Transcription
We need to talk about mindfulness.
Our lives are filled with distractions, which is probably why there's a growing movement in America to train people to get around the stresses of daily life. It's a practice called mindfulness.
The practice of mindfulness.
Mindfulness.
Mindfulness.
Mindfulness.
The instructors also make classroom visits teaching mindfulness activities from meditation to movement. Americans alone spend $1 billion dollar on mindfulness related books, apps, and retreats every single year with global spending on alternative health care including things like acupuncture, yoga, and meditation projected to hit $300 billion over the next calendar year and $1.4 trillion by 2033. It is big business.
But despite being the keystone of a trillion dollar enterprise, most people are pretty cool with the mindfulness industry, and reasonably so. We've all seen the articles claiming the scientific benefits of it. Many therapists have welcomed the practice with open arms. And in a world of burnout, mental health crisis, and where the disconnect between modern life and our evolutionary psychology drives stress levels through the roof, you have to assume that something is better than nothing, right?
I'm not so sure. When you dive deeper into the financial, scientific, and cultural foundations of the mindfulness industry, things start to get real sticky real fast. Original research studies were often small, featured no control groups, and were heavily criticized for leaning too much into the placebo effect. And as time went on, systemic reviews and metaanalyses only showed mindfulness to be as effective at controlling stress as pretty much any other exercise where you asked people to close their eyes and just breathe for a while. So, it does something sometimes, just not billions of dollars worth of something. at least not for us as the consumer. More on that later.
Despite how widely mindfulness is now being used in therapy, we're starting to see recorded instances of it causing anxiety spikes, mania episodes, and trauma resurfacing in people with PTSD. But the issues go well beyond therapy. Schools have been caught funneling millions of taxpayer dollars into mental health programs that turn out to either be straight up fraudulent or run by spiritualist grifters who have no real medical or research qualifications at all. Blurring the line between what counts as religion, what counts as medicine, and what public institutions can or should be spending taxpayer money on. And in corporate America, it's becoming clear that many HR departments are only adopting mindfulness programs as a lowcost solution to make their workers more complacent about abusive working conditions.
Not only that, but there are real cultural concerns with how the mindfulness industry misrepresents the religious beliefs of billions of people living in Asia in order to manipulate desperate and overworked white people who don't know any better about what they're being sold. Because the dirty truth is that this half science, half spirituality, new age religion that you think is thousands of years old was largely invented in modern-day Massachusetts and California, not ancient India or Japan.
And finally, as a man and former medical first responder, I am deeply concerned with how this obsession with new age ideology in therapy is making people question whether or not clinical psychology is even a legitimate field to begin with. Because if someone goes into therapy for medical reasons only to be met with mantra repetition, yogic wisdom, and breathing exercises, then a lot of people are going to think that they are getting scammed. especially the veterans, first responders, and bluecollar men who need mental health services the most in this country.
So, we need to talk about mindfulness, about where it comes from, how it became so widely adopted, what the actual research says, and how it compares to cheaper alternatives caught up in way less baggage, so that you can decide for yourself if mindfulness is all it's cracked up to be or if it's the world's most profitable scam.
In order to understand mindfulness, we need to quickly go back to 500 BC. For six centuries prior, the northern Indian subcontinent was dominated by a series of practices that modern scholars call the historical vadic religion, which was derived from a set of Sanskrit scriptures called the vadas, which contained rules for priests, sacrificial practices for the gods and philosophy regarding death and life. By the time we hit 500 BC, however, the traditional Vadic institutions started to break down and religious beliefs in this region started to move away from sacrifices to the gods and instead towards things like arty worship, vegetarianism, temples, the cycle of reincarnation and trying to end that cycle via enlightenment and thus religious movements like Janism, modern Hinduism and Buddhism were born.
Also, like, please level with me as I try to summarize centuries worth of complex religious history and ideas in just a few minutes. I was a dork who joined a club in college to translate portions of the Bavata Piranha into English. You probably aren't. So, I will do my best to summarize this quickly while still paying respect to the fact that these are modern religions that people still believe in.
Anyway, Buddhism in particular latched on to the idea that samsara, which is the cycle of reincarnation, could be ended by achieving nirvana, which was done by adhering to the eight-fold noble path. Namely, having the right view, the right resolve, the right speech, the right conduct, the right livelihood, the right effort, the right awareness, and the right mindfulness. The term we translate as mindfulness in English is sati in Sanskrit. And sati is the practice of trying to stay aware of your body, thoughts, and surroundings so that you can see things as they really are without getting swept up in emotions and hopefully without allowing bad habits, bias or cravings to filter how you understand the world around you.
