the rest of the people?
    - BoHerfVJrEsq 5y ago
      Well, suppose your best friend told you that he did some practice for a while, and gradually got rid of what he estimated to be 99% of the suffering he'd had before. What form do you think evidence of that could take? Brain scans of some kind? They have apparently been done, and they apparently really do look odd. https://www.lionsroar.com/how-meditation-changes-your-brain-and-your-life/ https://www.lionsroar.com/how-meditation-changes-your-brain-...
      - drdeca 5y ago
        I don’t doubt that one can do mental things to put one’s mind in an unusual state long term (nor that differences from these unusual states can be observed with a measurement device). What I doubt is that doing so is prudent. When you look at the ambiguously labeled knobs and levers in the locked control panel of your mind, is it really a good idea to pick the lock and mess around with the levers? (Also, why would I even want to change whether a thing would cause my mental reaction to be “suffering”? Either “suffering” refers to something other than what I generally mean by the word, in which case, well, whether it is a benefit would depend on what that meaning is (but the default would be not to mess with things beyond my ken) , or it does, in which case, uh, no, I’d rather not be wireheaded kthx. Along the lines of https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/utilitarian-time-travel https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/utilitarian-time-travel , if the baron would impale me on a pike, my preferred solution would be to prevent that, not to have a neural restructuring beam make it so I love getting impaled. )
flaque 5y ago
Mindfulness isn't "thinking about chopping onions while chopping onions." Mindfulness is chopping onions. The confusion is that "developing" mindfulness means recognizing when, while chopping onions, you're instead thinking about work, or that embarrassing moment from years ago. There are meditation practices, like "noting", that have you think or say what you're doing while you're doing it. But this is an exercise to train mindfulness, not mindfulness itself.
- lugged 5y ago
  You're arguing semantics. These two things are not mutually exclusive either. You can and should practice both.
  - savolai 5y ago
    Please elaborate what arguing semantics means to you in this context. The comment above seems very relevant to me. Sure, mindfulness (meditation?) can be both. Still, the signposts point primarily not to thinking as the driver of doing (being), but to awareness itself.
  - twelvechairs 5y ago
    The article is worse than parent commenter in sematics. It equates mindfulness with golfers 'paying attention to their swing' which is just plain wrong. Mindfulness is not focussing on an outcome, like hitting a golf ball exactly in the right way, but about understanding the breadth of experiences in the present - senses and thoughts.
    - visarga 5y ago
      It's like going to a discount store, browsing the isles and finding good deals here and there (fun random shopping), vs going to the mall to get that blue shirt with white lines, and never finding it in the right size in any store (an often frustrating experience). The difference is in how you filter your experiences - wide filter with no specific purpose is mindful state, narrow filter with exact purpose is regular state. A simple test: in mindful states you are very aware of the body and in regular states you forget about it.
tomerbd 5y ago
I once thought I was at the brink of life. Since then I know what mindfulness is and I know I did not experience it since then.
pugz 5y ago
I find that a handful of experiences with ketamine over the past few years have been very good for my mindfulness.
fractallyte 5y ago
Mindfulness is an invaluable tool for victims of trauma, to ground them in the 'here and now', when they are overwhelmed by floods of uncontrollable emotions. These emotions are the result of biological, not cognitive, processes. Mindfulness is one of several tools that help to dampen emotions as victims ('survivors') learn to 'process' traumatic memories. The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk, is the canonical work on the subject of trauma - highly recommended for anyone interested in psychology! 'Mindlessness' might have its place too. The idea of letting go, allowing the subconscious to take over... could that be an important part of healing?
theonemind 5y ago
You shouldn't be mindful in a way that interferes with your ability to perform automatic actions. You need non-dual mindfulness, but it's a bit subtle and harder to teach (not harder to do, just harder to get started). Non-dual mindfulness can make you more spontaneous and perform automatic actions better in that you're not self-hindering with internal friction. Sam Harris' Waking Up https://app.wakingup.com/ https://app.wakingup.com/ tries to. (No affiliation, just an user.)
cko 5y ago
I am now of the view that mindfulness in the Theravada Buddhist tradition is accompanied by an overall attitude of renunciation (nekkhamma in Pali). Besides, the Pali word for mindfulness, sati, is one of the Seven Factors of Awakening (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Factors_of_Awakening https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Factors_of_Awakening). So as part of a whole practice, besides just bare attention and a mind that doesn't move much, there's factors like joy, energy, and tranquility to balance. Not to mention the precepts as a prerequisite to even starting the practice. I used to think this mindfulness stuff could be completely stripped of its context, like an extra secular Buddhism, but I'm not so sure anymore.
- joeberon 5y ago
