The Problem with Mindfulness
Mindfulness can be useful for quieting a busy mind, but it isn’t sufficient to enable you to make sense of your thoughts and achieve your goals.
“Mindfulness” is a buzzword in the self-improvement world these days. Many popular figures tout it as a way to improve your happiness, calm your mind, and reach a state of clear focus. But is it really the best way to achieve those goals?
First, what is mindfulness? According to Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, mindfulness is “the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” The subject of this state of awareness, Kabat-Zinn explains, can be “virtually anything,” although he uses the common example of concentrating on your breathing. The “non-judgmental” part, he says, means not judging yourself for the thought patterns you notice, but gently bringing your awareness back to the subject you’re trying to focus on.
Self-help speakers use a similar definition. For example, Tim Ferriss calls mindfulness “a present-state awareness that helps you to be non-reactive.” Cultivating the practice of observing yourself without snap emotional judgments, he argues, will help you appreciate the positive things in life and focus on what’s important and valuable to you, rather than fixating on and complaining about negatives.
In my experience, mindfulness exercises can help me calm my mind. My brain is naturally very busy—it’s always abuzz with thoughts and feelings, some of which I’m not even consciously aware of. Taking a few moments to focus on my breathing or the sounds around me can help me slow things down enough to refocus. Often, priorities I’d forgotten about will spring back to the front of my mind as the din subsides. These exercises can also help me become aware of and identify the background thoughts and emotions that are muddying my thinking and affecting my mood.
But what should you do with that awareness once you have it? Mindfulness preaches being non-judgmental or non-reactionary. But what is the benefit of achieving clarity about your thoughts or your surroundings—only to sit passively and observe? How do you determine if a thought or sensation is good for your life or not—while being “non-judgmental”? We have minds that are capable of making rational judgments—why restrict ourselves from using them?
Fortunately, there’s a concept similar to mindfulness, but which addresses this key issue: “living consciously.” In his book The Art of Living Consciously, psychologist Nathaniel Branden defines it as “seeking to be aware of everything that bears on our actions, purposes, values, and goals—and behave in accordance with that which we see and know.”
Instead of the non-judgmental awareness that advocates of mindfulness promote, living consciously entails actively passing judgment about where to direct your awareness. “Living consciously has its roots in respect for reality—a respect for fact and truth,” Branden explains. Living consciously means thinking carefully and rationally about your purposes, values, and goals, then focusing a conscious awareness on anything relevant to them—whether that’s your thoughts and feelings, external threats and opportunities, or facts and principles that bear on your life and values. “If we are to learn to function effectively,” observes Branden, “we must learn to look in two directions: to preserve contact with the world and with the self.”
Whereas a mindfulness approach may treat a whim and a rational thought with an equally non-judgmental attitude, living consciously requires focusing on reality and rejecting the irrational. It entails judging the thoughts, feelings, and underlying motivations you discover through conscious introspection. This can take the form of such questions as, “Will these thoughts I’ve discovered help me achieve my goals?” “What is the real reason I’m feeling this emotion in response to this stimulus?” “If this value causes this feeling in me, is it the right value for me to pursue?”
If we are, as Branden advises, to “behave in accordance” with the things we observe in our active focus on that which affects our values, we must judge our reactions to those things and decide which are the proper reactions to act upon. The only way to do that is by using reason.
Mindfulness can be useful for quieting a busy mind, but it isn’t sufficient to enable you to make sense of your thoughts and achieve your goals. To do that, you must go beyond mindfulness and practice living consciously.