Women Mean Business
Telegraph Dating
Thinking man
Dressing well
Cookbook home
Special diet recipes
Browse by occasion
Browse by meal type
Food and drink home
Health and fitness home
Tel Mag
Cars home
A-Z car finder
Great drives
How mindfulness is making us more anxious
A cure for all our stresses or just part of a never-ending cycle of self-improvement?
By Boudicca Fox-Leonard 1 May 2021 • 6:00am
Mindful meditation has become popular in the last ten years but it's not the answer for everyone
Today, being "mindful" has become a synonym for living a superior kind of life. Headspace, the mindfulness app created by Andy Puddicombe, a British former monk, is valued at $250 million (£180 million) and has two million subscribers. With books now published on everything from mindful baking to birdwatching, mindfulness is the key virtue of our times. How did we get here?
In 2011, Mark Williams, a professor of clinical psychology at Oxford University, and Danny Penman, a meditation teacher, took a Buddhist meditation technique called Vipassana and set it out in 10-minute meditation chunks for time-poor Westerners in a book called Mindfulness: Finding Peace in a Frantic World.
The technique teaches users how to spot the habits of their own mind as a passive observer, and so to take them less personally. Sad and stressful thoughts are allowed to come and go without judgment, like a passing cloud in the sky. Williams and Penman weren't the first people to write about it, but theirs was the first book to go mainstream, with 1.5 million copies sold and translations in more than 30 languages. Williams has taught mindfulness in prisons and believes the adoption of mindfulness-based therapy courses on the NHS has been instrumental in opening the conversation up around mental health.
"One of the benefits of popularising it," he says, "is that those who've had it can talk about mindfulness at a party without people judging them. It's been destigmatised as it's been popularised."
And yet, 10 years on, half a million people in the UK suffer from work-related stress and psychological breakdown. Has mindfulness helped at all? Could the pressure to be mindful be making us feel more anxious?
Critics of the mindfulness revolution feel that it has contributed to our stress by reinforcing ongoing structural problems, such as overworking. It's become another thing to do, part of a never-ending cycle of self-improvement that is your responsibility.
In 2019, Ron Purser, professor of management at San Francisco State University, took aim at "spiritual entrepreneurs" in the corporate mindfulness space. His book, McMindfulness, argued that mindfulness had become a brand commodity, one that let corporations off the hook for toxic organisational cultures.
Talking over email, he cites the example in the US where Starbucks baristas sent corporate headquarters a petition demanding better working conditions.
"What did corporate management do? They announced that they would be gifting all their employees a Headspace mindfulness meditation app! There you go! You got stress, well here is an app. Get over it!," says Purser.
It was to Headspace that marketing executive Kim Palmer, from Kent, turned six years ago after her job as a high-flying marketing executive at Tesco led her to burn out.
Kim Palmer found she was too stressed for mindfulness to be helpful Credit: Heathcliff O'Malley
"Everyone kept telling me to meditate and learn mindfulness and it would help me. It didn't help me at all," she says. "In fact, I felt worse because my brain was so frazzled and tired and overwhelmed." In the end, it was hypnotherapy that helped her find the calm she needed. "I needed someone to help me to relax. I needed a lean-back experience, rather than a lean-in one," says Palmer, who has since set up Clementine, a hypnotherapy app.
In fairness, Penman states that mindfulness isn't a panacea: "You can't just wave a crystal around and everything will be OK." But critics worry that academics and researchers who advocate mindful practices have allowed the media to promote a quasi-magical view of the practice as a cure for all.
Purser recalls a woman at Cardiff University who told him how she had sought treatment through the NHS for body dysmorphia, only to be told that she had to enrol in a mindfulness course before she would be allowed to gain access to a psychologist for counselling and treatment. "She was angry because many of the practices and exercises in the mindfulness course focus on the body. This made her even more anxious. She had to quit."
While studies have found that mindfulness meditation can cut the recurrence of depression by 50 per cent, evidence is also emerging that it can cause unwanted negative effects.
In 2020, Miguel Farias, an experimental psychologist at Coventry University and author of The Oxford Handbook of Meditation, and his colleagues published a study that reviewed more than 40 years of the science of meditation and mindfulness-based therapies. It suggested the practices could lead to negative effects in about 8 per cent of people – from increased anxiety, depression and stress, to unusual experiences such as hallucinations. He receives regular emails from people who have had negative experiences doing mindfulness courses. As a result, Farias set up meditatinginsafety.org.uk to raise awareness of mental health issues in relation to meditation practice
"We still don't know clearly how mindfulness affects people differently," he says. "It's not only based on their own characteristics, but on other factors, such as the context in which mindfulness is taught, and the competence of the teacher."
Victoria Mary Clarke, from Dublin, can lay claim to having had one of the best teachers, having studied with Deepak Chopra, the alternative medicine guru worth an estimated $150 million.
Victoria Mary Clarke now only meditates when she's in a good mood Credit: Tony Gavin
However, having been an evangelist for the technique, she now only practises mindfulness occasionally, and only when she's in a good mood. "I'm prone to overthinking and depression, and I found it made me worse; it made me really stuck in my head. It's fine when I was in a good mood, but when I was upset, it made me feel worse."
Arika Trimnell, a spiritual and mindfulness expert, says that it's the belief that you need to meditate "for X amount of times a day for X amount of minutes" that is the problem.
Instead, she stresses that mindfulness can be done in small ways: "Noticing the texture and temperature of the floor when you get out of bed, or noticing bold flavours like your morning cup of coffee."
The mindfulness boom may have woken us up to the importance of taking care of our mental health. But, as a medicine, it might be advisable to take it in small doses – rather than swallowing it whole.
Mindfulness meditation involves sitting silently and paying attention to thoughts, sounds, the sensations of breathing or parts of the body, bringing your attention back whenever the mind starts to wander.
The aim is to be fully present and engaged in the moment, aware of your thoughts and feelings without distraction or judgment.
Mindfulness allows you to:
• Notice how thoughts come and go in your mind. You may learn that they don't have to define who you are, or your experience of the world.
• Notice what your body is telling you. Signs of tension and anxiety are a fast heartbeat, tense muscles or shallow breathing.
• Create space between you and your thoughts, so you can react more calmly.
Meditation,
Mental health,
Anxiety,
More from Family
My husband has found God in a big way – and lost his sense of fun
By Anonymous author 17 Jan 2022, 12:00pm
How families can help protect the environment at home — top tips for 2022
By Jess Salter 17 Jan 2022, 11:11am
Dear Richard: 'My mother-in-law is coming between my mother and me'
Richard Madeley 17 Jan 2022, 10:24am
Wake up! Why getting your mornings right is the key to a successful day
By Anna Maxted 17 Jan 2022, 5:00am
Adrian Lester: 'The best thing about success is that I don't have doors slammed in my face any more'
By Boudicca Fox-Leonard 17 Jan 2022, 5:00am
I blame myself for spoiling my daughter but she has become intolerable
By Anonymous author 17 Jan 2022, 5:00am
National Trust discount codes
Nike discount code
Boden discount codes
Made discount codes