9 ms·

Mindfulness interventions for teens decrease mindfulness, study finds

126 points by Bologo 2y ago

beretguy 2y ago
> students have learned mindfulness techniques like breath awareness, thought observation, and emotional monitoring as part of their regular curriculum Children are full of energy - they need to be let loose and run around. It’s like trying to teach peaceful and quite a 6 months old dog - you can’t. You need to let them burn all that energy.
- vsnf 2y ago
  I find this continues to be true in my adulthood. With the blessing of remote work (or failing that, an office culture that doesn't mind), I'm very happy to take a midday walk and enjoy the outdoors. I'm very certain that if I had compatriots with me now like I did during school recess that we'd definitely find some sticks and swordfight with them, or climb rocks and trees, age be damned.
  - nradov 2y ago
    I've never seen an office culture that minded people taking a walk (unless the team was in war room or something). A lot of workers go out to buy lunch anyway. For hourly production workers that have to clock in/out and may only get a fixed 30 lunch break then it is more difficult.
    - heyoni 2y ago
      The problem is no sword fights or basketball courts :/ it also feels strange to randomly do something like a few pushups at the office whereas at home I do it all the time.
    - babyshake 2y ago
      A 30 minute walk around most parts of downtown San Francisco is not exactly the kind of 30 minute walk OP likely has in mind.
- exabrial 2y ago
  This is also the way you get sleep at night (tire them out so they sleep through the night). It also sets them up for healthy habits as adults.
- maxerickson 2y ago
  The second meta-analysis specifically separated older kids from younger kids and found that the intervention had less impact on the older kids.
- laserbeam 2y ago
  “Children” is likely the wrong word here. As humans develop, they change incredibly fast. The needs of a 6 year old are surprisingly different from those of an 8 year old. This study focuses on 14 year olds (on average). This is way past the age of “needing to burn energy like a dog”. Sure, they have more energy than adults, but you’re still likely describing much younger humans.
- gosub100 2y ago
  And the emotional systems of the brain are some of the last to develop. It's good to teach youth that there are these things called emotions (for the most inept) and they do matter. But don't expect too much from it.
- energybored11 2y ago
  The "mindfulness" techniques and breathing techniques ultimately come from the Hindu/Buddhist school of thought and is much bigger than the cargo cult way the western society seem to have picked up from them. > Children are full of energy - they need to be let loose and run around. The masters of the original mindfulness techniques would agree.
  - BeFlatXIII 2y ago
    That’s why you do yoga asanas prior to meditation.
- pawelmurias 2y ago
  Yes! We need more of that rather then trying to embrace brutal eastern religions and push secularized supersitions dressed in a layer of pseudoscience
stephc_int13 2y ago
My belief is that societal and technological sophistication is overall extremely stressful for organisms that were prepared for a very different life by evolution. Our neurosis is a byproduct of our success and of the highly complex and competitive nature of our social interactions. Touching grass, spending time with animals, learning to accept and appreciate our animal roots, is what can balance the stress.
- Tom3849 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - hunter-gatherer 2y ago
    Your knee-jerk reaction is perhaps emphasizing OP's point. OP obviously is referring to the spirit of being more in tune with our natural roots and not prescribing "Get a dog, visit a man-made park" as a strict prescription as you seem to be interpreting it.
    - Tom3849 2y ago
      No, I illustrated that for some people "being more in tune with our natural roots" is deeply stressful. And it is simply not realistic advice! I get attacked weekly, and can not even carry peper spray, or tell anything to my attackers (they would turn on me). Last time I got attacked by 6 large dogs while walking on beach, and their owners would not even restraint the. After, they tried to steal my phone for recording the attack. Latter they told police, dogs were "stray" and they are not responsible for them. Despite providing shelter, food, vet and walking them on leash... If I mugged people, trying to steal their food, I would be in jail! Some "true" mythical countryside has even more dogs in large packs. It is outright dangerous to cycle here!
  - nordstreem 2y ago
    Get out of your routine and introduce some dissonance. Outside is an endless miasma of geometric and color gradient state change overload for the brain, garbage collects the social objects we’re forced to hallucinate. Sit in one spot too long and it all goes fractal.
harry8 2y ago
Religious studies fails to make kids more religious. Abstinence programs taught in schools fail to increase celibacy. Health programs fail to dent mcdonalds market share. Arithmetic fails to stop people taking on unnecessary and punitive debt. The point being pushing things (good, bad or ugly) in schools often doesn't work out as hoped. Schooling is not a solved problem but it is a very crude tool used badly and often brutally by people of all kinds who wish to improve society by giving kids the tools to... You've heard it all before.
