No clear evidence that meditation or mindfulness makes you happy | Hacker News Reader

No clear evidence that meditation or mindfulness makes you happy

newscientist.com

9 pointssahin6 comments

It may be my neurodivergence but “mindfulness” has long driven me up the wall. I’ve come to understand better what the nature of my intrusive thoughts are and why I can never make them go away but instead that I can change myself, possibly quite radically, by replacing them with something else.

Well... believing that meditation and mindfulness are supposed to make you happy is a misconception. They are tools for helping you calm and examine yourself, so you can make happiness a possibility, because you are managing stress and anxiety and setting realistic, rational priorities on everything.

They are the broom that sweeps the path clean... the path still goes where it goes. Changing paths is a conscious effort... you have to do the work.

> Of the 532 studies that fit their criteria, only four were considered robust by today’s standards – defined as having at least 45 participants, as well as a clearly pre-registered plan at the start of the experiment to prevent later bias.

Ah yes, we should be applying today’s standards to yesterday’s knowledge. Give me a break.

Is this paid content from big pharma? Concrete jungles and the typical 9to5 make us happier than nature could ever do.

Perhaps some things simply cannot be captured by scientific methods and numbers.

> Hundreds of studies claim that mindfulness, walking in nature and expressing gratitude make us happier. But a new review found that most of the research papers looking into these strategies are based on small, poorly designed trials, which could make their conclusions unreliable.

> This doesn’t mean these interventions don’t work, but we need much more solid scientific research to prove that they do, says Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Uh no, I don't. If taking a nature walk makes me feel better, I'll do it without waiting for proof provided by others. There's also a difference between being happy and feeling good. Being happy is like being excited or laughing or enjoying something really tasty. Feeling good is like the way you feel right after a good yawn. It's not exciting, but it does feel like the absence of 'not good'.

This is BS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZksQBlURBQ

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