Hey Wisecrack, Jared here.
Have you ever had a really bad day, gone home and eaten an entire pizza and 2 tubs of ice
cream? Has the pressure of needing to pay bills left you in the fetal position curled
up with your dog replaying Untitled Goose Game for the ninth time?. We’ve all experienced
it at some point: being exhausted, anxious...stressed.
America is stressed out. According to the American Psychological Association, 77% of
people living in the U.S. regularly experience physical symptoms of stress. And if you’ve
experienced the turmoil of being unable to sleep at night because of the thoughts racing
through your head, there’s a good chance someone’s recommended you fix it by using
an approach called mindfulness.
At its most basic level, mindfulness is just concentration training- achieving a calm mental
state by focusing on the present moment, instead of fixating on the past or worrying about
the future. The practice, touted by everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Paul McCartney has turned
into a $4 billion industry. It’s the subject of numerous self help books and online courses,
and has even made its way into beauty products, wellness cruises and spawned countless apps.
But is this cure-all for stress too good to be true? While practicing mindfulness definitely
has benefits, critics think it also might be turning us into self-absorbed zombies.
Focusing on our breathing might make us feel better, but some think the way we’re going
about it might be making the world at large a little worse. And I’m not just talking
about this.
So take a deep breath, focus on the sound of my voice, and welcome to this Wisecrack
edition on mindfulness- Is it Deep or Dumb?
-- But before we get into it, I wanna give a
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in on the fun and download the game today. Click the link in the description and you’ll
get 50,000 silver and a free epic champion as part of the new player program. And now,
back to the show.
Mindfulness isn’t new, in fact, it’s very old. The modern mindfulness movement credits
an essential spiritual practice in buddhism called sati which translates roughly to, well,
mindfulness. The idea behind sati is to pay attention to sensory experiences in order
to prevent unproductive thoughts and emotions from surfacing. Having correct sati or mindfulness
is the seventh element of the noble eightfold path, that ultimately helps one achieve nirvana,
transcendental bliss and complete freedom from suffering -- the spiritual goal of buddhism.
It’s not to be confused with the hindu practice of Sati, where a widow sacrifices herself
by sitting on her dead husband’s funeral pyre.
Anyway, the meditative techniques used to achieve sati are very similar to the ones
therapists and self-help gurus teach stressed out millenials and burnt out executives, minus
the ethical and moral principles that accompany buddhism.
So how did we get from this to this? Even though Buddhism’s been around for a long
time, it’s influence on western medicine is a bit more recent.
While we might take for granted the idea that stress is killing us all, it’s actually
a fairly recent development in the medical world. Before World War II, psychological
stress wasn’t really spoken about in the same way it is today, but it did exist. In
the 1800s, with the rise of industrial expansion and urbanization, doctors first started reporting
cases of ‘nervousness’. In 1869, New York neurologist George M. Beard diagnosed a condition
called ‘neurasthenia’, where patients suffered from fatigue, headaches, insomnia,
depression and anxiety. By the turn of the century, neurasthenia was a household term…
and people bragged about it like it was a badge of honor. Everyone from Teddy Roosevelt
to Jane Adams had a diagnosis. The disorder was proof you were a productive american,
so in some deranged ways, it made people look good. Those headaches and heart palpitations
just meant you were working too darn hard!
Of course, in the 19th century men still couldn’t show weakness, so treating their neurasthenia
usually involved ‘manly’ activities like working on cattle ranches or going on wilderness
retreats. Women, on the other hand, were told to stay in bed for weeks at a time and denied
access to any form of entertainment, or even their families and children. Yikes.
Eventually, neurasthenia fell out of vogue, only to be replaced by something much more
vague-- stress.
The modern concept of stress started in 1936 with endocrinologist Hans Selye torturing
lab rats on a canadian rooftop. Selye would leave them out in the freezing cold, make
them starve or exercise a lot, and then dissect them to see how it affected their insides.
He found that all his various tortures actually caused the same physical effects. Their adrenal
glands were different, they had stomach ulcers, and they were more susceptible to stroke and
heart attack.
Even armed this information, Selye struggled to define stress for his entire career, at
one point calling it the:
and later redefined it as:
Even though he couldn’t really explain it, he spent his life promoting the idea that
what was happening in his rats was happening in people too. He became a high-profile sensation,
authoring 39 books promoting the concept of stress and how dangerous it was.