- tmaly 2y ago
  Sounds like we need to throw some startups at it /s
  - brianf0 2y ago
    We should. why /s?
    - Terr_ 2y ago
      I can't give a definitive answer since I'm not the parent poster, however, it makes sense to me: There are various areas in which "disruptors" have promised that their outsider approach would somehow revolutionize the status quo into something better, and either they flopped or it became arguably worse in the long run. A simple example might be how Theranos was going to innovate past stodgy medical companies and provide wonderful new diagnostics to drive down healthcare costs, etc. Or how certain rideshare companies, once they achieved various local -opoly statuses--in ways not entirely aboveboard--are somehow back to a worse value-proposition than the system they displaced.
      - roenxi 2y ago
        All that tells us is that some attempts at improvement fail. Which, while common, doesn't inform us about the whether making attempts is good. Startups give you as many attempts at improving a situation as there are people who can scrape together some capital. Improvements from within is capped at (#Existing Companies x %with functional management) which is a much smaller number of attempts. Improvements by regulation is capped at ... N=1 and whatever the odds are that a good idea dodges regulatory capture, your political opponents, inertia and being too hard to enforce (sub 1 attempt in practice, maybe 2 or 3 pushes in exceptional circumstances). Of the options, startups are the best. The failures are less consequential.
Naijoko 2y ago
wow the whole site is only pushing bullshit science. Its worth to click a bit on the other articles. Seems like an AI generated website.
- laserbeam 2y ago
  Could be. There’s at least a link to the paper. Unfortunately it’s a preprint, not peer reviewed. I can’t tell at a glance if the science is bs, but I can certainly tell that writing for a general audience before peer review is a shit thing to do and should certainly discount this article.
- gosub100 2y ago
  The OP hasn't commented in 3 months, and has submitted numerous articles from the same domain. The other mostly come from another domain with an identical UX.
ajkjk 2y ago
I mean yeah. Giving someone new information can change their behavior if they incorporate it. But pushing them to act in a certain way.. Probably not, unless it's coercive, which is bad for other reasons. If you want kids to be mindful, be mindful yourself.
gonzo41 2y ago
Color me shocked that trying to teach a teenager not to think about themselves so much is going to fail. Mindfulness only works when you put the effort in to seek the equanimity it provides. I think it's hard for kids to make being calm and composed a virtue. You kind of have to get there as a consequence of experiencing a lot of chaos. I think 2 hours of sport before all school would do more for most kids. Even if it was just a 2 hour walk outdoors.
seltzered_ 2y ago
Link to the preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qnk2u https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qnk2u One other reference I've seen from a Tristan Harris interview is that mindfulness teaching effects (presumably for younger kids) can get negated by social media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=3034&v=3CdxIATnH_w&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=3034&v=3CdxIATnH_w&feature=y...
- thefaux 2y ago
  I'm not saying he's wrong, but that is a rather convenient position for him to take.
Buttons840 2y ago
> The aim of these programs is to equip youth with skills to prevent mental disorders and enhance overall well-being. The way I learned mindfulness meditation, you should not expect it to accomplish anything specific. I listened to a course and found the ideas new and helpful, it was so life changing that I went further and studied some Buddhist philosophy, but further studied brought some anxiety and so I stopped. My current attitude is that I got what I could from it, but won't study it further. I don't think mindfulness should be viewed as any better than other life strategies.
- asaddhamani 2y ago
  I find the Waking Up app the closest to this. Others like headspace feel heavily commercialised, with an aim of improving “productivity”. If anyone is looking for guided meditation, I suggest checking out waking up.
  - ekms 2y ago
    I dont think the original series of guided meditations from the headspace founder was aimed at productivity. From what I remember, it's a pretty typical breath- and bodyscan-centered vipassana style. I can't comment on any of the subsequent instructors or lessons though, haven't tried them
  - SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
    > Others like headspace feel heavily commercialised The one you pointed to is $130 a year.
    - npinsker 2y ago
      Their point is that Headspace seems to sell meditation a bit more as a means to optimizing one’s life, while Waking Up sells meditation more abstractly, as a means to more fully live one’s life. The app is free (or heavily discounted) for those that can’t pay. Nor do they seem to optimize conversion flows, run ads, or pursue growth as aggressively as Headspace has.
    - 2y ago
throwaway22032 2y ago
