Mindfulness may have been over-hyped
bbc.com
bbc.com
Personally, I've still found it very useful. When I'm meditating frequently, I'm less reactive -- it's like there's this new sense of "self" that is observing and controlling my brain, whereas before, or when my meditation habit lapses, my brain is just doing it's thing in a more reactive way. This has been incredibly useful both personally and professionally.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/health/us-suicide-rate-su...
Edit: Not really sure what HN dislikes about this post. My goal here was to offer some actual aspects of North American society which many would agree to be worse than they were in recent history as opposed to simply saying "society is broken". I was expecting some actual discussion here.
The insanity was always there, but has become mainstream.
Yes. American politics is not notably more polarized now than in the time immediately preceding the Clinton impeachment. (Now, had you said either 10 or 30 instead of 20, the answer would be different.)
Naked, dancing in the moonlight insane as it gets.
This society has given me, a female individual, full autonomy over my body, my education, and my career prospects (for most anything short of being a catholic priest!) and protects my right to that autonomy via law. My grandmother didn't even have that. This society has produced and distributed vaccines that protect my entire generation from devastating illness. This society has seen the harm that inhumane treatment towards people of color and homosexual people has and legislated protections for both (cultural norms are still behind in some places, but vastly improved over previous generations).
You may think that too many facebook notifications is stressful, but how stressed do you think Alan Turing felt when he was tried for indecency and medically castrated for being gay? Heck, compared to many generations before that (and some deeply conservative societies that still exist in theocracies today), he was lucky to not be murdered by the government.
I freaking love modern western society and refuse to shrug off all the progress we've made and cast it aside as "broken".
You are far more better off than in the past, but maybe because of that you (and everyone else) sometimes (unknowingly) are performing actions that are degrading their society as a whole.
Maybe you're having children later, having them raised by a nanny because you're wealthy and/or are working more, maybe you're not allowing them outside to play/grow. Maybe because you're using Facebook you're connecting far more superficially with your friend circle. Your grandmother had the support of all her family, community and neighbors, whereas in the modern world we're going to be going through a lot of things by ourselves.
I think ultimately we can't really know if society is broken, we can only compare it what we had before and what we imagine it can be like. That maybe casts a very negative light on it, when in reality we're doing relatively decently.
https://twitter.com/asymmetricinfo/status/992463509534453760...
Cherry picking.
For most Americans, their reality is massive income inequality, insane healthcare expenses, working shitty jobs for 40+ hours a week, suffering from some kind chronic or preventable illness, and numbing the pain with 5 hours of TV per day. It's total shit.
Granted, it's less shit than it was 50 years ago in terms of social progress, medical advances, etc. But fundamentally, I believe it's still broken for the vast majority of people, if you were to somehow measure the NPS of being a human. ("Would you recommend being a human to a friend or colleague?")
An interesting video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO0v_JqxFmQ
Working your life away for a substandard living is not a new thing. Not by a mile. It's the norm for history. Someone is always getting exploited. The 40 hour work week was a right that we fought for. The fact that we even have treatments and preventions for illnesses (and get new ones every day, that hep C cure for example) means we are improving, and ensuring people have access is a problem many people are invested in fixing (millenials are big supporters of universal healthcare, it will be a thing one day).
I do think I'm lucky though. I was the first person in my family to grow up middle class. I never had to rely on food banks or welfare, I didn't have to spend all my free time caring for my siblings while my parents worked. My mom had to do those things growing up, but she escaped it because she earned a scholarship to a state university and could get by with that and a part time job. Society is the one who built that college and gave her that chance, even when her family would not or could not. I am thankful for that, because at least I now have the knowledge and opportunity to fix things that do need fixing. And there are plenty. But I don't think for a second that I would have had more opportunity to do that if I had been born at any point in time before.
You are confusing identifying, debating and solving serious social problems with "shrugging off all the progress".
We didn't copy anything, the text from the meditation we took it from Shunryu Suzuki's book.
He could live in a jurisdiction that enforces non-compete agreements, or he could have been currently employed by the competitor with a full-employment clause in it.
I hate companies like this because they only care about exploiting trends to suck out money.
The idea was that in the west, we would take these ideas and try to fit them into a western world which is a world where time == money. So you get these things like 'mindfulness classes' where, for one hour, you practice being in a state of mindfulness whilst the rest of the week you go through your life as usual.