  I honestly think it's quite dangerous in a secular context. Mindfulness can be, for some, like literally taking psychedelics, but except you are sober and there is no guarantee that you will ever come down. I know many people who have to "fake" a normal, healthy mental life because they are genuinely in a state of total, constant perceptual chaos due to badly integrated mindfulness experiences. Like, this is genuinely totally life-destroying stuff. It is dangerous outside of the Buddhist context, because Buddhism offers a world view that can synthesise with your experiences, along with many qualities that should be developed at the same time as mindfulness, such as loving-kindness and compassion, which help to create stability. Otherwise, just focussing extremely on mindfulness and insight, you can get an extremely destabilised individual. Because of this, recommending intense (>30 mins) daily mindfulness meditation to people suffering from mental health issues is almost criminal imo.
stevebmark 5y ago
The end goal of mindfulness is to make you realize that you don't exist and that you have no free will, and there is no "you." With enough practice you will get there, and it's interesting to be able to meditate to the point where you briefly experience periods where you don't exist. Overall, while of course it's true that we have no free will and there is no "you", it's a terrible place to leave someone, especially as a therapeutic intervention. The only way I've found to keep on living happily is to basically ignore the outcome of mindfulness.
- arkitaip 5y ago
  > you don't exist and that you have no free will, and there is no "you." Have you ever considered that all of this might be gobbledygook that obviously doesn't even serve you well?
  - mlboss 5y ago
    There is no “you” to serve :) . There is no ghost in the machine.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- trees101 5y ago
  https://danlawton.substack.com/p/when-buddhism-goes-bad https://danlawton.substack.com/p/when-buddhism-goes-bad ...* distressing and functionally impairing meditation experiences of 60 Western Buddhist meditators. They documented 59 types of adverse effects in their study, including involuntary convulsions, panic, anxiety, dissociation and perceptual hypersensitivity—a far cry from the mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.*
- logicchains 5y ago
  > Overall, while of course it's true that we have no free will and there is no "you", it's a terrible place to leave someone, especially as a therapeutic intervention. I wonder if part of the problem is exposing people to a visceral understanding of that without also teaching them an intellectual understanding. I.e. that if the universe is deterministic, then all their actions were predetermined at the start of the universe, and there's no sense in worrying about the future because there's nothing we can do to change it. And to the extent that the universe is non-deterministic, the added randomness means we have even less (still zero) influence over future outcomes. In this light, the notion of "self" drops away as an arbitrary distinction among cogs in a single machine, and without the self there's no way to think thoughts like "I am sad" or "I am unhappy". Because such thoughts rely on belief in the existence of "I". I can imagine it causing trauma when someone suddenly feels via meditation that they have no "I", but have no way of understanding/processing this on an intellectual level.
megamix 5y ago
Yea so in the end being street smart always beat book smart.
atoav 5y ago
As a musician what happens when you don't think and just do is often superior than when you are mindful of every tiny detail of your hands movement (it can even happen that you are downright unable to play if you are too aware of what you are doing). This kind of focus is important when practising, but on stage it should just be there with the sound, not sure whether this would be called mindful or the opposite. Mindfulness is very subjective as well — I know people who are proud of their own mindfulness and I can't help but notice that there are always aspects within their behaviour or their surroundings that they are totally not getting. You get the feeling they want to be so "in tune with themselves" they don't notice what is going on in the person opposite, or in their general surroundings. Maybe they got mindfulness wrong or maybe I got mindfulness wrong, but for me what I see there is the polar opposite of the flow state I described with music
- whynaut 5y ago
  flow state and mindfulness aren’t really opposed. In fact, having a good grasp of mindfulness allows you to shut down distractions to your own flow as they appear in your mind. Sounds like they got it wrong.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I believe western school of music is too much on the analytical side of this. Indian music a bit too. While other cultures are more on plugging into "feel" and letting things emerge/flow.
  - atoav 5y ago
    I am a improvisational musician for a reason.
dmje 5y ago
Being deliberately mindless is itself mindful.
Aerroon 5y ago
A lot of these posts here on HN regarding meditation and mindfulness sound like what you would hear from an 'intergalactic encyclopedia salesman'. Just a different faith. It's dressed up in the mystery of 'teachings' and 'feelings' and other vague notions. It feels like someone has set up an industry that's raking in a lot of money and all the converts perpetuate it. Perhaps they buy into it or maybe they try to justify it to not feel like they were cheated, but the way it's talked about puts me immediately on guard. I suppose that even if it doesn't work there might be a placebo effect at play.
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  > I suppose that even if it doesn't work there might be a placebo effect at play. I mean, it's not hard to believe (hah!) that faith, various belief systems and meditation-like exercises are beneficial for mental health. The alternative is generally "the universe is uncaring and nothing you do matters in the grand scheme of things", which is slightly less uplifting. Completely agree that any related rhetoric should put one on guard, but "the explanations they provide are wrong" isn't incompatible with "they help you live a better life". Probably not worth becoming a zealot and throwing all your money down a certain drain though.