As someone who grew up in the 90s, so many things seem to have changed to just cause a ton of anxiety that we didn't have when I was growing up. A typical day for me as a teenager would be to wake up, have breakfast (or maybe not), walk to school, strictly pen and paper work only, hang out with my friends at lunch. We might play Gameboy after school, the same game for weeks on end. If I wanted something to do I had to go outside and play, at home we maybe had books, it's a self limiting form of entertainment. Now it feels like everything is just so much more complicated. The me of today would wake up and stare at his phone for half an hour before even getting to school. It's just massive overstimulation all of the time. Mindfulness, even in adults, I find is a hack to avoid actually doing the things which lead to stress reduction.
- sublinear 2y ago
  All this overstimulation is driven by marketing. Nothing really changed except the rate of consumption of information. Staying focused is more important than ever. Not enough people know how or care to fight all these nasty attempts to move their locus of control outside themselves. Once you know what you want out of life it's much easier to keep things in control. As the old Simpson's episode said: "just don't look".
- gosub100 2y ago
  Can you imagine what kind of shit show the first presidential election will be with gen Z candidates? I'm not taking a dig at the generation, but the social media posts that will be unearthed by the opponent's campaign. I predict we'll see would be presidents get sacked at the 11th hour due to things they said on Myspace in 8th grade.
  - throwaway22032 2y ago
    This stuff is super unpredictable to me. In the US as far as I can tell the right wing has a "traditional" leader that has sex with prostitutes, and the left wing gets upset if you call a man a man. It's basically random as to whether a completely reasonable opinion will be seen as verboten, or a completely bonkers opinion will be seen as okay, so I mean, who knows?
babyshake 2y ago
I think it's likely that what is happening is the process of mindfulness (noticing your anxiety without judgement, and allowing it to exist and gently float away) is no match for that daily onslaught of culture, largely propagated via social media, that what we must do is focus and obsess on what makes us anxious. And if you don't focus on what makes you anxious, you are a fool at best and an enemy combatant at worst.
ARandomerDude 2y ago
The more you vent, the more stressed you become. The key isn’t learning all these little tricks, it’s learning to persevere. Our society is so weak that the idea of mental toughness is shunned as “toxic masculinity” or whatever but the fact is depression and suicide rates have soared as we’ve gotten away from the idea that toughness is good. Have heroes. Don’t allow yourself to whine. Aim for victory. In the process you’ll discover you’re much happier.
- defiamazing 2y ago
  [dead]
dilliwal 2y ago
This study is not even peer reviewed, is a pre-print and has low sample size. How do we make all these conclusions so quickly
- xandrius 2y ago
  It generates more clicks this way. Also people already have answers in their head, so anything that comes up from a study (even a poor one) can spark conversations. Good job in pointing out, I hadn't noticed those important details.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
titanomachy 2y ago
It says it reduces “self-reported mindfulness”. Maybe you have to be at least a little mindful to realize how unmindful you are? Similar to how people who have never studied cognitive bias assume they are unbiased.
- haswell 2y ago
  This was the first thing that came to mind. After being a skeptic and avoiding it for years, I decided to do a mindfulness/meditation experiment, and indeed, one of the first things I started to realize was just how much my brain would go down rabbit holes of discursive thought. Becoming more mindful absolutely made me feel like I was less mindful, simply because I was actually noticing. I need to dig deeper into the study to see if/how they accounted for this, but it seems like it'd be a major factor in a self-reporting situation.
tasuki 2y ago
Maybe the problem is conflating mindfulness and mental wellbeing a little bit?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
liorsbg 2y ago
Note that this is self-reported mindfulness. I don't find it farfetched that someone who's been taught mindfulness would self-report lower even though objectively they may have a higher degree of mindfulness.
- wes-k 2y ago
  This has been documented already. As you begin mindfulness practices you become aware of your thoughts. You then think “gosh, I didn’t have all these thoughts before” when really you did, you just weren’t aware of them. I believe studies on this are discussed in Sam Harris’s book “Waking Up”.
Animats 2y ago
This is named an "intervention", but the article makes it clear it was training applied to everyone in some school. This is apparently called a "universal mindfulness intervention", which seems an oxymoron, but whatever. Using the same psychological intervention on everyone seems misguided, if not harmful.
energybored11 2y ago
I have a feeling this study can be replicated with literally anything that uses "school" as an intervention vehicle except in cases where it is actually harmful for them (such as undergoing gender change surgeries).
jane441 2y ago
[dead]
EricE 2y ago
Obsessing about mental health harms mental health? Who could have guessed!
lurking15 2y ago
This has more to do with anything tangentially related to or funded by central govt (like public education) failing to accomplish stated goals, rather than mindfulness being bad.

