
Mindfulness Meditation Impairs Task Motivation but Not Performance [pdf] - RangerScience
https://sci-hub.tw/downloads/2310/10.1016@j.obhdp.2018.05.001.pdf
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kumarvvr
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.

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ssijak
Those 2 things are not mutually exclusive.

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heavenlyblue
I just don't see how spiritual awakening suddenly makes a person working 9-5
in a cubicle more happy. For all it is, it probably makes him wonder if living
in a forest outside civilization is actually a way more reasonable choice.

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eternalban
Contentment is a state of mind.

~~~
user5454
Still it's easier and more pleasant to maintain that state of mind not sitting
inside a cubicle with a boss yelling at you to work harder.

~~~
BioMeditate
I'm now picturing a boss telling an employee "Contentment is a state of mind"
and that we also need to that hundredth "TPS" report done today

~~~
user5454
The IT Crowd's take on it:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZTvMYQSl_w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZTvMYQSl_w)

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passive
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.

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mettamage
Where could you learn it though? Grown up typically Dutch, I learned Tonglen
by reading search inside yourself. Other than your comment, I never came
across it.

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helloindia
Tonglen is a popular practice in Tibetan Buddhist Schools. There are several
other practices like, Eight Verses of Mind Training, Generating Bodhichitta
with Equalizing self and others. One won't find such methods in general
meditation books, as these are practices specific to Mahayana Buddhism.

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cimmanom
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.

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fny
> Maybe mindfulness just gave them some perspective on how pointless it was.

"One hundred and one Amazon Mechanical Turk workers whose location was set to
the United States took part in exchange for $1.35 each."

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cimmanom
Oh, better: under uncontrolled conditions where it was impossible to tell
whether anyone actually meditated and there's likely to be some self-selection
bias.

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kazishariar
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.

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hinkley
Which sounds great to CEOs but there’s one problem:

When you use mindfulness while the CEO is talking and realize his or her
problems are their own making and why should you kill yourself to make a lie
true?

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spicymaki
I don't see why this is a problem. However, sometimes you can't escape your
situation and sometimes you have to do things you don't like to support
yourself and others. This is not incompatible with mindfulness.

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nabla9
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.

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tsenkov
>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.

Interesting. Would you care to share an example of this?

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sebosp
I see it like being aware of impulse timings in you, for example, I now and
then feel the waves of both happiness and sadness, when they come and leave
and I understand it's temporary, I realize the mood it leaves and that it will
end and as I'm focusing on the effect of it on the body I don't quite take so
much place on happiness/depression, more like observe and let it be. This
state of acceptance is strange for me when it comes to searching for
success/praise at work, it is stranger when remembering new/better
job/car/app/travel is needed and it's strangest when searching for a
significant other.

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notduncansmith
This sounds familiar. For a long time, I didn’t know how to internally
straddle the line between “acceptance” (as you put it) and nihilism. Now,
while I feel I have a grip on it internally, I still struggle to communicate
with others in a relatable way.

When my opinion is requested, I usually find it most natural to come to the
conclusion of “inconclusive”, which people around me find to be evidence of
either weak character or lack of trust.

I find it difficult to be outraged about anything for more than a few seconds,
after which I’d prefer to either talk about solutions or stop bathing in self-
congratulatory angst that has no action justifying it. I also find it very
hard to talk negatively about anyone, even those whose actions are abhorrent.
Refusing to participate in lambasting a group target usually results in
becoming visibly less-accepted within that group.

I don’t really do social media, not out of moral superiority but because I
don’t have a large enough network of friends to get value out of it
(especially relative to the large perceived cost of giving away heaps of
information about myself to untrustworthy megacorps). People usually assume
I’m trying to sound better than them when we talk about it, despite my
disclaimers that I don’t judge anyone who does use these products.

So, by giving up values that seem unhealthy, and picking up some that seem
better, I’m still alienated from the people I wanted to more fully enjoy the
presence of in the first place. When I’m by myself, I’m pretty balanced,
“riding the waves” as you say. Then the loneliness and hunger for validation
set in, and I’m right back to square 1.

I don’t know how to reconcile this.

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petra
I resonate with many of the things you, if not completely , at lest in
direction i'm heading.

>> Then the loneliness and hunger for validation set in,

I'm thinking about getting a dog. It's suppose to be great for validation and
against loneliness, and also, taking care of a dog seems really compatible
with the spiritual path - a caring, compassionate relationship - but a silent
one.

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tsumnia
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.

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AlexCoventry
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.

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siliconc0w
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.