- wonnage 5y ago
  TBF both meditation and yoga were ripped from religious practices and repackaged for Western consumption, and this version wins out because it helps sell pants.
  - jazzyjackson 5y ago
    simultaneously, yoga & meditation were translated and shared in earnest with western audiences. It’s not all new age wu.
  - rusk 5y ago
    > because it helps sell pants. Check the etymology pyjamas, actual pants and shampoo. Though lots was stolen from other cultures I fail to see how these examples of mimicry qualify as theft. They were asymilated because it’s nice to have night pants and clean hair, just like it’s nice to put yourself in a relaxed and untroubled state of mind.
rg111 5y ago
I have always doubted full Mindfulness. I meditate irregularly. Some of the best ideas in my life came to me when I was not thinking about it- while walking, cooking, or in shower. If I had fully focused on those tasks only, those ideas might have had eluded me. OTOH, always thinking about something is unhealthy. I find a comfortable middle ground in times when it is required. If Archimedes only focused on the warmth and the smooth texture of water on his skin, he wouldn't have gotten to the Law. (I know these stories are little dramatized.) Only doubt I have is that is there some (perceptionally) magical benefit that you get when you reach there? Could be. Or it could be mythical.
- whynaut 5y ago
  mindfulness is almost an opposite of thinking.
  - joeberon 5y ago
    No. Mindfulness is "thinking when thinking, walking when walking, shitting when shitting".
    - RandomWorker 5y ago
      That’s more like Zen Buddhism
      - joeberon 5y ago
        No, it is not, it's the Buddha's definition of mindfulness, that a monk knows exactly without confusion when he is walking, knows when he is sleeping, knows when he is eating, etc. It's easy to look it up in the suttas. Saying the canonical presentation of mindfulness is somehow "Zen Buddhism" is totally incorrect.
    - Aditya_Garg 5y ago
      No, mindfulness is more “watching while thinking, watching while walking, watching when shitting”
dr_dshiv 5y ago
Well, even mantras are a way of distracting the mind from thought in order to support improved performance. Often, verbal thinking distracts us from a task— verbal thinking is just a small part of the thinking we do. So, counterintuitively, distractions can help our mind attend more mindfully.
dr_dshiv 5y ago
The term I've been preferring lately is "whole-mindedness". It's a mouthful, but the point is to have internal integration, to not be split in ones thinking. To do things fully. That does not mean having lots of mentalizing, verbal thoughts. Those thoughts can get in the way and prevent us from wholemindedly attending to the work.
Mikejames 5y ago
i get the articles point, but it doesn’t touch onto some of the main reasons people follow mindfulness. sure everyone knows if you think too much about a task you mess up. imagine a pro golfer focusing on every muscle tensing in the correct way to hit a ball. it’s not possible to play at that level with a level of consciousness, it’s about muscle memory. but a pro golfer that meditates to get beyond bad press and things that consume their minds, that’s where mindfulness will make them a better golfer. mindfulness is on a different level to just being conscious of a task, it allows you to prevent going down pathways of thought that are not useful, and taking you away from the moment. it allows you to experience your emotions and thoughts and to most importantly not judge them, allowing you to see who you really are. Experience different perspectives, gain a different view on life. enabling you to be your true self and to those around you
chinaev 5y ago
I believe mindfulness teaches you to focus your attentions in a turn on / turn off manner. It doesn't actually tell you to be painfully attentive all the time.
laserlight 5y ago
Clickbait title. The article defines mindfulness as directing one's attention to an object. The act of directing and redirecting attention is a practice that develops mindfulness, not the mindfulness itself.
- RandomWorker 5y ago
  Also both paying attention to the swing and to the sounds are both forms of concentration (both can be improved by mindful concentration exercises). The swing is really not something that will improve your shot, it’s also about understanding the conditions like wind, ground patterns etc. Makes sense that listening to the sounds you would be more in tune to these things (then using your muscle memory to perform the swing), while a swing is just a mechanical motion that doesn’t interact with many of the features that would make you a better player.
t8e56vd4ih 5y ago
that's just playing with words. both terms can actually and often do in practice mean the same.
barrenko 5y ago
Sometimes madness is better than mindlessness.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
The article mainly addresses performing expert physical tasks like golf of playing musical instruments. I agree that muscle memory can be what you need. However, based on my own experience of meditating for 40+ years, I believe that the practice of only doing one thing at a time without stray thoughts leads to contentment and productivity - a great combination! For me, the ability to (usually) be able it almost instantly quiet my mind during meditation is a skill that carried over into the rest of my life. In the spirit of Stoicism, I try to not concern myself with tasks that I can’t do until some future time and if I catch myself becoming distracted thinking of something that belongs in the future, I use mindfulness to be in the present. Everyone needs to figure out for themselves what makes them happy, and for me it is spending as much of my life as possible doing productive things for society, being calm and content, and happiness gained from caring about other people as much as I care about myself.
voiper1 5y ago
I doubt these experiments. The participants weren't practiced in mindfulness, nor where the experiments comparing mindfulness to its opposite.