Now, despite being part of the eight-fold noble path, meditation was not particularly important in Terravada Buddhism for centuries after it spread into Southeast Asia. Because of history reasons, Buddhism became very centered around outward action. So like becoming a monk or giving money to monasteries is a way of showing your devotion to Buddhist practices. And in fact, you had many people start to believe that attaining Nirvana wasn't even possible in this lifetime anymore until the prophesied arrival of Matria, the future Buddha. So because of that belief, it almost seemed silly to focus on things like meditation in this lifetime, whereas supporting an overall Buddhist society in preparation for the arrival of the future Buddha just kind of made more sense. Almost sounds like a certain country, I know, but then everything changed when Viposa attacked.
In 1754, a Burmese monk named Mdayi was super displeased with the public's dismissive attitude towards the eight-fold noble path at the time. So, he wrote a series of vaposa manuals that people credit with reigniting the public's interest in meditation and once again taking accountability for trying to attain enlightenment in this lifetime. The vaposa movement ended up becoming a very uniquely Southeast Asian form of Buddhism and really became a rallying cry against the western colonialism that impacted that region throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Up until that point, Buddhism was mostly a thing for monks and the royal family. But as western colonial powers and Christian missionaries started to invade these regions, Buddhism was seen as a way of fighting back against the religious and political destruction of their people.
Westerners have always had this bad habit of not taking other people's beliefs seriously if it's not based off of a book. And so, Southeast Asians realized that focusing on the religious scripture and the mindfulness-based meditation side of their religion made them look super rational and academic about their religion to the outside world. And since meditation is such a visually peaceful practice, it flipped the typical narratives around colonization and made Westerners look like the violent, uneducated barbarians in these wars. I should throw out that Buddhism is not an inherently peaceful religion. Buddhist violence was and very much still is a thing, especially in this part of the world where Buddhism became associated with nationalism and Buddhists have actively persecuted Muslims and Tamil Hindus for like the past century if not longer. But at least in regard to the British invasions, victims of colonialism realized that focusing on the peaceful elements of their religion made the British look really, really bad for invading them.
And the vaposa movement didn't just stop at preserving the dignity of Southeast Asian peoples. In what was arguably the biggest UNO reverse card in history, Burmese monks started intentionally training Americans in terraada Buddhism to try to spread their own religious ideas to the west. Teachers like Mahasi Syada and SN Goinka took on thousands of Western students and trained them in a form of Buddhism that was rational, did not require any formal conversion, and positioned itself as being rooted in science and clinical psychology as opposed to just spiritual tradition. It treated Buddhist religious practice as something that was universally available to everyone and that could stand up to the scrutiny of science, which students like Jack Kornfield then took back to America, starting things like the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts alongside Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Saltsburg.
Okay, so this is the part of the video where if I wanted to explain how mindfulness ties into broader new age spirituality and how it ties into things like the theosophical society and the Beatles and Gaudyishnavism and whatnot, we would be here for hours. I don't want to rattle off the names of 500 meditation centers founded by 500 different white dudes in Massachusetts, California, and Colorado. So, I am not going to do that. However, I am going to explain the origins of corporate mindfulness as we know it today and how what was once an explicitly religious practice within Buddhism and other Vadic religions ended up becoming an obsession of American teachers, therapists, and business bros alike. a phenomenon that largely owes its existence to Alan Watts, the human potential movement and division 32 of the American Psychological Association.
In the 1950s, a British American writer named Alan Watts published several books on Buddhism, Dowoism, and how Eastern philosophy could be blended with Western philosophy and Christian ideas. Now, Alan Watts was a controversial figure to say the least. He was widely known as both a womanizer and a heavy substance abuser. But despite that, Watts managed to gain a significant cult following while publishing books on Eastern religion and working for a radio station in the Bay Area. And his 1957 book, The Way of Zen, ended up becoming one of the first best-selling books on Buddhism in the English language. So despite a lot of people hating Alan Watts as a person, they loved what he wrote. And one of the main arguments of Watts's writings was that psychotherapy should be the tool used to fix the mental health problems of Western people. A stance that was and still is pretty common amongst new age thinkers.
