There's More to Mindfulness Than You Might Think

You've probably heard about the potential of mindfulness to cure a wide range of problems, and perhaps you’ve even tried it yourself. Following what you read in the popular literature, you’ve learned that if something is bothering you, don’t run away from your emotions but instead let them develop as you observe the fact that those emotions are there. Through mindfulness, you’ll experience a sense of relief, and your stress should dissipate — if not right away, then soon.

According to Ryerson University’s Ellen Choi and colleagues (2021), this view of mindfulness as a “quick fix” for your problems veers away significantly from the original conceptions of awareness and acceptance within a therapeutic context. As proposed in the academic literature, mindfulness isn’t something that is intended to make stress go away with some type of magic attentiveness wand.

As Choi and her coauthors go on to explain, the popular version of mindfulness seems to have become “'McMindfulness,' a consumerist wellness-promoting brand emphasizing short-term relief of personal suffering at the expense of engaged exploration of the sources of distress that may lead to organizational or societal change.” In other words, using mindfulness as a way to process and then dispose of problems without considering their source provides only a short-term solution to larger problems that aren’t so easily dispensed with.

What Does the Popular Media Have to Say About Mindfulness?

The Ryerson U. authors maintain that when mindfulness is portrayed as a one-stop shopping approach to all kinds of emotional relief, rather than serving as a process to bring about greater self-understanding, it becomes too results-oriented. In their words, this conflates “stress-related outcomes with the process of being mindful.” You might feel better after practicing mindfulness, but to go into the process expecting this outcome negates the whole point of exploring your feelings and creating “a space” between what you observe and the response you have to these observations.

To determine how prevalent the mistaken characterization of mindfulness is in popular parlance, the Canadian researchers conducted an extensive analysis of terms associated with this quality in the print media, a resource known as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) containing one billion words of text collected from 1990-2020, and “iWeb,” covering 14 billion words in 22 million web pages from the 95,000 most frequented sites. After crunching this massive amount of data, Choi et al. discovered the overwhelming trend that popular use of mindfulness only includes its awareness function without incorporating acceptance. As a result, people who think they’re practicing mindfulness aren’t going through that essential process of taking a nonjudgmental approach to their own internal experiences.

Although these findings don’t support the quick-fix criticism inherent in “McMindfulness” that mindfulness is being billed as a means to an end, they do suggest that the public is still being misled in important ways that can defeat the purpose of using mindfulness as a pathway toward growth. You have to do more than meditate, one of the “top 10” terms used in the popular sources that Choi et al. studied. For this approach to work, you also need to be able to establish that non-judgmental “space” between experiences and reactions.

Finding the Meanings of Mindfulness

Having established the disconnect between professional and popular characterizations of mindfulness, the Canadian research team next set about to ask people to complete an empirical measure of mindfulness. The idea behind this phase of the research was to determine if ordinary people answer this questionnaire in ways different from those with professional training. To do so, Choi et al. looked at data from the “Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire” (FFMQ) obtained from 145 datasets involving nearly 42,000 participants. Raters classified the samples from these studies according to the apparent degree of background in meditation and mindfulness.

The five facets of the FFMQ include the following, with these sample items each of which is rated on a five (never or rarely true) to one (very often or always true (you can see the whole scale here):

Observing:

When I’m walking, I deliberately notice the sensations of my body moving.

When I take a shower or bath, I stay alert to the sensations of water on my body.

Describing:

I’m good at finding words to describe my feelings.

I can easily put my beliefs, opinions, and expectations into words.

Acting with awareness:

When I do things, my mind wanders off and I’m easily distracted. (reversed)

I don’t pay attention to what I’m doing because I’m daydreaming, worrying, or otherwise distracted. (reversed)

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Nonjudging of inner experience:

I criticize myself for having irrational or inappropriate emotions. (reversed)

I tell myself I shouldn’t be feeling the way I’m feeling. (reversed)

Nonreactivity to inner experience:

I perceive my feelings and emotions without having to react to them.

I watch my feelings without getting lost in them.

Turning now to the results, as expected, samples with greater experience in the practice of mindfulness showed a consistently positive association between awareness and acceptance (e.g. observe and non-judge, describe and non-judge, and non-judge and non-react). This finding indicated that those who have learned mindfulness or those who incorporate mindfulness into their therapeutic practices regard its facets as “synergistic,” meaning that one doesn’t exist without the other. For the non-clinical samples, by contrast, there is “a misalignment in the interpretation of mindfulness.”

What’s more, a second analysis of previously published data showed that the disengagement of the two elements of mindfulness could have the effect, on those not in the know about acceptance, of increasing maladaptive emotions. Specifically, people whose version of mindfulness only includes awareness could become more susceptible to a form of emotion suppression that only makes their problems worse.

Think about what it’s like to be more aware of your difficulties but not necessarily able to accept them as part of life. With those emotional responses now front and center in your consciousness, the only tool you’ll have if you are to “feel better” is to shove them away.

All forms of acceptance are not equal, though, suggest the Ryerson U. authors. If you are too accepting, you run the risk of becoming passive, and not going through “the process of re-engagement that acceptance enables.” Instead, what you need is “purposeful engagement with all of life’s experiences.”

A Better Way to Think About Mindfulness

Rather than focusing only on what you’re feeling and experiencing, the Choi et al. findings suggest the importance of proceeding down the pathway of acceptance. However, this pathway isn’t necessarily a straightforward one. It’s not always possible to accept a fact about yourself or your experiences that is truly unpleasant by taking one dose of the mindfulness medicine. You might have to titrate your exposure to that fact one bit at a time until you’re able to swallow a larger portion. Running away from the negative emotions in an effort to get a quick fix won’t work but if you try to manage too large a piece of that experience, you run the risk of engaging in the maladaptive process of emotional suppression.

It’s also important to distinguish, as the Choi et al. team point out, between the “trait” of mindfulness as a stable entity, and its “state” as a quality that varies from situation to situation. If you think that you’re not a very “mindful” person, according to this view, there’s still room for optimism. If mindfulness is a process, it’s one that you can learn. However, as the findings from this comprehensive investigation point out, the process involves more than seeking a quick fix, and more than just noticing your feelings without trying to make your peace with them.

To sum up, there is ample evidence to support the value of mindfulness as a way to move toward greater fulfillment. Just be sure that the brand of mindfulness you practice takes its many complexities into account.