160 points by prostoalex 5y ago

kayodelycaon 5y ago

One thing to be mindful of is mindfulness is a fad. It’s not a silver bullet for fixing problems.

systemvoltage 5y ago
Think about what other things today are cool but ultimately a fad in the future. When mindfulness was on the rise sometime in 2017, dare if you would question it! Corporations sold mindfulness like hot cakes. I’ve read some arguments that it can psychologically destroy you.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  Along these lines, my psychiatrist was all about mindfulness. I’d spent my entire life working on being mindful of my actions and reinvented Cognitive Behavior Therapy in the process. For all the good it did me. Without executive function, mindfulness is pretty much useless for self-improvement. People misapply mindfulness all over the place and it drives me nuts. Maybe if we called it “paying attention to detail”, people would understand it better.
  - brigandish 5y ago
    Mindfulness (in the Buddhist tradition, at least) is not a synonym for "paying attention to detail". From[1]: > The practice of Satipatthana meditation centers on the methodical cultivation of one simple mental faculty readily available to all of us at any moment. This is the faculty of mindfulness, the capacity for attending to the content of our experience as it becomes manifest in the immediate present. I can't speak to what your psychiatrist applied the term to, nor how it's been popularised. [1] https://accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/soma/wayof.html https://accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/soma/wayof.html
  - artificialLimbs 5y ago
    >> self-improvement I don't see mindfulness as being for self improvement. Its most precious function is for self observation and self learning. It is intended for one to 'wake up' to be able to see oneself as one is. In our 'normal' state of functioning, we are completely divorced from most of our own internal perceptions most of the time. Do you realize that you have a foot right now? Likely no, but when you read that sentence, you are able to remember that you have a foot, and you can feel it and sense it. Mindfulness is intended to grow the experiencing of oneself to encompass all aspects of ones own reality including the physical body, intellectual activity, and emotional states. At the extreme end of the practice, one may perceive these things singularly and at all times. Where self improvement involves changing oneself and trying to achieve, mindfulness involves acceptance and not trying to force something. >> Without executive function ...however, some people are damaged and will not be able to realize self observation. We do not expect those without feet to run. Edit: formatting
    - andi999 5y ago
      Beeing aware of the sound you hear in your ear when it is silent and focusing on it is the best way to increase the volume, making it permanent and driving you nuts according to my ear doctor. Being oblivious to your body is in my opinion the healthy state.
      - artificialLimbs 5y ago
        Tinnitus is an interesting state. I've had it for quite a time, having had loud car audio systems and attending rock concerts in my teen years. I've tried doing as you say and focusing on the noise. It does seem to be more noticeable when I focus on it, but I've never had the experience of it getting louder when I stop. There is also the case of bleeding as a direct experiment one can do. Next time you cut yourself and suspect you may have some blood, try not looking at it (reduces the mentation/expectation of blood), and focus exclusively on the feeling of the pain as much as possible. You'll find the bleeding stops substantially faster.
drooby 5y ago
True that it’s not a silver bullet.. I don’t really see it as a fad though. It’s been around for thousands of years. It’s probably not going anywhere.
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  A lot of the talk about mindfulness is a fad. The actual practice is extremely old. Same with meditation.
- it_citizen 5y ago
  I see his point though. More and more I am associating mindfulness as one of many over-marketed self-help practices to cope with the stress of modern life. This mountain of books and methods to find calm or happiness appear to me as a stigma of how insane some aspects of modern life can be. Somehow, our society create a problem and sell you a way to deal with it. Sometimes I am even thinking it is one of the built-in mechanism helping to keep the system stable.
- zentropia 5y ago
  Astrology has been thousands of years, too. So it's not a proof is not a fad.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    Fads aren't things you personally find no use in, they're things that get wide attention very fast and lose it quickly.
bin_bash 5y ago
I think it's the thinking that it must be a silver bullet to be of any use that has you calling it a fad.
kragen 5y ago
A 26-century-long fad.

brigandish 5y ago

Concentration (sustained attention) has many stages. For example, at the lowest stage and in an unpracticed individual, one must fight to keep attention placed on an object. Someone who is well practised will either pass over that stage immediately upon beginning to concentrate or they will not be in that stage for long. As concentration sustains it becomes easier to the point that no will is required for it to remain, it becomes automatic and arises as if you are being concentrated by the object. Sportsmen call this flow. Are these studies comparing this difference? Do they first ascertain the level of skill in concentration that the subject has? Are they going to go against what all sportsmen who've experienced flow have to say on the matter? Personally, I find much of the science world's attempts to look at mindfulness and/or meditation as incredibly clumsy, and frankly, arrogant. Just because people who have written extensively on the subject were not scientists is no reason to dispense with their insights (ha).

