Studies find evidence that meditation is demotivating
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Re: Studies find evidence that meditation is demotivating
#2> the very notion of motivation — striving to obtain a more desirable future — implies some degree of discontentment with the present
Surely there must be a study somewhere that shows how the right kind of misery makes employees more productive.
Re: Studies find evidence that meditation is demotivating
#3My sample set is small, but I remain dubious about this study.
Accomplished meditators are very rarely couch potatoes; they tackle things that need to tackled with calm, wisdom, and efficiency.
True, motivations like "I don't want to yelled at.", or "I want more money.", or "I want to look good and smart to everybody." will go away or at least have less impact. But they are replaced by "How can I make this happier place?", or "What's the right thing to do for the company?", or "How can I take my ego out of this and do what's right?", along with better behaviour under stress and time constraints "When you're in a hurry go more slowly...", etc.
Also what kind of meditation are we referring to? Sitting and just breathing can also just be a relaxation exercise... not meditation. Those effects more or less just vanish when you come out of the sitting. Once some basic insights are there, the relationship to work changes and becomes more relaxed and practical and ... more effective.
As I said my sample set is small.
Re: Studies find evidence that meditation is demotivating
#4My theory is that (correct) meditation makes people more aware of what's good for them and what isn't. One result of this could be that they realize that most of their goals in a company are BS so they lose motivation.
I know a lot of Buddhists including monks and they certainly are very active and motivated people. They are just a little pickier about what they put their energy into.
Re: Studies find evidence that meditation is demotivating
#5The title is total clickbait.
From the article: "Then we tracked everyone’s actual performance on the tasks. Here we found that on average, having meditated neither benefited nor detracted from a participant’s quality of work."
They found that people who meditated were more calm and serene, reported less motivation, but performed similarly to people who had done non-meditative activities.
It seems to me that having a calm, relaxed workforce who performs just as well as your normal stressed workers is a pretty big positive. I'd find the study more interesting if it studied the long term effects, like do the two groups tend to diverge in productivity over time? Does it prevent burn out? Increase job satisfaction?
Re: Studies find evidence that meditation is demotivating
#6This experimental design is... weird. The participants were assigned tasks that "were similar to everyday workplace jobs", and asked about their concomitant motivation level to complete them. But why would they either group have any intrinsic motivation to do a purposeless simulation of busywork, except because it was part of the study?
Re: Studies find evidence that meditation is demotivating
#7The title is total clickbait. From the article: "Then we tracked everyone’s actual performance on the tasks. Here we found that on average, having meditated neither benefited nor detracted from a participant’s quality of work." They found that people who meditated were more calm and serene, reported less motivation, but performed similarly to people who had done non-meditative activities. It seems to me that having a…
Not only that, but the tasks these people were assigned are not good models for work tasks. In a real professional workplace, the tasks are usually related to systems or processes over which the individuals feel ownership. Random tasks about which they know nothing are convenient for a study, but not a good model of actual work.
Re: Studies find evidence that meditation is demotivating
#8My theory is that (correct) meditation makes people more aware of what's good for them and what isn't. One result of this could be that they realize that most of their goals in a company are BS so they lose motivation. I know a lot of Buddhists including monks and they certainly are very active and motivated people. They are just a little pickier about what they put their energy into.
My observations about effects of meditations agree 100% with this user's.
Re: Studies find evidence that meditation is demotivating
#9> And the very notion of motivation — striving to obtain a more desirable future — implies some degree of discontentment with the present, which seems at odds with a psychological exercise that instills equanimity and a sense of calm.
'at odds with' is sort of a funny way of putting it: the realization that 'striving to obtain a more desirable future' often ends up being a trap is part of the very foundation of meditation, and explicitly so.
The other aspect of what's being said here is sort of a subtle problem, and one of the things that freaks people out about getting too into meditation: if I'm totally content, I would have no motivation to do anything then, right? In practice however, that's not the case. 'Motivation' in this sense is about making yourself do something you don't want to do. For instance, someone highly motivated to succeed at work might put in super long hours and make sacrifices in other aspects of their life in order to get ahead. If you were more content with where you were, it's true you probably wouldn't do that—but instead you might start writing a novel or building a house or doing charity work or whatever. It doesn't mean you're going to be lazy (in fact, meditation can be quite energizing; often times after finishing a restful session I pop up and effortlessly start cleaning and taking care of whatever needs to be done), just that you won't feel pressure to change your situation.
Re: Studies find evidence that meditation is demotivating
#10Experiments report loss of motivation to do toy tasks. I can imagine people losing motivation to do those, or participate in the study, after meditating. Not sure how that translates to lack of motivation in doing what you actually like/want to be doing.
The nap analogy from the article, I find, is very good. After taking a nap, it might be easier for you to concentrate and do deep work. If you need to do something tedious instead, like respond to admin emails or perform made up tasks for a meditation study, you might perform better pumping some loud music or being under social pressure.