Scientific Meta-analysis Casts Doubt On Mindfulness

Mindfulness has become very popular in the West in recent years, but a scientific meta-analysis has raised doubts and questions about the benefits that many attribute to it. The issue stands out because this approach is considered valid not only in many articles, but also in the daily practice of psychologists and other professionals.

Remember that the mindfulness is a kind of adaptation of transcendental meditation that comes from religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism. People started talking about it in the 1970s, when Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn created a technique called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.

The word mindfulness is an Old English term meaning “attention”. It has been understood as “mindfulness” as it refers to this principle of Zen philosophy. However, its creator never defined himself as a Buddhist or as a practitioner of oriental traditions. It can be said that mindfulness is a particular interpretation of them.

Mindfulness and Eastern Traditions

Religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism and practices such as Zen have an ancient tradition. What stands out most in the West is the practice of meditation, which, in any case, is very different from that performed in mindfulness.

The truth is that  these practices have a meaning closely linked to the religious and sacred beliefs of those who carry them out, in the context in which they arose. Mindfulness, on the other hand, is simply a technique, and many people use it to reduce stress.

The creator of mindfulness himself defined it as a technique to reduce stress. However, this practice took multiple forms and was interspersed with countless other techniques and beliefs, giving rise to enormous variety. What is common in all its forms is this search for “inner peace” in anxious people.

Doubts and questions related to mindfulness

Thousands of people worldwide claim to have experienced great stress reduction and “spiritual growth” due to mindfulness. Despite this, a group of neuroscientists from New Zealand and the United Kingdom carried out a meta-analysis on the subject. The results were published in Scientific Reports .

A meta-analysis is a survey of available studies. This means that all research publications on the topic are collected, their validity is evaluated, and their conclusions are examined. At the end, a large account of the discoveries and what can be learned from all this material is made.

The meta-analysis on mindfulness has exposed some doubts and revealed that many of the mindfulness studies were seriously flawed. The most recurrent of these was the fact that whoever prepared the study was an interested party. Many of these surveys were done by the instructors themselves. Likewise, there were several that did not start from a representative number of cases.

The limitations of the technique

Another flaw detected is that many of these studies compared what happened between a group of people who practiced mindfulness and a group who didn’t. The appropriate thing in this case would be to have offered some relaxation alternative to this last group to contrast the results at the end. However, this was not done in several of these studies.

What researchers have concluded is that mindfulness does not offer the benefits that many attribute to it. You do not achieve even greater spirituality, nor do you develop more empathy or compassion with this technique. In fact, neuroscientists said the technique produced no more well-being than a documentary, exercise, or psychotherapy.

One of the authors of the meta-analysis was Miguel Farías, from the University of Coventry. He noted that mindfulness is far from Buddhism practiced in the East and that, in the Western Hemisphere, it has been approached as a kind of mental gymnastics. For this reason, it does not have the scope of classical transcendental meditation.

So what’s troubling about the situation is that  there are thousands of publications that extol mindfulness. At the same time, this meta-analysis provides rigorous conclusions that contradict these texts. However, this practice has been adopted by many people and belief is likely to prevail over the evidence.