mtalantikite 5y ago
Yeah I feel like equating sati with just attention or concentration like is done in so many of these studies misunderstands the teaching. Tilopa’s advice might help them understand this sort of meditative “concentration” a little more: don’t recall, don’t imagine, don’t think, don’t examine, don’t control, rest. A high level professional athlete is probably doing something along those lines in relation to their sport, so asking them to examine and control is of course going to knock them out of it. There is a reason why it’s called samma-sati.
- brigandish 5y ago
  I agree with everything you've written except "misunderstands the teaching", I think they've ignored the teaching and instead decided to investigate what they think the teaching is without having researched the teaching. Misunderstanding would be understandable and easier to forgive. Preconception certainly is a terrible affliction!
agumonkey 5y ago
Apology for the slight detour, I wonder if pianists/drummers have a leg up on this. The multiple parallel layers (hands/melody/chords for piano, polyrythms mapped over all limbs). This forces your brain to handle many things at once yet focus on a single whole. In my small experience it was highly meditative (and very deeply stimulating for the brain).

emersonrsantos 5y ago

What is concentration? Is to have your attention totally directed to one thought. The goal of meditation is to have no thoughts, which is totally different from mindfulness, which is just attention on everything you do. Samadhi or illumination is attained without thoughts, mostly with a help of a 'koan' like: 'we know that all things can be reduced to unity. What unity is reduced to?' Then the mind cannot answer and will start to evade and even give illogical answers, then the mind, when tired, stops looking for answers and go quiet, and that's the goal of meditation.

artificialLimbs 5y ago

>> Underlying this state of “automaticity” (as cognitive psychologists call it) are mental processes that can be executed without paying attention to them. These processes run off without conscious awareness—a chain reaction of mental events. We don’t perform all tasks automatically, but many can be performed this way once they are well practiced. It is not the case that we do not pay attention to the tasks, but that we pay attention to them with different faculties than the mind. For chopping cucumbers, if we are chopping cucumbers and talking to our mother at the same time or singing a song in our head, we are utilizing our physical functions rather than mental. It is not that we do not pay attention to the chopping, but that we use our body to do the paying of attention while we use mind elsewhere. >> this is one reason why some experts appear to “choke under pressure”: they think too much about the mechanics of the task at hand. If you're trying to do physical tasks while also doing mental tasks at all, then you are thinking too much. >> skilled golfers performed substantially worse when they focused on their swing Now they are realizing they have bodies, and trying to see what they are doing, mentating while also trying to use that physical-only skill that they had developed under very different circumstances (without mentation). One may also hear about how meditation or mindfulness 'destroyed' someone's life or 'made them crazy'. It is the case that many are unable to process the pain/unpleasantness of fully experiencing one's being in all its horrror. Truly looking at oneself can probably be achieved by more if they were to take it in small doses with plenty of mindlessness interspersed throughout their practice, rather than trying to 'drink the ocean'. Edit: clarity/verbiage.

anozer 5y ago

What happens when CEOs and Political leaders who become mindless? Can we get a score on how mindless they are based on decision-making history? Feels like they repeat the same set of rules so many times to climb the ladder, that certain the networks in the brain have been reinforced so many times it appears as high skill in some scenarios and massive weakness in others. Just like dumb over trained neural nets.

hprotagonist 5y ago

“Don't think. Feel! It is like a finger pointing at the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all that heavenly glory.” (and never take your eyes off your opponent, even when you bow)

hnzix 5y ago

Unwanted mindfulness when you are trying to get into the flow state - also known to sports psychologists as "the yips". Come to think of it, I wonder if coding burnouts / writer's block / analysis paralysis has the same underlying mechanism.

bedobi 5y ago

Is there any evidence mindfulness as taught and practiced by, well, those who teach and practice it, is good for anything? Keep in mind (no pun intended) - if your example is someone who was already successful, and they remain successful, that's not terribly good evidence.

