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Is Something Lost When We Use Mindfulness as a Productivity Tool?

By Charlotte Lieberman

I came to mindfulness as a healing practice after overcoming an addiction to the drug Adderall during my junior year of college. I found myself in this situation because I thought that using Adderall to help me focus was no big deal—an attitude shared by 81% of students nationwide.¹

Adderall simply seemed like an innocuous shortcut to getting things done efficiently and effortlessly. I still remember the rush I felt my first night on Adderall: I completed every page of assigned Faulkner reading (not easy), started and finished a paper several weeks before the due date (because why not?), Swiffered my room (twice), and answered all of my unread emails (even the irrelevant ones). It’s also worth noting that I had forgotten to eat all night and somehow found myself still awake at 4 a.m., my jaw clenched and my stomach rumbling. Sleep was nowhere in sight.

What I saw initially as a shortcut to more focus and productivity ultimately turned out instead to be a long detour toward self-destruction. Rather than thinking of focus as the by-product of my own power and capability, I looked outside of myself, thinking that a pill would solve my problems.

Long story short, I eventually came to grips with my problem, got off the drug, and found an antidote to my crippling self-doubt: meditation—particularly, mindfulness (or Vipassana) meditation.

So to me, it’s somewhat ironic that mindfulness has taken the media by storm precisely because of its scientifically proven benefits for focus and productivity.²

And it’s not just because I came to mindfulness as a way of healing from the fallout of the amount of pressure I put on myself to be productive. While mindfulness is not a little blue pill, it’s starting to be thought of as a kind of shortcut to focus and productivity, not unlike a morning coffee. A wisdom tradition associated with personal growth and insight is now being absorbed by our culture as a tool for career development and efficiency. But should mindfulness really be used to attain a particular goal? Is it OK to think of a practice that’s all about “being” as just another tool for “doing”?

Companies seem to think so. Given the mindfulness buzz, it’s no surprise that corporate mindfulness programs are proliferating across the country. Google offers “Search Inside Yourself” classes that teach mindfulness meditation at work. As celebrated in the recent book Mindful Work by David Gelles, corporations like Goldman Sachs, HBO, Deutsche Bank, Target, and Bank of America tout the productivity-related benefits of meditation to their employees.

The world of professional athletics—most recently the NFL—too has drawn attention to the achievement-oriented underpinnings of the mainstream mindfulness movement. The 2015 Wall Street Journal article that explored the Seattle Seahawks’ success in the 2014 Super Bowl explained that the team’s secret weapon was its willingness to work with a sports psychologist who teaches mindfulness. Seahawks assistant head coach Tom Cable went so far as to describe the team as “incredibly mindful.”

This article was written in January, a month before the Seahawks lost the 2015 Super Bowl. In the wake of their defeat, I heard several conversations among acquaintances and family members (all of whom were sports fans and were nonmeditating but aware of meditation) in which they expressed skepticism about the power of meditation for focus and success. I mean, how much can we embrace mindfulness as a tool for success if a team famous for meditating lost the Super Bowl?

Still a lot, I think. And I’m fine stopping here to admit (if you haven’t already concluded yourself) that the commodification of mindfulness as a productivity tool leaves me with a strange taste in my mouth. Above all, I am resistant to the teleological attitude toward meditation: that it’s a “tool” designed for a particular purpose, contingent on “results.”

And yet asserting this skepticism brings me back to a conversation I had with my vegan cousin a few years ago. He is a PhD student in biological anthropology, an animal activist, and a longtime vegan. When I asked him if he was irked by all the celebrities going vegan to lose weight, he shook his head vigorously. “I’d rather have people do the right thing for the wrong reason than not do the right thing at all,” he explained (the “right” thing here being veganism).

This philosophy seems applicable to the mindfulness craze (aka “McMindfulness”) too. I’m happy more people are getting the myriad benefits of meditation. I am glad that you’re no longer thought of as a patchouli-scented hippie if you’re an avid meditator. If corporate mindfulness programs mean that employee self-care is more valued in the workplace, then so be it.

But I also think there’s room to consider an alternative way of talking about meditation, especially when it comes to how we relate to our work.

Looking at mindfulness as a tool for accomplishing what we need to get done keeps us trapped in a future-oriented mindset, rather than encouraging us to dilate the present moment. Of course, this doesn’t invalidate the neuroscience; mindfulness helps us get more stuff done. But what about allowing mindfulness to just be? To have the effects it is going to have, without attaching a marketing pitch to this ancient practice?

Psychologist Kristin Neff is renowned for coining the term “self-compassion.” In particular, Neff has asserted that the first component of self-compassion is kindness, the ability to shrug off those times when we “let ourselves down,” when we don’t get to check off everything from our to do lists. The other two components of self-compassion are awareness and mindfulness. The goal is not to get more done but to understand that we are enough—and that our worth is not contingent on what we get done. (Although studies have shown that self-forgiveness actually helps us procrastinate less.³)

I’m not an idealist. I’m not saying every one should start “Om-ing,” devoting themselves solely to self-compassion, and forgetting all about their to do lists. But I am saying that compassion, and self-compassion, ought to move into the foreground as we talk about mindfulness—even in corporate mindfulness programs.

There’s no shame in wanting to be productive at work. But there’s also no shame in being able to cut yourself some slack, to extend yourself some love during those times at work when things don’t feel so great.

CHARLOTTE LIEBERMAN is a New York–based writer and editor.

Notes

1.A. D. DeSantis and A. C. Hane, “‘Adderall Is Definitely Not a Drug’: Justifications for the Illegal Use of ADHD Stimulants,” Substance Use and Misuse 45, no. 1–2 (2010): 31–46.

2.D. M. Levy et al., “The Effects of Mindfulness Meditation Training on Multitasking in a High-Stress Information Environment,” Graphics Interface Conference, 2012.

3.M. J. A. Wohl et al., “I Forgive Myself, Now I Can Study: How Self-Forgiveness for Procrastinating Can Reduce Future Procrastination,” Personality and Individual Differences 48 (2010): 803–808.

Adapted from content posted on hbr.org on August 25, 2015 (product #H02AJ1).