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Mindfulness interventions for teens decrease mindfulness, study finds

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Re: Mindfulness interventions for teens decrease mindfulness, study finds

#101

Post by prepend »

gary_0 wrote: post #65
harry8 wrote: post #4

Religious studies fails to make kids more religious. Abstinence programs taught in schools fail to increase celibacy. Health programs fail to dent mcdonalds market share. Arithmetic fails to stop people taking on unnecessary and punitive debt. The point being pushing things (good, bad or ugly) in schools often doesn't work out as hoped. Schooling is not a solved problem but it is a very crude tool used badly and ofte…

Maybe because kids aren't stupid and they can tell Western society doesn't practice real piety, doesn't respect celibacy, doesn't care about the health of its citizens, and glorifies recklessness over studious caution? You can't preach what you don't practice. (Hopefully I don't sound like I'm criticizing Western decadence too much. I'm actually a big fan of decadence!)

> Western society

Is this unique to Western society? Are there societies that do a great job teaching this stuff to kids? I always assumed that teaching teenagers stuff was pretty universally difficult.

Re: Mindfulness interventions for teens decrease mindfulness, study finds

#102

Post by haswell »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #71
asaddhamani wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the Waking Up app the closest to this. Others like headspace feel heavily commercialised, with an aim of improving “productivity”. If anyone is looking for guided meditation, I suggest checking out waking up.

> Others like headspace feel heavily commercialised The one you pointed to is $130 a year.

The Waking Up app has up to a 100% scholarship rate for the subscription with no questions asked (you can pick your rate if you so choose).

Their philosophy on monetization is that they don't want anyone who can't afford it to be excluded, but are still putting out a valuable service and it's fair to charge money for it.

I'm a very happy paying user of the app, and I deeply appreciate their willingness to give it away to people who can't afford it.

Re: Mindfulness interventions for teens decrease mindfulness, study finds

#103

Post by haswell »

titanomachy wrote: post #66

It says it reduces “self-reported mindfulness”. Maybe you have to be at least a little mindful to realize how unmindful you are? Similar to how people who have never studied cognitive bias assume they are unbiased.

This was the first thing that came to mind.

After being a skeptic and avoiding it for years, I decided to do a mindfulness/meditation experiment, and indeed, one of the first things I started to realize was just how much my brain would go down rabbit holes of discursive thought.

Becoming more mindful absolutely made me feel like I was less mindful, simply because I was actually noticing.

I need to dig deeper into the study to see if/how they accounted for this, but it seems like it'd be a major factor in a self-reporting situation.

Re: Mindfulness interventions for teens decrease mindfulness, study finds

#106

Post by em-bee »

nottorp wrote: post #79
gary_0 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because kids aren't stupid and they can tell Western society doesn't practice real piety, doesn't respect celibacy, doesn't care about the health of its citizens, and glorifies recklessness over studious caution? You can't preach what you don't practice. (Hopefully I don't sound like I'm criticizing Western decadence too much. I'm actually a big fan of decadence!)

My daughter told me towards the end of high school something that basically summarizes as: For lifestyle/moral decisions kids will do what they see their parents do . Not what they are told by parents or anyone else. Based on her observations of her friends.

a german comedian said this: there is no point to raise children properly, they will just copy their parents anyways

Re: Mindfulness interventions for teens decrease mindfulness, study finds

#107

Post by 7952 »

skissane wrote: post #77
7952 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long time religion was the best explanation for the complexities of the world. And it naturally attracted the most curious people. Of course that all changed with science and particularly evolution. We discovered better answers to the age old questions.

> For a long time religion was the best explanation for the complexities of the world. And it naturally attracted the most curious people. Of course that all changed with science and particularly evolution. We discovered better answers to the age old questions. You are assuming that the primary purpose of religion is to explain those phenomena which the natural sciences seek to explain – an assumption many reject. I…

I think history is full of examples of people using god and religion as an explanation for far more prosaic things than is typical now. An explanation for why crops fail, or a child dies of the flu. An explanation for why a birds song is beautiful or the colour of the sky at dusk. And I think that religious thought would sit more easily alongside other ideas. Rather than something discrete that has a "primary purpose". It was more self evident and less based on modern ideas of faith.

Naively it seems like that has changed. We are far less likely to believe in the power of prayer or that god is the proximate cause of events. I don't think that science is the only cause of this change and in fact religion has been a moderating influence sometimes. But science and evolution do seem particularly powerful. It does give an explanation for many of the most important events and feelings in our lives.

But i think we often take those scientific ideas for granted in the modern world. We teach kids to wash their hands and brush their teeth long before they know the lords prayer. So we don't need to look to god for an explanation of why they died of an abscess or dehydration after diarrhea. And if they do die the questions will be narrower. A question of faith more than practical cause and effect.

Re: Mindfulness interventions for teens decrease mindfulness, study finds

#108

Post by skissane »

7952 wrote: post #107
skissane wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For a long time religion was the best explanation for the complexities of the world. And it naturally attracted the most curious people. Of course that all changed with science and particularly evolution. We discovered better answers to the age old questions. You are assuming that the primary purpose of religion is to explain those phenomena which the natural sciences seek to explain – an assumption many reject. I…

I think history is full of examples of people using god and religion as an explanation for far more prosaic things than is typical now. An explanation for why crops fail, or a child dies of the flu. An explanation for why a birds song is beautiful or the colour of the sky at dusk. And I think that religious thought would sit more easily alongside other ideas. Rather than something discrete that has a "primary purpose…

> I think history is full of examples of people using god and religion as an explanation for far more prosaic things than is typical now

For many mediaeval philosophers, the primary thing God explained is "why does anything exist at all?" The existence of particular things had natural explanations, which could be studied by natural science – of course, much more primitive in those days, but they would not have had a problem with the latter developments in that field, just as contemporary philosophers who follow them don't either. Whereas, "why does anything exist at all?" is not a question that currently natural science has any consensus explanation for. Yes, it all starts with the Big Bang–but why the Big Bang? Did that happen for some known (or knowable) reason, an unknown reason, an unknowable reason, or no reason at all? At the ultra-speculative fringes of theoretical physics you will find attempts to answer it – e.g. Max Tegmark's ultimate ensemble theory – but that is far from being an established scientific consensus, and many question if it is really science at all, as opposed to philosophy masquerading as physics.

Another thing God explained for the mediaevals is "what is the ultimate source of rationality and ethics?" And those are questions for which I'd argue the natural sciences still don't have established answers, and quite possibly never will have established answers.

> Naively it seems like that has changed

I think there has been less change than you think there has been. Most people today have an overly simplistic model of what educated people one thousand or two thousand years ago believed. One encounters many people who anachronistically assume that mediaeval and ancient Christians had a similar worldview to 20th century American young earth creationists. Even before Christianity, Plato and Aristotle were much closer to today's "sophisticated theology" than the kind of "explanation for why a birds song is beautiful" you are talking about

Re: Mindfulness interventions for teens decrease mindfulness, study finds

#109

Post by woleium »

gary_0 wrote: post #85
whatshisface wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're doing is criticizing decadence from an epicurean perspective.

Pretty much. "Have fun, just don't be stupid about it." I have a deep suspicion of proponents of asceticism.

everything in moderation, including moderation.
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