One such example being Carl Jung, a student of Sigman Freud, who played a major role in modernizing Freud's original ideas of how therapy should work, and who was himself also obsessed with things like astrology and mysticism, and whose attempts to blend things like astrology and psychotherapy together would become the basis of many of the modern personality assessments that we have today. most notably the MyersBriggs Type Indicator, aka the 16 personalities, which in and of itself is now a multi-billion dollar industry of programs that are beloved by some people and absolutely hated by others who see it as nothing more than a pseudocientific corporate scam. A topic that I already did a whole other 40-minute video on.
So, bringing it back to mindfulness, in 1962, two Stanford graduates named Michael Murphy and Dick Price founded the Eselin Institute near Monterey, California, which would end up becoming the de facto headquarters of the human potential movement, which combines humanistic psychology and Eastern philosophy to encourage personal development through meditation and self-awareness and would play a massive role in carrying mindfulness and self-actual ualization thinking into management consulting in the 80s and '9s. See, the Eselin Institute basically functioned and still functions to this day as both a private resort for individuals and as a philosophical retreat location for groups. So, if you want to go get a $5,000 massage or spend $8,500 to listen to someone talk about Carl Jung and psychedelics, then this is the place for you.
Now, understandably, a lot of modern criticisms of the Eselin Institute are about how expensive it is, and there are a seemingly endless amount of negative reviews from the past few years of people who see it as nothing more than just a performative new age facility for rich people. Now, to be fair, I grew up in Nevada, so a place for rich people to be performative about their new age spirituality is just the impression that I've had of Northern California as a whole my entire life. So, I can't really blame the Eelin Institute for being a product of its environment because truth be told, back in the 20th century, it really was the place where East meets West in America and was where an insane amount of authors, philosophers, and influential business people traced their ideas back to after attending retreats there.
Now, that doesn't mean things were all hunky dory in the 1960s either. You have plenty of investigative journalists who claim that the Eselin Institute was also very much just a place for woo woo people to get together to take drugs and have casual sex in the '60s. But regardless of what the truth is, you cannot deny the influence that the institute had on education, therapy, and business here in America. And just because an ideological movement has bad people who are drawn to it doesn't mean that the philosophy itself is inherently a scam. In fact, in 1971, the American Psychological Association formally institutionalized humanistic psychology as division 32 of the APA and was what allowed things like mindfulness-based stress reduction to have a place in scientific discussions.
Now, this is where we need to start asking ourselves some very serious questions about what counts as religion, what counts as science, and what public institutions like schools and government agencies should or shouldn't be spending money on. I'm going to be very transparent and honest here. On a professional level, I do not like things like astrology-based personality assessments, mindfulness exercises with Buddhist sutra readings, anthroposophy based learning, or any other spiritualist practice having a place in America's schools. I personally see that as the state sponsoring a religion, even if they don't realize it. And I have seen firsthand how these types of ideologies lead to a bunch of other bad things like anti-intellectualism, Atlantis conspiracy theories, white supremacy groups, retreats full of sexual predators, and everything else under the sun.
And to be completely honest and transparent, I have had some bad experiences with this stuff. Personally, I've had HR giries force me to read Buddhist scriptures in work meetings at public universities under the guise of mental health workshops. I once got informally written up by a supervisor after I tried to claim that I shouldn't have to teach MyersBriggs anymore in my own university class because I felt that doing so was academically dishonest. I've been to therapy sessions where the therapist just straight up disregarded my feelings and experiences as a man because it didn't align with their new age ideas about how people should think about gender and trauma.
And I've also been someone who has radically changed my own opinions in my adult life. Like for example, when I was 18 years old, I became a vegetarian after reading the Bavad Gita. And then at 23, I rationally chose to abandon vegetarianism. One, because I realized just how important things like hunting are for ecological regulation and conservation funding, but also because of just how bad for the environment things like plastic clothing alternatives are. So, while I do understand that it's like super uncool to be the guy antagonizing meditation because it's ultimately not really causing people a lot of harm, I am doing this from a place of love and personal experience as someone who has drank the new age Kool-Aid myself. And because at the end of the day, I feel like someone has to be critical of this industry because it often feels like nobody is willing to.