By the 1950s, stress was a buzzword, and scientists and physicians were trying to figure out its
health risks. That’s when Selye’s work caught the attention of the tobacco industry.
Lobbyists began to solicit Selye and other leading stress scientists to start researching
on their behalf, linking things like heart disease to stress caused from modern life,
instead of say, cigarettes. With a pocket full of cash, Selye argued that tobacco was
a great form of stress relief, and therefore good for you.
Around that time, two American cardiologists, Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman, whose research
was also bankrolled by the tobacco industry, came up with the idea of the Type A personality--
people who were Type A subjected themselves to more stress and pressure than other personality
types, and were therefore more susceptible to disease. They published a study claiming
the risk of heart disease was twice as high for men with Type A personalities than other
men. This theory has been heavily criticized for its narrow parameters and oversimplification
of human behavior, but at the time, it made a splash in popular psychology.
By the 1970s, psychiatrists and psychologists stopped focusing as much on the harmful side
effects of stress, and instead started trying to figure out how to make the stress go away.
One of them was a PhD student at MIT, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who was introduced to meditation
by a zen missionary who came to speak at his school. Kabat-Zinn went on to study meditation
and practice yoga, and in 1979 he founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University
of Massachusetts Medical School, where he implemented an eight week program called ‘Mindfulness-Based
Stress Reduction’ - MBSR for short.
After publishing a few books and being featured in a PBS special, MBSR started to become very,
very popular.
It’s important to note that part of the reason mindfulness became so popular is that
it works. Numerous studies have shown that mindfulness has positive effects on emotional
and behavioral stress and even pain management-- focusing on your breathing can lower your
heart rate, blood pressure, and muscle tension. Put simply, practicing mindfulness can calm
you down and make you less anxious.. While the science is still iffy, these seem like
promising benefits. So, what’s the problem?
--
As I explained earlier, the ancient Buddhist tradition of mindfulness isn’t just about
improving concentration, it’s about awakening and liberating people from greed and delusion.
But critics say its trendy counterpart seems to be doing the opposite-- mindfulness’
greatest benefit might be for people’s bank accounts. A search for ‘mindfulness’ on
Amazon turns up over 40,000 book results alone. So it’s not surprising that some critics
are calling the secular practice McMindfulness.
According to the late Psychologist Jeremy Safran, McMindfulness is “the marketing
of mindfulness practice as a commodity that is sold like any other commodity in our brand
culture, a brand that promises to deliver … [it is] the marketing of a constructed
dream; an idealized lifestyle; an identity makeover.” No longer a technique linked
to its buddhist origins, mindfulness is being packaged and sold as something you can buy
to cure your burnout, and make you happier and more productive. And it goes way beyond
the therapist’s office.
Silicon Valley has become a leader in this space, creating mindfulness apps and selling
them as ‘brain hacks’. The company headspace makes a highly successful subscription based
meditation app, and is valued at 250 million dollars. And there are plenty of others competing
for your downloads-- calm, aura, breethe, buddhify, one’s even called ‘the mindfulness
app’. These apps all promise to help you find balance in your life through guided meditations
and breathing exercises. Some even boast celebrity voiceover talent. For $12.99 a month, Matthew
McConaughey will help you fall asleep.
In his book, McMindfulness, Ronald Purser says this commodified form of mindfulness
is a problem because it’s too pragmatic. In an effort to make it more compatible with
modern science, and more consumable for the masses, mindfulness has been stripped of all
it’s buddhist context, and therefore stripped of its ethics. Much like a McDonald’s Big
Mac, mindfulness has been scaled and controlled, creating a global, branded product that is
easy to sell over and over again. To anyone.
Purser writes that according to the earliest recorded teachings of the Buddha, even a person
committing premeditated murder can be exercising mindfulness-- it’s just wrong mindfulness.
Buddhists differentiate between right and wrong mindfulness samma sati and miccha sati.
Practicing right mindfulness means having wholesome intentions and positive mental qualities
that consider the well-being of others as well as oneself. So an assassin focusing on
his breathing in order to beso he’s less nervous when it’s time to commit a murder
probably shouldn’t be bunched in with the kind of mindfulness praciced by the Dalai
Lama. And if this sounds like a stretch, Purser notes that even Heinrich Himmler took his
elite SS officers on a meditation retreat to a medieval castle.