I guess that when we took the idea of mindfulness and put it in a package that fit our society, it might have gotten hyped and more distant from its essence. This just to state that mindfulness might still be worth your time - just not the 'prepackaged' version.
* Small disclaimer: I do not practice it, I'm just being a parrot of some philosophy classes that I thought were interesting.
> I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.
Since reading that ten years ago I've done that almost daily. Often I'm only saying it to my dog but it certainly has made me appreciate the small moments that can be wonderful.
Basically, when you practice meditation of type X, you should ask what are the benefits. If you practice as told, and get the benefits, you know for yourself it's working.
Similarly, if you're working remote I can't really tell if you are programming or on facebook, but at the end some task must be accomplished.
Walk with dousing rod until it twitches down, then start digging. If you don't reach water: dig deeper until you do.
If you are meditating with the goal of relaxing your mind, for example, you can easily fail at that, and will likely fail at it more often than not given how much the mind can wander. Meditating with that goal in mind can be extremely frustrating. So a useful thing to know is that intentions matter a lot when meditating.
When the British conquered the Buddhist kingdom of Burma, Buddhism lost the protection it had from the king. The laity then organized in order to defend their Buddhist institutions, and people began to study the dhamma like never before.
This gave rise to talented monks who preached to the laity. Then Ledi Sayadaw, a Burmese monk, began preaching that meditation was not something that only monks who dedicated their lives to it could do, but was available to anyone. This led to a lineage of lay teachers of meditation, one of whom was Goenka, the founder of the Vipassana meditation movement.
In short, the modern Vipassana movement has its origins in the popularization of meditation which was a result of British colonialism in Burma.
Meditation for me is about truth seeking. I emerge from zazen feeling as though I understand myself and the world around me more honestly. It has long term implications for how I think and behave, certainly, but probably not in any medically interesting sense.
I don't expect studying physics or building a deck to change my health outcomes measurably. Meditating isn't different in kind.
The value that I gain from "just sitting" is not something I can articulate very well in words. I would certainly encourage others to meditate daily, but meditation won't mend broken bones or unclog arteries or replace neurotransmitters the body can't produce enough of naturally. It's just sitting, after all.
That sounds like it could be rather therapeutic for many folks. Small changes in perspectives can make a big difference, I think.
These hype cycles only serve the people that peddle the hype.
Of course people are totally free to do what they want in their own time and if they feel like spending that on 'mindfulness' (which conveniently is so vague it could mean just about anything) then that's fine. Back in the 80's everybody seemed to have their personal Guru, now we have this. 20 years from now we'll probably have something else that takes its place.
There's a 65 year old guy that just finished his 30,000th big mac [1] and meanwhile people are trying to tell me that the piece of toast I had for breakfast is causing systemic inflammation and killing me.
SMH.
[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/wisconsin-man-eats-...
Fries and sodas are much worse for you.
While there's only 540 calories in it that's really a function of the big Mac being quite small.
A burger isn't inherently bad but chain burgers are laced with oil and sugar.
It's still just another "my grandpa smoked a pack a day for sixty years and he lived to be 91" story though. Irrelevant.
Science based on feelings is pseudoscience and should be treated as such.
A mindfulness consultant forced onto a workforce sounds about as effective as forcing all your employees to run five miles every week. But that doesn't mean that running is bad for you.
The "baby" is the ability to recognize the tens of thousands of thoughts you are thinking every day without knowing that you are. This can offer tremendous insight into your mood and personality (and how to change them if you wish).
The general position here seems to be that because the ancient herbalist didn't have a notion of acetylsalicylic acid, the willow bark he dispensed for pain wasn't even "wrong", despite its being the correct treatment from the tools he had available.
Huh?
Exactly. Its correctness is.
The "general position" I'm seeing is that if a piece of knowledge wasn't premised on a contemporary understanding of the world (which is itself, with a probability that approaches unity, also wrong in critical and meaningful ways), it can't have been "right".
Even when it turns out it was, when examined through the lens of that understanding. Hence the mention of willow bark: we didn't even understand aspirin's mechanism of action until the last ~half century. Does that make every doctor who prescribed it before that point wrong, or even just "not right", for having done so?
EDIT: Phrasing
Ancient people and people 50 years ago were both wrong about a lot of things, as we no doubt are today, but there is a very different sort of wrong between the pre-scientific world of mythology and the self-correcting methodology we have today.