I distinctly remember listening to one of Tim Ferrris's podcasts back in 2014 and he said that something like 80% of all the millionaires that he interviewed credited meditation is one of the reasons for their success. And while I truly genuinely believe that everyone has the right to practice or believe whatever they want, #first amendments, I worry that it's a dangerous slippery slope when you have highly influential people who credit their woowoo side for their success when in reality it was decades of stress, hard work, and sleep deprivation that enabled most of those people to become millionaires. Because the truth is that the path to financial success is often not a very healthy and holistic one. And so I worry that this whole narrative of, "Oh, I'm a millionaire because I meditate," is really doing nothing more than pacifying people who live in poverty, who are listening to these people because they want solutions on how to attain financial success and therefore create a better life for themselves. So, it's my belief that many of these so-called professional development workshops that exist today are making billions of dollars from abusing the fact that Americans who live in poverty are desperate and willing to try just about anything so long as they don't know where it actually comes from.
In fact, one of my most popular videos was about how things like the seven habits, love languages, and the types of working genius were written by religious leaders who effectively just repackaged their own sermons and religious opinions with words like synergy and then sold it to the general public as business advice. And so, people reading that assumed that what they were getting was advice coming from scientific or economic research. But in reality, all they were getting was the author's theological opinions without academia really backing them up.
So, let's dive into the academia and really see what the research has to say about mindfulness. Now, before I get into it, I do have to give the disclaimer that I'm not a psychologist and I do not have a PhD. I have however created college courses, reviewed research publications, approved college curriculums, and facilitated millions of dollars worth of grants in academia, albeit in relation to job market economics. So, while I am no expert in this space, I do have enough knowledge and experience to know when I'm being bullied by what's written on a sheet of paper. And that's kind of the impression that I get with mindfulness research.
The first two foundational studies on mindfulness for clinical use were conducted by John Katzen. First in 1982 and then again in 1985 which were really focused on using mindfulness as a way of mentally dealing with living with chronic pain. And then this research made a jump into depression treatments back in 2000 with this paper on using mindfulness-based cognitive therapy to prevent major depressive episodes. Reading these papers, one thing that jumped out to me was just how limited their control groups and sample sizes were. In the Teasdale study, 100% of participants were white, 75% of them were female, and literally every single person they studied was already taking anti-depressant medication. So, to me, it's silly that you would even call this a valid study on using mindfulness to deal with major depressive episodes when you're pretty much only surveying white women who are already on anti-depressant meds. And it doesn't surprise me then that recent studies start to show things like mania episodes and trauma resurfacing in sessions where you apply the same framework onto men who are not taking medication and are working in traumatizing careers.
But again, I am not an expert on this stuff. So, what do the experts have to say? Well, you have this systemic review of mindfulness studies back in 2014 that did find them to have a small to moderate benefit for people with anxiety, but ultimately concluded that studies into mindfulness were weak and insufficient due to a lack of active controls. You have this metaanalysis of mindfulness-based interventions for psychiatric disorders back in 2017 that concluded mindfulness therapies were basically better than doing nothing but were not more statistically meaningful than other interventions that exist. And then you had this metaanalysis of mindfulness programs in 2021 that was unable to show that mindfulness specifically was superior to any other mental health practice where you just had people close their eyes and shut up for a while. So I personally think that the most honest conclusion you can draw from this is that while mindfulness is not an outright sham, it's not really doing that much either. And so while I understand why people like this professor at McGill say that participating in mindfulness is better than doing nothing in terms of your mental health, it does make me wonder why are they pushing mindfulness specifically so hard at schools and at businesses.
I am going to throw corporate America one single bone before I get into criticisms of what people like Ronald Perer have called McMindfulness in the United States. The American health care system sucks. On average, employer sponsored family insurance plans cost $25,572 a year. And even after you spend a quarter of six figures on your employees health insurance, the insurance company still fights tooth and nail to deny them as much coverage as possible, leaving American workers less physically and mentally healthy every single year. Something I also did an entire video about. From the perspective of business owners, out of shape and depressed workers are not exactly good for productivity. So including things like summer meditation retreats in your HR protocol and challenging your workers to take 10,000 steps a day is a way of fighting back against the healthcare nightmare of the United States and is an overall investment in your company's future. Because despite what a lot of people may think, companies are not people. People are people. And if your people are too tired and sad to work, then you are eventually going to run out of money.
