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Spirituality

Don’t Buy into the Backlash — the Science on Meditation Is Clear

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To everything there is a season. And to every cultural trend there is a backlash. And now the backlash has come for meditation. Once confined to the lifestyle or health pages, you’re now as likely to read about meditation in the business, sports or entertainment news. And just last week, there was news that the app Calm hit a valuation of $250 million, amid what TechCrunch called “an explosion of interest in Mindfulness apps.” So it was no real surprise when we saw the New York Times opinion piece last week entitled “Hey Boss, You Don’t Want Your Employees to Meditate.”

But the problem is that meditation isn’t just the latest fad to be fed into the cultural what’s-in-what’s-out machine. It’s a matter of public health. And the problem with this piece is — well, actually, there are many!

The central claim by the authors, Kathleen D. Vohs, professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, and Andrew C. Hafenbrack, assistant professor at the Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics, is that, based on their study, meditation diminishes motivation and thus “might seem counterproductive in a workplace setting.”

But getting to that conclusion, and justifying the backlash headline, required the authors to define virtually all the terms of the study, and in fact the study itself, as narrowly as possible. “A central technique of mindfulness meditation,” the authors assert, “is to accept things as they are.” In fact, what mindfulness does is empower you not to react emotionally, unthinkingly, or impulsively to things as they are. Acceptance does not mean resignation. What it means is summed up perfectly in the serenity prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” And as Mark Williams, psychology professor at Oxford, wrote, “mindfulness cultivates our ability to do things knowing that we’re doing them.”

Then the authors assert that motivation “implies some degree of discontentment with the present, which seems at odds with a psychological exercise that instills equanimity and a sense of calm.” But people are motivated all the time by more than discontentment — by love, by gratitude, by patriotism, by dreams of new products or new planets. With both mindfulness and motivation defined so narrowly, it’s not much of a stretch for the authors to set up a study that finds, as they write, “tension” between the two.

One of the biggest problems with the far reaching conclusions is the scope of the study itself. To test the effects of meditation, the authors had participants listen to a single 8 or 15-minute mindfulness meditation recording online. We do not know if people were lying down or washing dishes as they were listening. Seriously? That’s not nearly enough time to justify such sweeping conclusions. The benefits of meditation are much more obvious after several weeks of practice. That’s why so many of the studies that have proven those benefits are based on programs of eight weeks or even longer.

Read the complete report.

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