That said, I'm not the one painting the hard and bright distinction between "right" and "wrong". I know the dude who thinks the earth is flat is "more wrong" than the person who thinks it's spherical.
I'm instead trying to point out the presumption structurally inherent in "we know more than those benighted, unenlightened sods that came before us did" being not merely a reason, but a requirement to dismiss anything said sods might have to offer.
Consider: all of the out-of-hand dismissal of meditation, or mindfulness in general, in this thread. As far as I can tell, the dismissal boils down to taking "We didn't invent it", "The evidence is generally at best weakly supportive, and doesn't conclusively refute the thesis", and, "But unscrupulous people do unscrupulous things and hide their misdeeds behind these concepts" as sufficient cause to nope right on past with prejudice.
The thing is, if you're properly playing "science", you don't get to "nope" out like that. Replicate it or refute it, sure, but not repudiate it. Empirically demonstrated results that run counter to our intuitions, and are at all replicable, are the things we should be paying the most attention to, because that's where we're most likely to learn something new. (Even if it's just about our intuitions...)
We've instead somehow made a more-or-less collective, and as far as I can tell unexamined choice somewhere along the way to interpret skepticism not as, "I will neither believe nor disbelieve without evidence" but rather as, "If something doesn't comport with my [certainly limited and probably incorrect] understanding of our [certainly limited and probably incorrect] understanding of reality, it should be mocked and dismissed."
And, no matter how hard I try, I can not wrap my head around how the latter follows from anything except yet another case of over-privileging our own perspective, and patting ourselves on the back for being so clever as to have inherited the trials-and-errors of aeons of ancestors, without crediting more than a token named few of them for any of that work (and often in some backhanded way that undercuts them as much as credits them. "That Newton. He sure was smart. Too bad he drank so much mercury...").
So, yes, Asimov was right. Of course our knowledge improves and is refined over time — assuming we're pursuing correct-enough theories that we don't get stuck in various local minima of understanding. But I wasn't disagreeing with him in the first place.
Regarding leeches and bloodletting, of course it helps in some cases, in the same way that executing random actions sometimes helps: by chance. To get from anecdata to systematic application, you need scientific inquiry to form a model of why it helps.
This doesn't follow, you can be smart and also wrong. It's also possible to be smart and not have good enough tools. The randomized controlled trial (RCT), for instance, is a marvelous tool that might sound obvious to you, but that's only because you received the kind of education which wasn't possible for most of history. Those ancestors from a millenia ago, however smart they were, didn't have RCTs and didn't have the world-view which would make them value RCTs and even if they did their peers certainly didn't have the right world-view to value things learned from RCTs and as a result, through no fault of their own, those ancestors had a much harder time understanding reality than we do.
Religion doesn't even have to be based in fact to have merit. The fact that it has been around forever indicates that it is quite beneficial for it's adherants.
Why was everyone doing burnt offerings? The Old Testament mentions them and ancient peoples in many geographically isolated parts of the world were doing them.
It's really weird, there must be something in the human psyche that resonates with the idea of burnt offerings. Or maybe burning offerings produced effects from the gods, but I'm guessing it didn't do anything but be a ceremony or totem. It's still weird and has me puzzled but I'm pretty sure objectively it wasn't all that great of an idea and certainly don't think we should take up doing burnt offerings now even though it was pretty common practice in ancient times.
Though of course there have always been ephemeral fads surrounding Buddhism, which have come and gone. Employer-provided mindfulness consulting is likely one of them.
Interleaving quotes from various semi-related conversations plumps up the word count, grab that quote from a conversation about a shoe marketing campaign and segue it into a quote from a blogger who thinks barefoot running cures cancer.
Boom, there's your content production done for the day. Sweet. You can get a head start of reading the wikipedia entries on "incels" and "crypto" as you will be solving those questions tomorrow, so you should probably find out what those words mean.
That’s on purpose, because Jon Kabat-Zinn intended it to be a placeholder term. Also why I flagged the article, because epistemologically the idea of researching whether mindfulness works doesn’t even make sense. And there is no shortage of content on this topic that’s actually good, e.g. Willoughby Britton’s talks and interviews.
