Meditation May Not Help?

I go over a recent paper casting doubt on “happiness” strategies

Photo by Max on Unsplash

Meditation has been part of my life since I have been around eighteen. As a teen, I struggled to balance stress and being a teenager. Learning to be in tune with my breath and mindful of what was going on in my body offered peace, and helped me make it through undergrad, then medical school, graduate school, and now starting a research fellowship. Knowing how to slow down was immensely valuable when I was always up and going.

Nature Human Behaviour is one of the top medical journals examining psychology topics and recently published a paper that did a well-designed study examining strategies for “happiness,” such as mindfulness and meditation. They interestingly found that existing well-designed studies do not provide much convincing evidence that mindfulness and meditation help with happiness, among other interventions. While some studies investigating mindfulness mentioned a net benefit, the benefit could plausibly be due to social interactions due to less structured studies.

Will this paper change the practice I have been doing nearly daily for over a decade? No. I find a subjective benefit from meditation; at the end of the day, even a subjective benefit can help us with our daily life. I may benefit from the placebo effect, but that is…