Mindfulness Meditation Impairs Task Motivation but Not Performance [pdf]

Meditation, in ancient and present India, is a tool for spiritual development, contemplation on the true nature of self and an aide to allow for detachment from worldly matters.

Its not meant to be a method to calm down workers so that they will produce more profit for a corporation.

As someone who grew up in a western Buddhist community (and skimmed the article), this rings true to me.

I largely credit my success at work to the tools for working with my mind imparted by my upbringing and continued practice. However, mindfulness is just one of those tools.

There are forms of meditation that build upon mindfulness that I would argue can be very helpful to motivation. To put it another way, once you are able to focus your mind on the present moment, there are other things you can focus it on.

For instance, if I've got a meeting coming up where I need to partner with people with whom I know I usually have a combative relationship, engaging in a compassion meditation, such as Tonglen, motivates me to see their problems and want to help solve them.

Mindfulness itself is wonderful, but it is among the most basic of techniques for training your mind. It is remarkably comparable to physical exercise, where a basic level of activity yields amazing results for your overall health, but must be accompanied by specific training if you want to dramatically change your physical capabilities.

On a meaningless task under laboratory conditions. Maybe mindfulness just gave them some perspective on how pointless it was.

I don't see how this is relevant to the real workplace where stress can be paralyzing and burnout is a greater threat to productivity and motivation than being chill is.

The very meaning of mindfulness is to detach from the self, and to do each and every task no matter how mundane it is as if brand new at each and every moment. Kind of like to see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wildflower hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour --so to say. So though the mundaneness of everything is quite real, the absolute newness of every moment is just as apparent. It's as if nothing has changed, yet everything has -jus all at once. At least w/o sounding too new age-y about it.

My experience is that concentration directed meditation is more like a tool. You can use concentrative skills to advance towards direction you want in the life. You are in control.

If you do awareness oriented practice long enough, it starts to work on you. You are on the ride 'to the unknown'. Motivations change and unless you make nessesary changes in your life, you lose motivation and have life chrisis. Usual solution is to quit meditation or do so little that you don't change. Many people have romantic notion of transcendence and enlightement, but when meditation starts to really work they realize that's not what they actually want. Change is scary.

As a former mindfulness case study, I'm sad to hear it was not helpful to this study. While the report does cover a number of experiments, the limitation to their research is the use of self-reports. While you can attempt to frame questions in a way to reduce priming, self-reporting is not a good metric because people can begin to respond with what they think you want to hear. Furthermore, the granularity of the timeframes for the experiments seems pretty small. In the case study I was involved in, we were tracked over months/years and showed higher "mindfulness scores" (granted, self-reported, so same limitation). A better approach (though time and cost expensive) would be to perform a longitudinal study on participants and measure their performance overtime. This removes the "answering with what you want to hear" issue while strengthening the study's validity.

As an aside, I like to look towards the Tao of Pooh (or I suppose general Taoism?). The idea is to not let things get you down, but to appreciate the here and now. Mundane activities exist and sometimes you have to do them, but if you can "get over" its mundanity, you can return to enjoying other things.

These are very weak results. High p-values, and no mention of correction for multiple sampling. There is no reason to trust this paper's conclusions.

Mindfulness is (for me) very helpful for inter-personal tasks. Someone might say or write something that might normally provoke a task-devolving-reaction where I enumerate why they're wrong or maybe go with something snide or passive aggressive - which might make me feel better but predictably isn't very constructive. After practicing mindfulness I can usually catch myself and divert energies to more constructive routes.

makes sense, mindfulness meditation changes the perceived value of rewards. Maybe someone stops ranking social status as high on their list and will not be motivated to do tasks that are only rewarded with social points.

I don't think motivation decreases for tasks that are meaningful to the individual, it can be good if the workplace goals are aligned with those of the individual, or bad if they are disconnected.

Mindfulness helped me single out most of the meaningless BS that I did in my life and work, and so I subconsciously started eliminating a lot of them.

Might make me "less productive" but did make me "more satisfied".

“These effects explain why mindfulness does not alter performance”

Isn’t it some kind of crime against statistics to offer explanations for the null hypothesis?

It looks to me like it worked perfectly. The subjects increased their ability to recognize that they would better do something else meaningful. If my colleagues became less interested in pointless busywork, that would improve my life as well as theirs.

Most engaged yet least attached.

I'm singularly glad someone did this research. Anecdata: Mindfullness never worked for me, and I suspect even harmed me some. I noticed that I became more nihilist and depressed when I used to meditate. Meditation basically made me start realizing the pointlessness of everything, the little value of emotions, which is great if your goal is to become unemotional and destressed. However, stress and emotions are how humans do great things. It's what motivates us to overcome nihilism, and desire to do something, be someone, etc. I hope more research is done, and we prescribe Mindfullness only contextually and not as a panacea.

It will be interesting to see how reproducible this is. Meditation can contribute to clarity of thought. If the task is an experiment or work that helps people and pays or something a child needs may effectively all be different cases.

Right, why don't we all just keep eating Modafinil or whatever new stimulants, drugs or meds are en vogue, in order to be able to keep doing meaningless jobs in the most efficient manner.

Related HN discussion from two days ago, linking to a NYTimes article by the authors of this paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17329396

Could someone with experience in both comment about the difference between mindfulness meditation and progressive muscle relaxation? I suspect there is an overlap in mechanism of action between these two methods, but I could be wrong.

How are people still trying to drive utility out of this

I used to wonder why Buddhist monks seemed to do so little productive work despite all the productivity their meditation was supposed to bring. Why aren't they generating awesome works of science or philosophy or literature or something with all that clear-headedness? This might explain it.