They're the ones choosing to pay the (presumably, in your conception at least) hucksters. Who keeps hucksters in business, but the people who give them money? What if the people paid for this mindfulness training were on the level, but the culture at the hiring organization was so rotten it would never stick? How does that blame fall at meditation's feet? Or even just the sheer fact that in the West we are inculcated from the youngest ages that validation, authority, and meaning are all external?
Your apparent lack of understanding of what mindfulness work actually is doesn't invalidate the concept, and your seeming biases against it probably preclude your ability to meaningfully grasp it.
Just because there's a hype cycle doesn't mean there's no value in the thing being hyped, and I'm genuinely dismayed that I should have to say that aloud in a forum dedicated to technology entrepreneurship, a thing that more or less wouldn't exist — or would, at a minimum, be unrecognizable — without them.
Yes, hype cycles are problematic. But they're the problem, more than the thing being hyped. Let's think more critically than that, hmm?
If you separate the things you think you need from the stuff you really need, then a lot of incidental stressors don't really affect you most of the time. But a lot of really big stresses (like your company's antics) that seemed like "have to" turn out to be "choose to".
They've hired a guru because they think it's cheaper than fixing the real problems. If the guru does the job properly, boy are they screwed. Instead of their little cogs thinking, "these problems aren't so bad" they may find themselves thinking, "these problems don't have to be my problems."
Btw, It is not meant for some random company to improve productivity. ;)
When your agile consultant gives up where do you turn?
Happier employees are more productive! Mindfulness to the rescue, at least it will look like we care.
There's a difference between over-hyped and nonsense. Mindfulness might be over-hyped, but its not nonsense.
It's a bit unfair to apply it where it's not meant to be applied and discard it for being useless, isn't it?
Considering mindfulness meditation has been around for millenia, I kind of doubt it's going away. You seem to be very pessimistic of mindfulness meditation. Have you given it a chance? It really has helped a lot of people.
If it works or not, I don’t know but I enjoy my moment of silence a lot. I also love that it gives me more and more frequently moments where I realize where and when I actually am instead of moving on autopilot through my day.
As cliche as it sounds, I for example stopped listening to music on the train and just listen to my surroundings and “be there”. My social media and phone addiction almost completely disappeared and I’m just in general a nicer person.
Again, what of that is actually attributed to meditation and mindfulness, I don’t know but it’s been great.
Running is somewhat similar in that at first it is uncomfortable but your body learns to lean into it.
That being said, prolonged periods of mindfulness and focus can bring about unparalleled states of bliss, but those are fleeting.
That's what being mindful is all about! It teaches you how to be present in the moment and let those negative anxious thoughts pass by rather than consume you.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/25/mental-healt...
There is no letting go unless your meditation practice has first allowed you to fully express that which is holding you back.
Meditation isn’t just getting into the zone.
Have you tried? It's not easy. It's taken months but my anxiety has noticeably decreased, though there's still a long way to go. Several times I've "let my guard down" and relapsed, thinking that I didn't have to try so hard anymore. I've come to admit that it's going to be a daily thing that I have to watch for, though it does get easier.
> There is no letting go unless your meditation practice has first allowed you to fully express that which is holding you back.
Yes, that's exactly what you have to do. You can't let something go if you don't know what it is. Maybe you have an inaccurate idea of what mindfulness is?
Lol, I'd much rather prefer for those negative anxious thoughts to not occur in the first place (and there is a superior method to achieve this), much less having to have to let them pass by or consume me. This is why meditation is not a solution.
I suspect you're doing this without realizing it; you're analyzing your anxieties until you understand them, and then they stop happening over time as you stop giving them so much attention.
Also, while negative thoughts are not pleasant, learning to maintain your sense of self while under duress (whether internally or externally derived) can be very useful.
I'm curious to hear about your solution / "superior" method though, even if I am skeptical for the reasons given above.
See my other comment about the method I practice.
That this can facilitate less "holding on" to thoughts and emotional states is a nice side effect.
For me and the communities I am a part of - I've noticed something that feels "deeper", here, which is that I've learned to not try to avoid things that feel negative - really, to befriend and even welcome every and all emotional state with curiosity and compassion. In this way, I've felt much less reactive, and much more capable of introspecting on what is going on within myself. This, combined with various other practices, support, and therapy, has been uncovering some really big changes in my life, both internally and externally.
This reminds me of a concept that is frequently discussed by a teacher and author I recommend - Tara Brach (she has a great podcast series).