But that's enough glazing corporate America. Because let's be real, business owners in the US aren't exactly famous for doing things out of the goodness of their hearts and the well-being of their people. If they cared about their workers, then wages would have kept up with productivity, and we wouldn't have crises around things like housing and student loans today. But alas, we do. So, why are companies really pushing mindfulness? At its core, mindfulness offers businesses a way to push the burden of stress management back onto their workers. Instead of saying, "We're overworking our people," they get to go to employees and say, "Hey, you seem stressed. You should try meditating." And mindfulness programs, even when they're ungodly expensive, are still technically cheaper than doing things like fixing pay scales, hiring more staff, or changing management structures. So, companies are still more inclined to try mental health services as a first line of defense if that means they can get away with not paying to fix the underlying issues.
I actually experienced this somewhat recently. Back in September, I quit my job at a university career center because I was a victim of significant wage compression for 4 and 1/2 years. Starting out, I was paid $20,000 a year less than my colleagues who had the exact same education and work duties as myself. And at the time, I didn't think much of it because there was a gap in our experience. But as the years went on, I was constantly told no every single time I tried to negotiate for an equitable raise. And to rub salt in the wound, back in the summer, they even started to pay new hires more money than I was making. If I had stuck around for another year, I would have lost out on $100,000 worth of salary relative to my co-workers who had started a few years before me. So, I gave them one final ultimatum in September. Give me an equitable raise or I quit. You'll have to find someone new to manage my case load of 2,000 students. You'll have to find someone new to teach my class of 80 students mid semester, and you'll have to find someone new to secure hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of careerfare revenue via employer engagement. But instead of negotiating with me, I was informally referred to my university's mental health services and treated like a disgruntled employee despite having no history of problems at my job and despite exceeding expectations on every single one of my performance reviews. So, I quit. And in the wake of my quitting, I received dozens of DMs of support from students, faculty, and other stakeholders at the university who were incredibly angry to see me leave over something as trivial as a 20k raise after half a decade of service. I'm fairly confident that my quitting cost them far more money than it would have cost to keep me at my job, which unfortunately is the closest thing that I can get to justice after years of being taken advantage of financially.
And the only reason I'm saying all of this is because my situation is far from unique. Wages continue to fall behind inflation. And economists estimate that it now costs three times as much money to attain the same standard of living as it cost back in the '90s. And since companies aren't exactly keen on tripling their employees salaries in order to guarantee them a consistent standard of living, they latch on to things like mental health programming as a way to deflect the blame away from themselves and onto their workers. On top of the fact that having mindfulness programs is a really effective marketing ploy to make your company come across like you are progressive and humanistic.
But what about schools? I know this is a whole can of worms, but generally speaking, schools don't have profit incentives and they are really there to support the foundations of society via education. So why are they pushing mindfulness? Well, unfortunately, it's not that different from the reasons why businesses are doing it. Mindfulness in schools is a cost-effective way to pretend like you're regulating students behavior, anxiety issues, and disciplinary needs. So, just like corporations, schools use mindfulness to transfer the responsibility of well-being away from themselves and on to students and can then argue that because they have these quote unquote robust mental health resources that they don't have to hire more teachers, special ed professionals, and support staff. And unfortunately, the poetic justice that we're seeing from the ramifications of this is hardly satisfying either. Arizona alone saw more than 1,000 teachers quit their jobs this year over pay issues, student behavior, and poor working conditions. And so, even though the shoe is dropping on neglecting worker conditions and compensation, it's still not a fun reckoning to watch because those are real children being negatively impacted by teachers mass resigning. But I digress.
Another big reason why school districts push things like mindfulness is because of educators trying to push their own ideologies on their districts. And I know that that sounds like something that a conspiracy theorist would say, but but hear me out. It doesn't matter whether it's an evangelical superintendent in Texas spending millions of dollars on football stadiums and Ten Commandments posters, or whether it's a new age superintendent in California spending millions of dollars on mindfulness. educational leadership often goes chronically unchallenged in this country. And so regardless of what their intentions are, becoming a principal or working directly for the district grants you access to millions of taxpayer dollars that you can potentially burn away if you have a good enough excuse. And we've seen this play out time and time again, like how schools funneled millions of dollars into things like learning styles and site-based reading over the past several decades, only for those programs to be revealed as pseudocientific scams that didn't work and made the classroom even worse.
So, if you'd like to expand beyond mindfulness specifically and dive even further into how pseudocience manages to permeate into schools as a whole, then I encourage you to watch this video next where I explain how pseudociences secretly take over schools. I'll see you over.