126 points by Bologo 2y ago

> students have learned mindfulness techniques like breath awareness, thought observation, and emotional monitoring as part of their regular curriculum Children are full of energy - they need to be let loose and run around. It’s like trying to teach peaceful and quite a 6 months old dog - you can’t. You need to let them burn all that energy.

vsnf 2y ago
I find this continues to be true in my adulthood. With the blessing of remote work (or failing that, an office culture that doesn't mind), I'm very happy to take a midday walk and enjoy the outdoors. I'm very certain that if I had compatriots with me now like I did during school recess that we'd definitely find some sticks and swordfight with them, or climb rocks and trees, age be damned.
- nradov 2y ago
  I've never seen an office culture that minded people taking a walk (unless the team was in war room or something). A lot of workers go out to buy lunch anyway. For hourly production workers that have to clock in/out and may only get a fixed 30 lunch break then it is more difficult.
  - heyoni 2y ago
    The problem is no sword fights or basketball courts :/ it also feels strange to randomly do something like a few pushups at the office whereas at home I do it all the time.
  - babyshake 2y ago
    A 30 minute walk around most parts of downtown San Francisco is not exactly the kind of 30 minute walk OP likely has in mind.
exabrial 2y ago
This is also the way you get sleep at night (tire them out so they sleep through the night). It also sets them up for healthy habits as adults.
maxerickson 2y ago
The second meta-analysis specifically separated older kids from younger kids and found that the intervention had less impact on the older kids.
laserbeam 2y ago
“Children” is likely the wrong word here. As humans develop, they change incredibly fast. The needs of a 6 year old are surprisingly different from those of an 8 year old. This study focuses on 14 year olds (on average). This is way past the age of “needing to burn energy like a dog”. Sure, they have more energy than adults, but you’re still likely describing much younger humans.
gosub100 2y ago
And the emotional systems of the brain are some of the last to develop. It's good to teach youth that there are these things called emotions (for the most inept) and they do matter. But don't expect too much from it.
energybored11 2y ago
The "mindfulness" techniques and breathing techniques ultimately come from the Hindu/Buddhist school of thought and is much bigger than the cargo cult way the western society seem to have picked up from them. > Children are full of energy - they need to be let loose and run around. The masters of the original mindfulness techniques would agree.
- BeFlatXIII 2y ago
  That’s why you do yoga asanas prior to meditation.
pawelmurias 2y ago
Yes! We need more of that rather then trying to embrace brutal eastern religions and push secularized supersitions dressed in a layer of pseudoscience

