Is mindfulness really good for everyone?

Mindfulness – living with full attention in the here and now – sometimes seems like the new hair blade oil. Popular mindfulness training has been embraced everywhere, in business, education, healthcare and even the military. Mental health care institutions have also uncompromisingly included the teaching in their care offer. Because, as it often sounds, mindfulness has been scientifically proven to be effective.

A lot of scientific research has been done on mindfulness. Those thousands of studies have opened doors to mindfulness across society. But of course quantity says nothing about quality. A control group is often missing, so the researchers themselves cannot determine whether mindfulness is better than, to name just a few examples, dancing, walking or petting the cat on your lap. The number of test subjects is in most cases very small. And the majority of studies that show no effects at all end up in the trash unpublished.

Don’t make fun of the results of poorly conducted research, critics warn. But that advice seems to fall on deaf ears. Dutch health insurers now reimburse mindfulness as part of a therapy for people with recurrent depression. Mindfulness in schools should protect young people from burnout and sadness. Google has its own Search Inside Yourself Mindfulness Program. In London, 6,000 children are taught mindfulness at school. Amsterdam also already has two ‘mindful schools’.

Unsubstantiated claims about mindfulness

It worries even scientists who swear by meditation. †Something has gone horribly wrong with the science of mindfulness‘, wrote experimental psychologist Miguel Farias in 2016. He argues that unsubstantiated claims in science have led to high expectations of mindfulness being created in the media. A popular view is to view mindfulness as part of a healthy lifestyle. You can train attention, just like you can train your muscles by exercising. Downright misleading, Farias thinks. ‘Such a statement propagates a simplistic view of the human mind.’

Moreover, it is a fairy tale that mindfulness is good for everyone, he says. For some it works, for others it doesn’t. ‘The pretentious expectation that you can make people function better with a meditation technique is not only naive, but also dangerous.’ Farias published in 2020 a systematic review article on adverse effects of meditation. He analyzed 83 studies, of which 55 studies reported side effects. One in twelve people suffered from anxiety, depression, cognitive disorders, stomach and intestinal complaints or thoughts of suicide. Other mindfulness researchers also wrote in a now famous article that exaggerated claims, omission of negative effects, and publication of poorly designed studies can mislead and harm the general public.

In our country, the Radboudumc Center for Mindfulness is the largest producer of Dutch research into meditation and attention training. Founder and professor of psychiatry Anne Speckens, herself also a mindfulness trainer, acknowledges that mindfulness is not a feel-good exercise. ‘On the contrary: it can be very confronting to consciously experience what you are actually feeling.’ In Nijmegen, the criticism was heard: for several years now, the researchers at the Center for Mindfulness have reported side effects. However, the quality of the studies remains a point of discussion.

Financial interests

For example, there is another problem in mindfulness research: the ‘toilet duck effect’. Virtually all scientists who research mindfulness are enthusiastic practitioners themselves. And that leads to unsubstantiated claims in the majority of studies, says American psychologist James C. Coyne, who is known in the scientific world for his razor-sharp analyses. Coyne doesn’t go so far as to say that mindfulness doesn’t do anything: “I’m too much of a skeptic for that. But there are too many financial and intellectual interests at play. Mindfulness centers linked to universities collect a lot of research money and also offer training themselves. That way, the researchers are assured of their appointment while continuing to set up faulty trials. That’s how it has been for years. There is hardly any progress in the quality of the studies.’

That doesn’t seem to be an exaggeration: a systematic review from 2017 – led by one of the greatest advocates of mindfulness, Wisconsin professor of psychology and psychiatry Richard Davidson – concluded that the quality of mindfulness research had hardly improved in ten years.

Should you abandon mindfulness then? To quote the American psychotherapist Albert Ellis – the founder of the well-proven cognitive behavioral therapy – who died in 2007: do it if you like it, but don’t take it too seriously and don’t consider it a therapeutic treatment.