Insane NY Times Article on 'Mindfulness' - Prepare To Giggle

[MiracleMan]

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/06/14/opinion/sunday/meditation-productivity-work-mindfulness.html

Corporate authoritarianism at it's finest.  This is actual fake news.  Text book example of how medicine, science, and education misunderstands and then misrepresents meditation, mindfulness, spirituality.  

 

[Erlend K]

Journalists have a tendency to sensationalize research findings and draw overly grandiose claims based on limited research. They don't have much choice tho. If they want to compete in the attention economy, they are forced to write sharable articles.

As both a meditator and a scientificaly minded person, research like this tends to cause some cognitive dissonanse for me. When I read it my instinct is to dismiss it as silly or flawed. But, being aware of my own bias I try to stay open minded. I would gladely have read the paper refered to, if it wasn't behind a paywall.

It's conclusions are (copy-pasted from the cited paper):

•State mindfulness impaired motivation to complete cognitive and performance tasks.

•State mindfulness had no overall effect (good or bad) for performance on same tasks.

•Weakened future focus and arousal serially mediated demotivating effect.

•Mindfulness enabled people to detach from stressors, which improved task focus.

•Detachment and task focus help explain why mindfulness does not alter performance.