Mindfulness interventions for teens decrease mindfulness, study finds

Religious studies fails to make kids more religious. Abstinence programs taught in schools fail to increase celibacy. Health programs fail to dent mcdonalds market share. Arithmetic fails to stop people taking on unnecessary and punitive debt.<p>The point being pushing things (good, bad or ugly) in schools often doesn&#x27;t work out as hoped. Schooling is not a solved problem but it is a very crude tool used badly and often brutally by people of all kinds who wish to improve society by giving kids the tools to... You&#x27;ve heard it all before.

My belief is that societal and technological sophistication is overall extremely stressful for organisms that were prepared for a very different life by evolution.<p>Our neurosis is a byproduct of our success and of the highly complex and competitive nature of our social interactions.<p>Touching grass, spending time with animals, learning to accept and appreciate our animal roots, is what can balance the stress.

&gt; students have learned mindfulness techniques like breath awareness, thought observation, and emotional monitoring as part of their regular curriculum<p>Children are full of energy - they need to be let loose and run around. It’s like trying to teach peaceful and quite a 6 months old dog - you can’t. You need to let them burn all that energy.

Note that this is self-reported mindfulness. I don&#x27;t find it farfetched that someone who&#x27;s been taught mindfulness would self-report lower even though objectively they may have a higher degree of mindfulness.

As someone who grew up in the 90s, so many things seem to have changed to just cause a ton of anxiety that we didn&#x27;t have when I was growing up.<p>A typical day for me as a teenager would be to wake up, have breakfast (or maybe not), walk to school, strictly pen and paper work only, hang out with my friends at lunch. We might play Gameboy after school, the same game for weeks on end. If I wanted something to do I had to go outside and play, at home we maybe had books, it&#x27;s a self limiting form of entertainment.<p>Now it feels like everything is just so much more complicated. The me of today would wake up and stare at his phone for half an hour before even getting to school. It&#x27;s just massive overstimulation all of the time.<p>Mindfulness, even in adults, I find is a hack to avoid actually doing the things which lead to stress reduction.

&gt; The aim of these programs is to equip youth with skills to prevent mental disorders and enhance overall well-being.<p>The way I learned mindfulness meditation, you should not expect it to accomplish anything specific. I listened to a course and found the ideas new and helpful, it was so life changing that I went further and studied some Buddhist philosophy, but further studied brought some anxiety and so I stopped. My current attitude is that I got what I could from it, but won&#x27;t study it further.<p>I don&#x27;t think mindfulness should be viewed as any better than other life strategies.

It says it reduces “self-reported mindfulness”. Maybe you have to be at least a little mindful to realize how unmindful you are?<p>Similar to how people who have never studied cognitive bias assume they are unbiased.

This study is not even peer reviewed, is a pre-print and has low sample size.<p>How do we make all these conclusions so quickly

I think it&#x27;s likely that what is happening is the process of mindfulness (noticing your anxiety without judgement, and allowing it to exist and gently float away) is no match for that daily onslaught of culture, largely propagated via social media, that what we must do is focus and obsess on what makes us anxious. And if you don&#x27;t focus on what makes you anxious, you are a fool at best and an enemy combatant at worst.

Maybe the problem is conflating mindfulness and mental wellbeing a little bit?

Link to the preprint: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osf.io&#x2F;preprints&#x2F;psyarxiv&#x2F;qnk2u" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;osf.io&#x2F;preprints&#x2F;psyarxiv&#x2F;qnk2u</a><p>One other reference I&#x27;ve seen from a Tristan Harris interview is that mindfulness teaching effects (presumably for younger kids) can get negated by social media: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?t=3034&amp;v=3CdxIATnH_w&amp;feature=youtu.be" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?t=3034&amp;v=3CdxIATnH_w&amp;feature=y...</a>

This is named an &quot;intervention&quot;, but the article makes it clear it was training applied to everyone in some school. This is apparently called a &quot;universal mindfulness intervention&quot;, which seems an oxymoron, but whatever. Using the same psychological intervention on everyone seems misguided, if not harmful.

I have a feeling this study can be replicated with literally anything that uses &quot;school&quot; as an intervention vehicle except in cases where it is actually harmful for them (such as undergoing gender change surgeries).

This has more to do with anything tangentially related to or funded by central govt (like public education) failing to accomplish stated goals, rather than mindfulness being bad.

Color me shocked that trying to teach a teenager not to think about themselves so much is going to fail.<p>Mindfulness only works when you put the effort in to seek the equanimity it provides.<p>I think it&#x27;s hard for kids to make being calm and composed a virtue. You kind of have to get there as a consequence of experiencing a lot of chaos.<p>I think 2 hours of sport before all school would do more for most kids. Even if it was just a 2 hour walk outdoors.

wow the whole site is only pushing bullshit science. Its worth to click a bit on the other articles. Seems like an AI generated website.

I mean yeah. Giving someone new information can change their behavior if they incorporate it. But pushing them to act in a certain way.. Probably not, unless it&#x27;s coercive, which is bad for other reasons.<p>If you want kids to be mindful, be mindful yourself.

Obsessing about mental health harms mental health? Who could have guessed!

The more you vent, the more stressed you become. The key isn’t learning all these little tricks, it’s learning to persevere. Our society is so weak that the idea of mental toughness is shunned as “toxic masculinity” or whatever but the fact is depression and suicide rates have soared as we’ve gotten away from the idea that toughness is good.<p>Have heroes. Don’t allow yourself to whine. Aim for victory. In the process you’ll discover you’re much happier.