She talks about the twin wings of compassion and awareness that are fundamental to many schools of Buddhism. Awareness === mindfulness, mastery of the mind and thought. Without compassion, i.e., opening of the heart - mindfulness doesn't have the same kind of potency for cultivation. It's hard to fly with only one wing. There's been a very large push for mindfulness but less so for unconditional love. Probably because we are a very cognitively-focused society, with many, many powerful disembodying influences.
To stay connected to ones heart is a somatic experience. In my own experience and, again, hearing from many others, this is much more challenging than practicing different kinds of mindfulness meditation on a regular basis. Certainly not even remotely close to impossible - it's a natural state of our physiology that's often been deconditioned. There are many tools, techniques, and systems to help us re-access this state.
With compassion, unconditional love can be brought to all aspects of yourself, all parts of experience that our egoic states might want to categorize as "bad" (or "good"). And, if we can really give this to ourselves, then we bring it out into the world, to share with as many beings as possible.
Anxiety went away from the moment that I've read and accepted that there is no right or bad way to being mindful or meditate. Also not being negative against bad feelings that could arise when practicing and just observe was a big step for me and made it easier to make it go away or make it less powerfull.
1. Useful $THING gets mentioned in the news (mindfulness, AI, cryptocurrency, ...)
2. $THING gets hyped into orbit ($THING consultants, $THING apps, $THING books, $THING as a way of life, ...)
3. We start seeing articles like "$THING has been over-hyped" or "$THING results not replicated".
4. $THING drops out of the limelight, sometimes into a worse position than it started in because of the 'negative' press.
5. A new $THING emerges ...
Edited: not trying to be snarky here (see below for the actual term I was looking for). It's just that this is a pattern I've seen repeated so many times, in tech. and elsewhere.
Mindfulness, according to Wikipedia:
>In Buddhist teachings, mindfulness is utilized to develop self-knowledge and wisdom that gradually lead to what is described as enlightenment
(by the way there were recent discussions of meditation, more of the get thing done variety, by the Sapiens guy here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905249 and a link to Seinfeld on Meditation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13909346 which I'm having a look at)
So my suggestion is while meditating, drop all that stuff, sit alone at home/indoor, or quiet outdoor area, and just be meditative while listening to your breath instead of "meditating", and trust you understand basic human decency. Being yogic-like, or whatever, doesn't mean you have to be what people commonly think that means. Just be you.
That's how I've always viewed yoga/tantra as at it's core. There is more to yoga and tantra than that but there is no need to go there unless you're interested. For most people, they just want to de-stress and heal their mind and body and be themselves. The regular practice of meditation like this extends into regular activities and has improved my productivity, tempered my reactivity to shit, etc.
I believe that "mindfulness" is also used in more than one way, and as a result may or may not refer to a kind of meditation.
I have a book "The Mind Illuminated", which discusses meditation (i) in great detail, and suggests a self-check as you begin meditating, though with different steps than HALT.
Disclaimer: I know very little about meditation, and some of this might be wrong. But it's certainly complicated, and words refer to many different things.
Mindfulness practice encompasses cultivating awareness of internal states, so the HALT thing can be seen as a limited form of that. The meditation aspect is typically used more to practice non-reactivity, body awareness, and to understand the temporary nature of things. For example, in one practice you sit still and make a mental note of all the sounds you hear. You hear them start and end, consider the qualities of the sound (loud, rhythmic, high pitch, etc) and you notice your reaction to them (do you get startled when the ice maker goes off? Are the sounds of birds calming?). You allow yourself to welcome new sounds into your perception, and try not to linger or dwell on old ones when they're gone. Obviously it's not directly practical to most things, but the idea is that you learn to feel alright with the temporary nature of things, pleasant or unpleasant, and can then apply that to your own emotions or other external situations.
Notice "right mindfulness" is different than "right concentration" and it is just 1/8th of the path. When your hypothesis is 1/8th of the complete picture, of course your studies will prove it does not work.
There are a bunch of similar comments here, this is just a slightly different angle on it.
Given that - how do you do a statistical analysis across the population of mindfulness meditation vs. pill popping? Pills always work, often with horrible debilitating side effects (yay Opioids!). Meanwhile the monk I met who learned to walk again after being confined to a wheelchair (gymnastics injury) had to sit under a tree for several years doing muscle exercises and willing the pain away.