stephc_int13 2y ago

My belief is that societal and technological sophistication is overall extremely stressful for organisms that were prepared for a very different life by evolution. Our neurosis is a byproduct of our success and of the highly complex and competitive nature of our social interactions. Touching grass, spending time with animals, learning to accept and appreciate our animal roots, is what can balance the stress.

Tom3849 2y ago
[flagged]
- hunter-gatherer 2y ago
  Your knee-jerk reaction is perhaps emphasizing OP's point. OP obviously is referring to the spirit of being more in tune with our natural roots and not prescribing "Get a dog, visit a man-made park" as a strict prescription as you seem to be interpreting it.
  - Tom3849 2y ago
    No, I illustrated that for some people "being more in tune with our natural roots" is deeply stressful. And it is simply not realistic advice! I get attacked weekly, and can not even carry peper spray, or tell anything to my attackers (they would turn on me). Last time I got attacked by 6 large dogs while walking on beach, and their owners would not even restraint the. After, they tried to steal my phone for recording the attack. Latter they told police, dogs were "stray" and they are not responsible for them. Despite providing shelter, food, vet and walking them on leash... If I mugged people, trying to steal their food, I would be in jail! Some "true" mythical countryside has even more dogs in large packs. It is outright dangerous to cycle here!
- nordstreem 2y ago
  Get out of your routine and introduce some dissonance. Outside is an endless miasma of geometric and color gradient state change overload for the brain, garbage collects the social objects we’re forced to hallucinate. Sit in one spot too long and it all goes fractal.

harry8 2y ago

Religious studies fails to make kids more religious. Abstinence programs taught in schools fail to increase celibacy. Health programs fail to dent mcdonalds market share. Arithmetic fails to stop people taking on unnecessary and punitive debt. The point being pushing things (good, bad or ugly) in schools often doesn't work out as hoped. Schooling is not a solved problem but it is a very crude tool used badly and often brutally by people of all kinds who wish to improve society by giving kids the tools to... You've heard it all before.

tmaly 2y ago
Sounds like we need to throw some startups at it /s
- brianf0 2y ago
  We should. why /s?
  - Terr_ 2y ago
    I can't give a definitive answer since I'm not the parent poster, however, it makes sense to me: There are various areas in which "disruptors" have promised that their outsider approach would somehow revolutionize the status quo into something better, and either they flopped or it became arguably worse in the long run. A simple example might be how Theranos was going to innovate past stodgy medical companies and provide wonderful new diagnostics to drive down healthcare costs, etc. Or how certain rideshare companies, once they achieved various local -opoly statuses--in ways not entirely aboveboard--are somehow back to a worse value-proposition than the system they displaced.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      All that tells us is that some attempts at improvement fail. Which, while common, doesn't inform us about the whether making attempts is good. Startups give you as many attempts at improving a situation as there are people who can scrape together some capital. Improvements from within is capped at (#Existing Companies x %with functional management) which is a much smaller number of attempts. Improvements by regulation is capped at ... N=1 and whatever the odds are that a good idea dodges regulatory capture, your political opponents, inertia and being too hard to enforce (sub 1 attempt in practice, maybe 2 or 3 pushes in exceptional circumstances). Of the options, startups are the best. The failures are less consequential.

