I’d like to take more of a skeptic’s orientation toward mindfulness and start with a question I often get asked when I pitch an idea for a research project. I get asked this question about mindfulness training by leaders of all kinds of organizations, and, in fact, I was asked most recently at the U.S. Pentagon, and it’s this: Does it work?
The question sounds simple, but I think what’s being communicated is a little more complex. What I think I’m being asked is: What are the real, known, effective benefits of mindfulness training? So I want to break this down to really explore its parts.
The first thing to examine in “Does it work” is the word “it.” What’s meant by that? Does it mean reading a book, downloading an app, listening to a lecture, or, potentially, signing up for a course that lasts a few weeks or a retreat that lasts several months? There are many forms of what “it” might mean. But when we think about research on mindfulness training, we have to constrain our questions to programs that we call “manual-ize,” meaning they actually follow a manual or a prescription that can be repeated by various…