BoHerfVJrEsq 5y ago
> Is there any evidence mindfulness as taught and practiced by, well, those who teach and practice it, is good for anything? Well, the 26 centuries of Buddhism, and all those monks and laypeople. I'm not sure if you consider all that they've said and written to be evidence, but I think you should.
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  What’s so special about buddhists? What’s the evidence? Is there some scientific research demonstrating something unique about them compared to the rest of the people?
  - BoHerfVJrEsq 5y ago
    Well, suppose your best friend told you that he did some practice for a while, and gradually got rid of what he estimated to be 99% of the suffering he'd had before. What form do you think evidence of that could take? Brain scans of some kind? They have apparently been done, and they apparently really do look odd. https://www.lionsroar.com/how-meditation-changes-your-brain-and-your-life/ https://www.lionsroar.com/how-meditation-changes-your-brain-...
    - drdeca 5y ago
      I don’t doubt that one can do mental things to put one’s mind in an unusual state long term (nor that differences from these unusual states can be observed with a measurement device). What I doubt is that doing so is prudent. When you look at the ambiguously labeled knobs and levers in the locked control panel of your mind, is it really a good idea to pick the lock and mess around with the levers? (Also, why would I even want to change whether a thing would cause my mental reaction to be “suffering”? Either “suffering” refers to something other than what I generally mean by the word, in which case, well, whether it is a benefit would depend on what that meaning is (but the default would be not to mess with things beyond my ken) , or it does, in which case, uh, no, I’d rather not be wireheaded kthx. Along the lines of https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/utilitarian-time-travel https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/utilitarian-time-travel , if the baron would impale me on a pike, my preferred solution would be to prevent that, not to have a neural restructuring beam make it so I love getting impaled. )

flaque 5y ago

Mindfulness isn't "thinking about chopping onions while chopping onions." Mindfulness is chopping onions. The confusion is that "developing" mindfulness means recognizing when, while chopping onions, you're instead thinking about work, or that embarrassing moment from years ago. There are meditation practices, like "noting", that have you think or say what you're doing while you're doing it. But this is an exercise to train mindfulness, not mindfulness itself.

lugged 5y ago
You're arguing semantics. These two things are not mutually exclusive either. You can and should practice both.
- savolai 5y ago
  Please elaborate what arguing semantics means to you in this context. The comment above seems very relevant to me. Sure, mindfulness (meditation?) can be both. Still, the signposts point primarily not to thinking as the driver of doing (being), but to awareness itself.
- twelvechairs 5y ago
  The article is worse than parent commenter in sematics. It equates mindfulness with golfers 'paying attention to their swing' which is just plain wrong. Mindfulness is not focussing on an outcome, like hitting a golf ball exactly in the right way, but about understanding the breadth of experiences in the present - senses and thoughts.
  - visarga 5y ago
    It's like going to a discount store, browsing the isles and finding good deals here and there (fun random shopping), vs going to the mall to get that blue shirt with white lines, and never finding it in the right size in any store (an often frustrating experience). The difference is in how you filter your experiences - wide filter with no specific purpose is mindful state, narrow filter with exact purpose is regular state. A simple test: in mindful states you are very aware of the body and in regular states you forget about it.

tomerbd 5y ago

I once thought I was at the brink of life. Since then I know what mindfulness is and I know I did not experience it since then.

pugz 5y ago

I find that a handful of experiences with ketamine over the past few years have been very good for my mindfulness.

fractallyte 5y ago

Mindfulness is an invaluable tool for victims of trauma, to ground them in the 'here and now', when they are overwhelmed by floods of uncontrollable emotions. These emotions are the result of biological, not cognitive, processes. Mindfulness is one of several tools that help to dampen emotions as victims ('survivors') learn to 'process' traumatic memories. The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk, is the canonical work on the subject of trauma - highly recommended for anyone interested in psychology! 'Mindlessness' might have its place too. The idea of letting go, allowing the subconscious to take over... could that be an important part of healing?

theonemind 5y ago

You shouldn't be mindful in a way that interferes with your ability to perform automatic actions. You need non-dual mindfulness, but it's a bit subtle and harder to teach (not harder to do, just harder to get started). Non-dual mindfulness can make you more spontaneous and perform automatic actions better in that you're not self-hindering with internal friction. Sam Harris' Waking Up https://app.wakingup.com/ https://app.wakingup.com/ tries to. (No affiliation, just an user.)

cko 5y ago

I am now of the view that mindfulness in the Theravada Buddhist tradition is accompanied by an overall attitude of renunciation (nekkhamma in Pali). Besides, the Pali word for mindfulness, sati, is one of the Seven Factors of Awakening (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Factors_of_Awakening https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Factors_of_Awakening). So as part of a whole practice, besides just bare attention and a mind that doesn't move much, there's factors like joy, energy, and tranquility to balance. Not to mention the precepts as a prerequisite to even starting the practice. I used to think this mindfulness stuff could be completely stripped of its context, like an extra secular Buddhism, but I'm not so sure anymore.

joeberon 5y ago
I honestly think it's quite dangerous in a secular context. Mindfulness can be, for some, like literally taking psychedelics, but except you are sober and there is no guarantee that you will ever come down. I know many people who have to "fake" a normal, healthy mental life because they are genuinely in a state of total, constant perceptual chaos due to badly integrated mindfulness experiences. Like, this is genuinely totally life-destroying stuff. It is dangerous outside of the Buddhist context, because Buddhism offers a world view that can synthesise with your experiences, along with many qualities that should be developed at the same time as mindfulness, such as loving-kindness and compassion, which help to create stability. Otherwise, just focussing extremely on mindfulness and insight, you can get an extremely destabilised individual. Because of this, recommending intense (>30 mins) daily mindfulness meditation to people suffering from mental health issues is almost criminal imo.