~~~
zer00eyz
This is probably one of the few cases where mindfulness truly applies.

That having been said it isn't solving the root problem. You can't fix
stupid... you can fix a lack of knowledge, experience and practical
understanding - but that has to come from culture not individuals.

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hugozap
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.

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grwthckrmstr
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".

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jl2718
“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?

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ncmncm
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.

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kreutz
Most engaged yet least attached.

~~~
s-shellfish
As soon as one attaches themselves to the way things should be, it can be easy
to lose sight of the way things are.

But honestly, it takes a very creative and devoted mind to be able to do that
constantly for things like coding. You can appreciate the bugs for what they
are (problems to solve and validate skill), but that doesn't mean lose
awareness of the problems they can cause in the future.

Appreciating a broken bridge in an artsy way is one thing, letting people
drive over it because 'death is a natural part of life' is entirely another
story.

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backpropaganda
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.

~~~
spicymaki
Emotional detachment is not the goal of mindfulness practice as I understand
it. The point of mindfulness practice is to become more of aware of your body,
mind, feelings, and develop insight to things as they really are (see
Satipatthana).

Devaluing emotions is exactly the opposite of the point of practice. Instead
you want to get in touch with your emotions, deeply. The trick with not going
off the rails emotionally is karma. Positive actions (e.g. generosity,
patience, truthfulness) produce positive emotions, negative actions (e.g.
speaking ill of others, lying, stealing) produce negative emotions. Karma can
also help overcome nihilistic thought. Your actions actually do mean something
to yourself and others (at least subjectively) and you can see and feel the
results in real life.

I agree with you said about context. I think opportunists are extracting these
techniques out of their original context and selling it as a panacea to all of
your problems. This is wrong and can only lead to harm.

~~~
pdpi
That’s a wonderfully practical and non-mystical definition of karma.

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m0llusk
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.

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benevol
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.

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wool_gather
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17329396)

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amelius
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.

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meow_mix
How are people still trying to drive utility out of this

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lopmotr
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.

~~~
wudangmonk
you can only better understand yourself through meditation, its not a divine
state where the secrets of the universe are revealed to you.

~~~
bunnymancer
I think he was being sarcastic...

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alfredallan1
Maybe. Maybe not.

>Why aren't they generating awesome works of science or philosophy or
literature or something with all that clear-headedness

Maybe they don’t want to? Maybe their motivation is towards intrinsic goals,
while science/literature/etc. are all extrinsic.

Just because they aren’t doing X doesn’t naturally and obviously mean it is
because they cannot do X. e.g. I can readily be a manager, and have more of
certain (in)tangible things, but choose not to, because that line of work
interests me less than other kinds of work. Just as, by the same token, just
because somebody wants to do X doesn’t mean they can do it. e.g. I really want
to be a talented rockstar with mad guitar skills, but I cannot becuse I am
largely tone deaf.

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lopmotr
No doubt they are successful pursuing their intrinsic goals. But the
disconnect I saw was between monks who don't work and workers meditating to
become more productive. Maybe the meditation is actually the cause of their
not working and is harmful for productivity. It might lead you to do as little
work as possible, even if you do what you do do really well and feel very
personally satisfied.

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alfredallan1
Whose productivity?

The individual’s? If my needs are simple, and easily met by working 2 hours a
day, what reason do I have to toil 18 hour days? To enrich someone else? My
skills and talents are for me to decide what to do with. What right does
someone else have to dictate how much I ought to work?

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lopmotr
I'm thinking of the advice you sometimes hear about meditating so that you'll
be better at your job. Maybe it makes you better at your life but not at work.

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alfredallan1
Yes, and it lets you be better at whatever you want to be better at. It also
lets you figure out what you really want to be better at, rather than
arbitrarily pegging that down to be one's job. And isn’t one’s work really
part of one’s life?

All it does, really, is put people in a more focussed, balanced state of mind,
and shut down much of the incessant internal monologue. Someone focussed is
generally better at their job than someone distracted.

So as one of the comments mentioned about monks not producing works of art or
science - if an artist/scientist really did get into meditation, and if they
were innately passionate about their art/science, they would get better at it.
But it is presumptous to assume that the average monk wants be do art/science.

