Overwork and burnout are affecting many Americans.
The American Psychological Association’s 2023 Work and Well-being Survey found that 77% of Americans suffered from workplace stress. Many feel under constant pressure to get ahead and are not able to take a break. Employees report that their workplaces do not encourage mental health or work-life balance.
As a result, an increasing number of Americans have turned to meditation.
In my book “The Mindful Elite,” I tracked the mindfulness movement from 1979 until 2015. I spoke with more than 100 meditators who run 61 mindful programs and organizations that bring mindfulness to secular workplaces and schools.
Many of them told me how meditation helped them approach their work and lives with more patience, empathy and self-reflection. Meditation, they said, helped alleviate stress and increased their attention and self-awareness. Other studies also affirm mindfulness can help people cope with anxiety, depression and pain.
But are there limits – or even downsides – to bringing meditation to work?
Early mindfulness leaders were remarkably successful in spreading meditation across America. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist, began his mindfulness-based stress reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979 to provide a complementary and alternative model of care for the chronically ill.
By 2022, meditation had become the most prevalent relaxation practice in the U.S., with 18% of Americans adopting it.
Meditation has become popular in offices and schools. To fit into the workweeks of busy professionals, meditation teachers often offer shorter entry-level sessions tailored to host organizations’ goals and schedules.
Meditation instructors secularize and justify mindfulness as aiding health and performance in a cost-effective manner that serves the bottom line.
These approaches have led to some critiques that the primarily white and Western teachers are wrongfully appropriating the practices to support aims antithetical to Buddhist tenets of nonviolence or nonattachment to worldly outcomes.
Leaders of the early mindfulness movement said they wanted to transform society for the greater good.
Kabat-Zinn wanted to foster greater “awareness” through mindfulness so people would become more conscious of what motivated their actions. For example, it could help them understand if they were driven by their own sense of self-aggrandizement or greed and inspire them to change.
In most of the organizations I studied, contemplative practice did not reach the organizational core and transform the larger workplaces they were a part of. Instead, employees reported that mindfulness was seen as marginal to core missions and workplace expectations.
Companies might offer recreational yoga in their fitness room, but it was often not used to address the underlying cause of stress, such as extremely high workloads and the emphasis on the economic bottom line at the core of corporate culture.
Even though some programs may benefit highly stressed-out workers, they struggle to bring lessons learned from meditation into competitive work cultures beyond their meditation groups.
Mindfulness teacher and scholar Cathy-Mae Karelse questions whether because mindfulness programs so closely mimic typical business and educational structures, they have lost the “emancipatory potential” some founders hoped for.
In her book “Work, Pray, Code,” Carolyn Chen shows how some Silicon Valley tech firms have adapted spiritual practices to such an extent that they have come to be used to support corporate ends, rather than individual liberation.
I fear mindfulness is all too often becoming a Band-Aid that helps sustain overburdened employees on an endless quest for more productivity.
Jaime L. Kucinskas is an associate professor of sociology at Hamilton College. Distributed by The Conversation and The Associated Press.