stevebmark 5y ago

The end goal of mindfulness is to make you realize that you don't exist and that you have no free will, and there is no "you." With enough practice you will get there, and it's interesting to be able to meditate to the point where you briefly experience periods where you don't exist. Overall, while of course it's true that we have no free will and there is no "you", it's a terrible place to leave someone, especially as a therapeutic intervention. The only way I've found to keep on living happily is to basically ignore the outcome of mindfulness.

arkitaip 5y ago
> you don't exist and that you have no free will, and there is no "you." Have you ever considered that all of this might be gobbledygook that obviously doesn't even serve you well?
- mlboss 5y ago
  There is no “you” to serve :) . There is no ghost in the machine.
deleted 5y ago
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trees101 5y ago
https://danlawton.substack.com/p/when-buddhism-goes-bad https://danlawton.substack.com/p/when-buddhism-goes-bad ...* distressing and functionally impairing meditation experiences of 60 Western Buddhist meditators. They documented 59 types of adverse effects in their study, including involuntary convulsions, panic, anxiety, dissociation and perceptual hypersensitivity—a far cry from the mainstream branding of mindfulness meditation as a panacea for all our woes.*
logicchains 5y ago
> Overall, while of course it's true that we have no free will and there is no "you", it's a terrible place to leave someone, especially as a therapeutic intervention. I wonder if part of the problem is exposing people to a visceral understanding of that without also teaching them an intellectual understanding. I.e. that if the universe is deterministic, then all their actions were predetermined at the start of the universe, and there's no sense in worrying about the future because there's nothing we can do to change it. And to the extent that the universe is non-deterministic, the added randomness means we have even less (still zero) influence over future outcomes. In this light, the notion of "self" drops away as an arbitrary distinction among cogs in a single machine, and without the self there's no way to think thoughts like "I am sad" or "I am unhappy". Because such thoughts rely on belief in the existence of "I". I can imagine it causing trauma when someone suddenly feels via meditation that they have no "I", but have no way of understanding/processing this on an intellectual level.

megamix 5y ago

Yea so in the end being street smart always beat book smart.

atoav 5y ago

As a musician what happens when you don't think and just do is often superior than when you are mindful of every tiny detail of your hands movement (it can even happen that you are downright unable to play if you are too aware of what you are doing). This kind of focus is important when practising, but on stage it should just be there with the sound, not sure whether this would be called mindful or the opposite. Mindfulness is very subjective as well — I know people who are proud of their own mindfulness and I can't help but notice that there are always aspects within their behaviour or their surroundings that they are totally not getting. You get the feeling they want to be so "in tune with themselves" they don't notice what is going on in the person opposite, or in their general surroundings. Maybe they got mindfulness wrong or maybe I got mindfulness wrong, but for me what I see there is the polar opposite of the flow state I described with music

whynaut 5y ago
flow state and mindfulness aren’t really opposed. In fact, having a good grasp of mindfulness allows you to shut down distractions to your own flow as they appear in your mind. Sounds like they got it wrong.
agumonkey 5y ago
I believe western school of music is too much on the analytical side of this. Indian music a bit too. While other cultures are more on plugging into "feel" and letting things emerge/flow.
- atoav 5y ago
  I am a improvisational musician for a reason.

dmje 5y ago

Being deliberately mindless is itself mindful.

Aerroon 5y ago

A lot of these posts here on HN regarding meditation and mindfulness sound like what you would hear from an 'intergalactic encyclopedia salesman'. Just a different faith. It's dressed up in the mystery of 'teachings' and 'feelings' and other vague notions. It feels like someone has set up an industry that's raking in a lot of money and all the converts perpetuate it. Perhaps they buy into it or maybe they try to justify it to not feel like they were cheated, but the way it's talked about puts me immediately on guard. I suppose that even if it doesn't work there might be a placebo effect at play.