Naijoko 2y ago

wow the whole site is only pushing bullshit science. Its worth to click a bit on the other articles. Seems like an AI generated website.

laserbeam 2y ago
Could be. There’s at least a link to the paper. Unfortunately it’s a preprint, not peer reviewed. I can’t tell at a glance if the science is bs, but I can certainly tell that writing for a general audience before peer review is a shit thing to do and should certainly discount this article.
gosub100 2y ago
The OP hasn't commented in 3 months, and has submitted numerous articles from the same domain. The other mostly come from another domain with an identical UX.

ajkjk 2y ago

I mean yeah. Giving someone new information can change their behavior if they incorporate it. But pushing them to act in a certain way.. Probably not, unless it's coercive, which is bad for other reasons. If you want kids to be mindful, be mindful yourself.

gonzo41 2y ago

Color me shocked that trying to teach a teenager not to think about themselves so much is going to fail. Mindfulness only works when you put the effort in to seek the equanimity it provides. I think it's hard for kids to make being calm and composed a virtue. You kind of have to get there as a consequence of experiencing a lot of chaos. I think 2 hours of sport before all school would do more for most kids. Even if it was just a 2 hour walk outdoors.

seltzered_ 2y ago

Link to the preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qnk2u https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qnk2u One other reference I've seen from a Tristan Harris interview is that mindfulness teaching effects (presumably for younger kids) can get negated by social media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=3034&v=3CdxIATnH_w&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=3034&v=3CdxIATnH_w&feature=y...

thefaux 2y ago
I'm not saying he's wrong, but that is a rather convenient position for him to take.

Buttons840 2y ago

> The aim of these programs is to equip youth with skills to prevent mental disorders and enhance overall well-being. The way I learned mindfulness meditation, you should not expect it to accomplish anything specific. I listened to a course and found the ideas new and helpful, it was so life changing that I went further and studied some Buddhist philosophy, but further studied brought some anxiety and so I stopped. My current attitude is that I got what I could from it, but won't study it further. I don't think mindfulness should be viewed as any better than other life strategies.

asaddhamani 2y ago
I find the Waking Up app the closest to this. Others like headspace feel heavily commercialised, with an aim of improving “productivity”. If anyone is looking for guided meditation, I suggest checking out waking up.
- ekms 2y ago
  I dont think the original series of guided meditations from the headspace founder was aimed at productivity. From what I remember, it's a pretty typical breath- and bodyscan-centered vipassana style. I can't comment on any of the subsequent instructors or lessons though, haven't tried them
- SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
  > Others like headspace feel heavily commercialised The one you pointed to is $130 a year.
  - npinsker 2y ago
    Their point is that Headspace seems to sell meditation a bit more as a means to optimizing one’s life, while Waking Up sells meditation more abstractly, as a means to more fully live one’s life. The app is free (or heavily discounted) for those that can’t pay. Nor do they seem to optimize conversion flows, run ads, or pursue growth as aggressively as Headspace has.
  - 2y ago

throwaway22032 2y ago

As someone who grew up in the 90s, so many things seem to have changed to just cause a ton of anxiety that we didn't have when I was growing up. A typical day for me as a teenager would be to wake up, have breakfast (or maybe not), walk to school, strictly pen and paper work only, hang out with my friends at lunch. We might play Gameboy after school, the same game for weeks on end. If I wanted something to do I had to go outside and play, at home we maybe had books, it's a self limiting form of entertainment. Now it feels like everything is just so much more complicated. The me of today would wake up and stare at his phone for half an hour before even getting to school. It's just massive overstimulation all of the time. Mindfulness, even in adults, I find is a hack to avoid actually doing the things which lead to stress reduction.