An assassin or Nazis using a meditation app might be an extreme case, but it shows us
that practices to help you keep calm may not always be in service of the right thing. And
this gets us to one of the biggest criticisms leveled at consumer mindfulness- it places
the task of managing anxiety on individuals, instead of on society or organizations as
a whole. Purser says that it makes us ‘better-adjusted cogs’, which is great for large corporations,
and not so great for everyone else.
One of the most common places to find mindfulness for sale besides the app store is in the workplace.
Consultants abound, pushing mindfulness training programs that can make dysfunctional companies
more compassionate, kinder workplaces. But the real sell to big companies is the claim
that mindfulness programs will improve work efficiency and reduce turnover. Sign your
employees up, because happy workers are more efficient workers, and they won’t blame
the company because they’re too busy working on themselves. In an article, urser, along
with Zen teacher David Loy write, [McMindfulness]:
Consider a program developed at Google called “Search Inside Yourself”. Chad-Meng Ten,
who helped develop the program and is now a techy-mindfulness-guru, calls it mindfulness
based emotional intelligence training. The program, which calls itself transformative
promises to reduce stress, improve focus, raise peak performance, and improve personal
relationships. You can sign up for it in 30 countries and 100 cities around the world.
According to Purser, the way mindfulness is employed in programs like search inside yourself
seems awfully similar to ones popular in 1950s and 60s “human relations” and sensitivity-training
movements. Those training programs were largely discredited-- criticized for manipulating
counseling techniques like active listening. Employees were made to feel that their concerns
were heard, but bad workplace conditions stayed the same. The tactics they used came to be
referred to as cow psychology, because content and docile cows give more milk.
In other words, mindfully focusing on the present means NOT thinking about the past
and future… or your terrible boss and long hours. According to historian Russell Jacoby,
this popular form of forgetting causes something called ‘social amnesia’. When you’re
in the here and now, you can forget everything else. So while you are being mindful of your
experience your blood pressure might go down, but you’re not thinking about the reasons
why your blood pressure was up in the first place.
The obsessive focus on individual wellness has become a moral imperative, and I don’t
just mean taking lots of selfies cuddling with your cat and cutting toxic people out
of your life, although that might be your form of hashtag self care. Kabat-Zinn and
other mindfulness gurus argue that this makes everyone more compassionate, and that if everyone
practiced mindfulness the world would be better. Kabat-Zinn’s current work discusses efforts
to inject mindfulness into global politics, helping people be more conscious and aware
of the social and political issues that plague their neighbors. But the way mindfulness is
practiced these days seems to suggest the opposite. Instead of becoming mindfully aware
about the world’s issues and how to solve them, mindfulness conveniently shifts the
burden of making yourself feel better onto you, so that managing stress is your problem,
not the world’s. It’s probably not an accident that Google’s program was called
‘search inside yourself’, not ‘search inside your company’s shortcomings’.
Sure, you can make yourself feel better by focusing on your breathing, but that won’t
stop the amazon from being on fire. It won’t make wars go away, and it won’t stop your
boss from being an asshole. Mindfulness programs are a great way to keep workers focused on
the therapeutic benefits of doing a ten minute body scan, so they forget to unionize. Quite
literally, mindfulness has people thinking at best about themselves, and most of the
time, about nothing at all.
--
The argument that mindfulness has been co-opted by large corporations to placate their workers
and turn them into self-absorbed zombies who buy self-help books is pretty convincing.
But are mindfulness critics being too harsh?
If the main criticism of mindfulness is that its politically and socially flawed-- that
it breeds inaction, and leads to acceptance of the status quo, is there a way to practice
mindfulness that could do the opposite?
After all, we live in a society built on companies trying to compete for your attention 24/7.
In such a world, is mindfulness not one of the few ways where we can push away the constant
advertising and institutionalized envy and maintain some semblance of agency over our
own psyches? And it’s for that reason that we can’t really confidently land on whether
Mindfulness is deep or dumb. Because it works. What it works in service of is the question.
Perhaps there’s a balance-- a way for stressed out millennials to center themselves and get
more sleep so that they have the energy to tear down power structures and make their
student loan payments. If people can become mindfully aware of the world beyond themselves,
maybe that would benefit the world at large, and not just big companies, I don’t know.
So what do you think? Do the benefits of practicing mindfulness outweigh the negatives? Do we
need to attach a code of ethics to our meditation apps? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Thanks to all our patrons for supporting the channel and our podcasts. Don’t forget to
subscribe and we’ll catch you next time. Peace.