61–70 of 147 posts
Tangential, but has anyone else noticed a surge in newsweek links here and on reddit? I feel like they hired some consultants.
It's really easy to check if numbers of submission have increased. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=newsweek.com
The sheer insanity of this phrase astounds me. There's an industry devoted to meditation. For such a thing to exist, you have to start by convincing people that they're not meditating right. Which means some people are better at it than others and you should worry about not being as good. What's next, competitive meditation?
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> Secondly, mindfulness feels, to me, like an offshoot of CBT. It appears to be very closely related to CBT in both its approach and what it helps control. Really? When I meditate I need to turn my thoughts off . With CBT you reframe your thoughts by a process of what I'd like to call creative thinking and empiricism. So for me, it's not an offshoot of CBT, since mindfulness is not concerned with thoughts but with be…
> When I meditate I need to turn my thoughts off. Mindfulness meditation is very explicitly not about turning thoughts off, but about letting thoughts arise and fall away without getting caught up in it. Concentration meditation practices do involve turning thoughts off. That said, I also find the comparison to CBT curious. > (in 95% of the cases it's your body). In mindfulness meditation, while it can be your body,…
I'm shocked that a relatively new clinical practice with only moderate evidence behind it would be overhyped to sell magazines. Shocked I tell you. I was introduced to mindfulness practice as a therapy for depression several years ago at my university. They were clear it was a new approach for clinical use (though building on a long history of meditation) and that although the initial research results were promising…
> I was introduced to mindfulness practice as a therapy for depression several years ago at my university
Compare that to the other scenarios described in the article, or how another commenter here mentions "mindfulness events for executives and corporate". I think that just shows how mindfulness is not the real issue, but how it is applied (or worse: how things that are not mindfulness being sold as mindfulness).
To give an illustration of effective mindfulness that (hopefully) does not come across as pseudoscience, I'll describe how my anger would explode in the past, and how mindfulness helped me solve that (note that "anger management" was not listed in the article).
Mindfulness was suggested to me by a therapist (so not a magazine selling snake-oil), and despite my extreme skepticism at the time, it was very effective when I actually sat down to do it. And if you look at how my angry emotions would run away from me, this makes a lot of sense.
One cause was a reinforcing loop: upsetting thoughts causing hyper-focus on other upsetting thoughts and memories, causing more anger, bringing up more thoughts/memories. So basically, what we all have, but the feedback loop was amplified and out of balance (years later I have been diagnosed with ADD, and hyper-focus is one of the symptoms - I would not be surprised if this was the main cause of anger management issues that many ADD/ADHD people suffer from).
The other issue was me trying to control these escalating emotions, which was so frustrating that it became another source of anger in itself.
As others noted, mindfulness is mostly about becoming consciously aware of where attention is drawn to, being able to step back, and guiding attention where you want it to go to. This is different from trying to directly control the emotions triggered by whatever I end up paying attention to; I can let my emotions freely sort themselves out, as a result there is no frustrating self-inhibition.
That is all that the ten-minute-breathing exercise is for: practicing the ability to step back from the thoughts as they appear to you. That is what lets you take control of where your attention goes, allowing you to guide it elsewhere. I don't think the meditation does much else, except maybe letting out bottled-up emotions.
The funny thing is that practicing this awareness for myself has also helped me to be more aware of what others are saying and thinking during conversations, and making sure that we are actually talking about the same things. So my inter-personal communication has improved too.
Anyway, my point is that yes, mindfulness has helped me tremendously, and there is nothing mysterious about why it did: the main source of my anger was the way I processed my thoughts. Mindfulness can be great for helping with problems caused by that. However, if the main causes are external factors, like a lack of social interactions, or being in an abusive relationship at home or at work, then what would the problems be that mindfulness can solve?
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> I have since understood it as training yourself to being bored... There is a vast landscape of meditation practices from numerous traditions that focus on different aspects, but I think your comment is an extremely poor characterization of them. It's bit like describing playing guitar or piano as "moving your fingers in some specific patterns." Uh, no.
I think OP is correct, it just wasn't stated as well as it could've been. Meditation (at least some practice forms) is an act of forcing boredom upon yourself AND exploring how your mind's default settings react in that environment. There is a reason why focusing on something like your breath is recommended vs. focusing on the television (breath is boring!). “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to si…
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(1) is often mentioned as a benefit of mindfulness meditation, but it always puzzled me; first, it seems something everyone does to some degree - thinking "I'm being paranoid" is essentially that recognition, no? Second, it's always missing the second part: and then what? One can recognize an optical illusion as one, but that knowledge doesn't make it fade away. I mean, it can help to know, but it seems there's step…
The important bridge is to realize that the feeling (paranoia) is something you can choose to embrace or not. Once the feeling is no longer something that automatically 'happens to you', one can start to explore it - at a safe distance, no rush. Why am I feeling in this way? Is there a good reason? If yes, what could I do about it? What would happen if I would just dismiss the feeling without doing anything? What wou…
In fact, I should really say you operate from a place which is 'before thought', since 'beyond' suggests something after the thinking process. Actually it can almost feel like thinking is a strenuous burden in this state, which suggests you're 'before' the thinking process.
Observing thoughts while still operating from "within your mind", which it sounds like you're describing, doesn't necessarily lead to that experience.
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> I have since understood it as training yourself to being bored... There is a vast landscape of meditation practices from numerous traditions that focus on different aspects, but I think your comment is an extremely poor characterization of them. It's bit like describing playing guitar or piano as "moving your fingers in some specific patterns." Uh, no.
Maybe refine it to training yourself to accept being bored. In the sense of paying pure attention to what your are doing without judging it. This is the core focus of some forms of zen practice for example. There are clearly meditation practices which seeks other goals, but mere judgement free acceptance is an important goal for some. E.g. you're doing dishes. It may be boring, but boring is a judgement. Set aside th…
Meditation can be a lot more, but yes, I agree that this is an important lesson that can come from it.
I'm shocked that a relatively new clinical practice with only moderate evidence behind it would be overhyped to sell magazines. Shocked I tell you. I was introduced to mindfulness practice as a therapy for depression several years ago at my university. They were clear it was a new approach for clinical use (though building on a long history of meditation) and that although the initial research results were promising…
> I was introduced to mindfulness practice as a therapy for depression several years ago at my university. They were clear it was a new approach for clinical use (though building on a long history of meditation) and that although the initial research results were promising it was still very much a developing area. It would be great if that's the approach other people were taking. Not everyone does this. Some of them…
Am I correct in guessing you are talking about a work setting, where the situation is similar to something like: "if you're overworked we're not going to address the root problem by lowering the amount of work to a sensible load, we're going to make you do more work in the form of mental exercises to strengthen your resilience, so we can burden you with more work!"?
