Meditation can reduce stress, but the pressure to overwork remains

Overwork and burnout affect many Americans.

American Psychological Association Work and Wellbeing Survey 2023 found that 77% of Americans suffered from workplace stress. More than half of respondents reported symptoms of burnout, ranging from emotional exhaustion to a desire to quit.

Many Americans feel constant pressure to move forward and are unable to take a break. Employees report that their workplaces do not support mental health or work-life balance.

As a result, an an increasing number of Americans I turned to meditation. Some people employ it to take a break from work, others to refocus or, more generally, to improve their mental health.

In my book “Conscious Elite”, I followed the development of the mindfulness movement from 1979 to 2015. I spoke with over 100 meditators who run 61 mindfulness programs and organizations that bring mindfulness to secular workplaces and schools across the country.

Many of them told me how meditation helped them approach work and life with more patience, empathy and self-reflection. They claim that meditation helped relieve stress and increased attention and self-awareness. Other research also supports mindfulness can aid people deal with anxiety, depression and pain. However, it is worth asking: are there limitations – or even disadvantages – in using meditation in practice?

Mindfulness as a panacea

Early mindfulness leaders had extraordinary success in spreading meditation across America. Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist, started his own Mindfulness-based stress reduction program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979 to provide a complementary and alternative model of care for chronically ill people.

He hoped to share “The essence of Buddhist mindfulness”, as he wrote, as part of “mainstream medicine”. Over 25,000 people have completed his mindfulness-based stress reduction program and it continues to be implemented around the world.

By 2022, meditation has become the most common relaxation practice in the United States, 18% of Americans have adopted it. Many people employ meditation to solve a health problem or turn to it when they lack access to conventional medical care.

Meditation has become popular in offices and schools in North America and Europe. To fit into the work weeks of busy professionals, meditation teachers often offer shorter, entry-level practice sessions tailored to the host organization’s goals and busy schedules. Some schools even offer compact, 15-minute lessons.

Meditation instructors secularize and justify mindfulness as an aid to health and performance in cost-effective ways that serve the bottom line.

They also tailor it to make it appealing to the people they work with. The law enforcement and military trainer explained, “It’s very mission-oriented in terms of my combat experiences.[…]We basically designed a curriculum that would appeal to these types of people.” He didn’t talk about meditation or do “anything they would consider weird or unusual” on his show. He said he didn’t even employ the word mindfulness.

These approaches have led to criticism that are appropriated primarily by white and Western teachers practices that support goals that contradict the Buddhist principles of non-violence and detachment from worldly outcomes.

Coping mechanism or transformative practice?

Leaders of the early mindfulness movement said they wanted to change society for the greater good through practice. Their goal was to spread meditation practices in science, health care, prisons, schools and other institutions.

Kabat-Zinn wanted to develop greater “awareness” through mindfulness, so that people become more aware of what motivates their actions. For example, it can aid them understand whether they were driven by their own sense of self-aggrandizement or greed, and inspire them to change.

Saki Santorelli, former leader of a mindfulness-based stress reduction program, similarly hoped that embedding mindfulness in secular institutions would force practitioners to understand the necessary reality of interconnectedness. This reality draws on the Buddhist belief that all life is interdependent and interconnected, rather than existing independently on its own. By training your mind and heart, he hoped they would find out their universal responsibility to others and aid create more inclusive economic systems.

Meditation to support corporate goals

Yet in most organizations I have studied, contemplative practice has not penetrated the organizational core and transformed the larger workplaces of which it was a part. Instead, employees reported that mindfulness was perceived as peripheral to key workplace missions and expectations.

Companies can offer recreational yoga in your fitness room for employees, but was often not used to address the root cause of stress, such as exceptionally hefty workloads and an emphasis on economic performance that underpin corporate culture.

While some programs may benefit highly stressed workers, they fail to achieve this bring the lessons learned from meditation to a competitive work culture outside of their meditation groups.

Mindfulness teacher and researcher Cathy-Mae Karelse asks whether mindfulness programs that so closely mimic typical business and educational structures have lost the “emancipatory potential” that some founders hoped for.

In his book “Work, pray, code” Caroline Chen shows how some Silicon Valley technology companies have adapted spiritual practices to the point that they have begun to employ them to support corporate goals rather than individual liberation.

For example, one company even placed its logo in the center of the maze. Walking through a circular labyrinthine labyrinth to arrive at a place that emphasizes corporate loyalty seems to reflect the liberatory purpose of performing this practice. This is a far cry from the goals of many spiritual practitioners, which is to employ practice as a transcendent metaphorical journey to a place of deeper personal insight.

I fear that mindfulness too often becomes a medicine that helps keep overworked workers in a never-ending quest for greater productivity.