MauranKilom 5y ago
> I suppose that even if it doesn't work there might be a placebo effect at play. I mean, it's not hard to believe (hah!) that faith, various belief systems and meditation-like exercises are beneficial for mental health. The alternative is generally "the universe is uncaring and nothing you do matters in the grand scheme of things", which is slightly less uplifting. Completely agree that any related rhetoric should put one on guard, but "the explanations they provide are wrong" isn't incompatible with "they help you live a better life". Probably not worth becoming a zealot and throwing all your money down a certain drain though.
wonnage 5y ago
TBF both meditation and yoga were ripped from religious practices and repackaged for Western consumption, and this version wins out because it helps sell pants.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  simultaneously, yoga & meditation were translated and shared in earnest with western audiences. It’s not all new age wu.
- rusk 5y ago
  > because it helps sell pants. Check the etymology pyjamas, actual pants and shampoo. Though lots was stolen from other cultures I fail to see how these examples of mimicry qualify as theft. They were asymilated because it’s nice to have night pants and clean hair, just like it’s nice to put yourself in a relaxed and untroubled state of mind.

rg111 5y ago

I have always doubted full Mindfulness. I meditate irregularly. Some of the best ideas in my life came to me when I was not thinking about it- while walking, cooking, or in shower. If I had fully focused on those tasks only, those ideas might have had eluded me. OTOH, always thinking about something is unhealthy. I find a comfortable middle ground in times when it is required. If Archimedes only focused on the warmth and the smooth texture of water on his skin, he wouldn't have gotten to the Law. (I know these stories are little dramatized.) Only doubt I have is that is there some (perceptionally) magical benefit that you get when you reach there? Could be. Or it could be mythical.

whynaut 5y ago
mindfulness is almost an opposite of thinking.
- joeberon 5y ago
  No. Mindfulness is "thinking when thinking, walking when walking, shitting when shitting".
  - RandomWorker 5y ago
    That’s more like Zen Buddhism
    - joeberon 5y ago
      No, it is not, it's the Buddha's definition of mindfulness, that a monk knows exactly without confusion when he is walking, knows when he is sleeping, knows when he is eating, etc. It's easy to look it up in the suttas. Saying the canonical presentation of mindfulness is somehow "Zen Buddhism" is totally incorrect.
  - Aditya_Garg 5y ago
    No, mindfulness is more “watching while thinking, watching while walking, watching when shitting”

dr_dshiv 5y ago

Well, even mantras are a way of distracting the mind from thought in order to support improved performance. Often, verbal thinking distracts us from a task— verbal thinking is just a small part of the thinking we do. So, counterintuitively, distractions can help our mind attend more mindfully.

dr_dshiv 5y ago

The term I've been preferring lately is "whole-mindedness". It's a mouthful, but the point is to have internal integration, to not be split in ones thinking. To do things fully. That does not mean having lots of mentalizing, verbal thoughts. Those thoughts can get in the way and prevent us from wholemindedly attending to the work.

Mikejames 5y ago

i get the articles point, but it doesn’t touch onto some of the main reasons people follow mindfulness. sure everyone knows if you think too much about a task you mess up. imagine a pro golfer focusing on every muscle tensing in the correct way to hit a ball. it’s not possible to play at that level with a level of consciousness, it’s about muscle memory. but a pro golfer that meditates to get beyond bad press and things that consume their minds, that’s where mindfulness will make them a better golfer. mindfulness is on a different level to just being conscious of a task, it allows you to prevent going down pathways of thought that are not useful, and taking you away from the moment. it allows you to experience your emotions and thoughts and to most importantly not judge them, allowing you to see who you really are. Experience different perspectives, gain a different view on life. enabling you to be your true self and to those around you

chinaev 5y ago

I believe mindfulness teaches you to focus your attentions in a turn on / turn off manner. It doesn't actually tell you to be painfully attentive all the time.

laserlight 5y ago

Clickbait title. The article defines mindfulness as directing one's attention to an object. The act of directing and redirecting attention is a practice that develops mindfulness, not the mindfulness itself.

RandomWorker 5y ago
Also both paying attention to the swing and to the sounds are both forms of concentration (both can be improved by mindful concentration exercises). The swing is really not something that will improve your shot, it’s also about understanding the conditions like wind, ground patterns etc. Makes sense that listening to the sounds you would be more in tune to these things (then using your muscle memory to perform the swing), while a swing is just a mechanical motion that doesn’t interact with many of the features that would make you a better player.

t8e56vd4ih 5y ago

that's just playing with words. both terms can actually and often do in practice mean the same.

barrenko 5y ago

Sometimes madness is better than mindlessness.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

The article mainly addresses performing expert physical tasks like golf of playing musical instruments. I agree that muscle memory can be what you need. However, based on my own experience of meditating for 40+ years, I believe that the practice of only doing one thing at a time without stray thoughts leads to contentment and productivity - a great combination! For me, the ability to (usually) be able it almost instantly quiet my mind during meditation is a skill that carried over into the rest of my life. In the spirit of Stoicism, I try to not concern myself with tasks that I can’t do until some future time and if I catch myself becoming distracted thinking of something that belongs in the future, I use mindfulness to be in the present. Everyone needs to figure out for themselves what makes them happy, and for me it is spending as much of my life as possible doing productive things for society, being calm and content, and happiness gained from caring about other people as much as I care about myself.

voiper1 5y ago

I doubt these experiments. The participants weren't practiced in mindfulness, nor where the experiments comparing mindfulness to its opposite.