So of course science can't rationalize it. How do you measure the strength of will of people? It's not so easy to put these sorts of things into a study. So I guess we'll keep eating the poison pill. Shrug.
We are clearly on different things.
I also don't know what walking on ones thumbs has to do with mindfullness.
You don't need to do a statistical analysis. We have other tools that can be used like double blind trials comparing meditation and medication.
Anyways, I think you should be very careful about placing much stock in anything that can't be studied in a scientific way. Such a thing would by definition have no measurable effect on the world or be unchangeable.
News businesses will create a hype curve for every phenomenon.
First it’s a fringe crazy idea, then it’s the new hotness, then it should be a part of your daily life, then someone decides they’re edgy and it’s not for them, then it’s basically cancer, then a story of how it grew too fast and has collapsed.
And the funny thing is, it’s almost a negative signal of what’s valuable. By the time The Guardian or CNN is talking about bitcoin, you have no chance of making a dime.
Meanwhile at University of Wisconsin, Madison:
Study reveals gene expression changes with meditation
https://news.wisc.edu/study-reveals-gene-expression-changes-...
"Peering into the meditating mind"
https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2018/peering-m...
(edit for clarity)
Personally I don't think that mindfulness/medition/... is overhyped but the tools/apps/courses are. There is really no need to spends hunderds of euro's to being mindfull or learn the practices.
I recently read Goleman's Emotional Intelligence. One of the key takeaways for me was the nature of mindfulness/meditation. To paraphase Goleman Mindfulness/meditation works by alleviating your mood. So, if there is lot of anger or you tend to get worried a lot, meditation works.
But, if you tend to be more dispirited most of the time then meditation actually doesn't work for you. A better solution is to try and get into an upbeat mood. Exercise, exciting adventure sports etc might be a better option.
Nothing.
It does not lead to better memories. It does not lead to more satisfaction. It does not bring more joy. It does not make you more productive. Does it help you focus better? Maybe. But practicing to actually focus is much more efficient.
It's like asking someone who did psychedelics to explain it to you. They'll always tell you the experience is not something you can understand with words alone.
One observation is that mindfulness meditation in the night reduced sleep quality.
Second is that mindfulness meditation is another exercise. It is aimed at increasing focus, since what you are doing is trying to focus. It isn't a cure for every mental ailment.
I find these articles very frustrating.
"Maybe it's good, sounds like of good, right? But studies are inconclusive!"
So what are you saying? And why so many stock photos?
As the battle for our attention increases rapidly, its going to be ever more important to truly understand all these tools and make use of them.
I think the meaning of mindfulness is mis-understood in a very large part of the population rather than it being over-hyped.
This shouldn't take away from the fact that mindfulness does help people. Just that if you're paying for it, you are quite likely doing it wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGjXEM1HZ54&t=1s
TLDR There are other things necessary for mindfulness/meditation to really take off. Things like ethics, right view and other parts of Eightfold Path (buddhist practice). Those give a mind basic clarity and joy necessary for successful practice.
"Dude, you should check out mindfulness. You'd really be into it."
Nope. As best I could ever tell, mindfulness was a pop-psych pastiche of various bits of Buddhism, Daoism, and Stoicism designed to sell self-help books and consulting hours.
I can't speak for Buddhism and I've heard that the Daodejing appears cryptic now because the body of contemporary Chinese literature it frequently alludes to has been largely lost to history. But the surviving late stoic works are surprisingly accessible, even in stilted translations, making it much easier to see through attempts to repackage old ideas and make a quick buck.
In practice, and to draw a shitty analogy: using logic, you know you shouldn't eat that cupcake because it's 800kcal. You can also curb your sugar addiction so you don't feel so hungry for cupcakes.
That being said I agree with you: "mindfulness" in isolation is just a buzzword, which is what this article is trying to say.
But I always reply the same way to people who preach mindfulness and meditation to me.
I've independently studied the stoics, the east etc etc for years. And always made my time for "vita contemplativa" which doesn't necessarily mean sitting down trying to escape thought.
I am generally much more grounded than anyone even telling me to do it.
Highly recommend these two scholarly volumes about Eastern philosophy -> https://www.amazon.com/History-Chinese-Philosophy-Vol-Philos...
Can't find the matching references, but he speaks of meditation actually beginning as a walking ritual. There is also a chapter on the Taoist's who found mindfulness through being drunk aha
Edit: Also obligatory Nietzche quote -> "Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world"