sublinear 2y ago
All this overstimulation is driven by marketing. Nothing really changed except the rate of consumption of information. Staying focused is more important than ever. Not enough people know how or care to fight all these nasty attempts to move their locus of control outside themselves. Once you know what you want out of life it's much easier to keep things in control. As the old Simpson's episode said: "just don't look".
gosub100 2y ago
Can you imagine what kind of shit show the first presidential election will be with gen Z candidates? I'm not taking a dig at the generation, but the social media posts that will be unearthed by the opponent's campaign. I predict we'll see would be presidents get sacked at the 11th hour due to things they said on Myspace in 8th grade.
- throwaway22032 2y ago
  This stuff is super unpredictable to me. In the US as far as I can tell the right wing has a "traditional" leader that has sex with prostitutes, and the left wing gets upset if you call a man a man. It's basically random as to whether a completely reasonable opinion will be seen as verboten, or a completely bonkers opinion will be seen as okay, so I mean, who knows?

babyshake 2y ago

I think it's likely that what is happening is the process of mindfulness (noticing your anxiety without judgement, and allowing it to exist and gently float away) is no match for that daily onslaught of culture, largely propagated via social media, that what we must do is focus and obsess on what makes us anxious. And if you don't focus on what makes you anxious, you are a fool at best and an enemy combatant at worst.

ARandomerDude 2y ago

The more you vent, the more stressed you become. The key isn’t learning all these little tricks, it’s learning to persevere. Our society is so weak that the idea of mental toughness is shunned as “toxic masculinity” or whatever but the fact is depression and suicide rates have soared as we’ve gotten away from the idea that toughness is good. Have heroes. Don’t allow yourself to whine. Aim for victory. In the process you’ll discover you’re much happier.

defiamazing 2y ago
[dead]

dilliwal 2y ago

This study is not even peer reviewed, is a pre-print and has low sample size. How do we make all these conclusions so quickly

xandrius 2y ago
It generates more clicks this way. Also people already have answers in their head, so anything that comes up from a study (even a poor one) can spark conversations. Good job in pointing out, I hadn't noticed those important details.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

titanomachy 2y ago

It says it reduces “self-reported mindfulness”. Maybe you have to be at least a little mindful to realize how unmindful you are? Similar to how people who have never studied cognitive bias assume they are unbiased.

haswell 2y ago
This was the first thing that came to mind. After being a skeptic and avoiding it for years, I decided to do a mindfulness/meditation experiment, and indeed, one of the first things I started to realize was just how much my brain would go down rabbit holes of discursive thought. Becoming more mindful absolutely made me feel like I was less mindful, simply because I was actually noticing. I need to dig deeper into the study to see if/how they accounted for this, but it seems like it'd be a major factor in a self-reporting situation.

tasuki 2y ago

Maybe the problem is conflating mindfulness and mental wellbeing a little bit?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

liorsbg 2y ago

Note that this is self-reported mindfulness. I don't find it farfetched that someone who's been taught mindfulness would self-report lower even though objectively they may have a higher degree of mindfulness.

wes-k 2y ago
This has been documented already. As you begin mindfulness practices you become aware of your thoughts. You then think “gosh, I didn’t have all these thoughts before” when really you did, you just weren’t aware of them. I believe studies on this are discussed in Sam Harris’s book “Waking Up”.

Animats 2y ago

This is named an "intervention", but the article makes it clear it was training applied to everyone in some school. This is apparently called a "universal mindfulness intervention", which seems an oxymoron, but whatever. Using the same psychological intervention on everyone seems misguided, if not harmful.

energybored11 2y ago

I have a feeling this study can be replicated with literally anything that uses "school" as an intervention vehicle except in cases where it is actually harmful for them (such as undergoing gender change surgeries).

jane441 2y ago

[dead]

EricE 2y ago

Obsessing about mental health harms mental health? Who could have guessed!

lurking15 2y ago

This has more to do with anything tangentially related to or funded by central govt (like public education) failing to accomplish stated goals, rather than mindfulness being bad.