Wellness, Happiness and MindfulnessIn the 1850 s Dr. John Harvey Kellogg invented Corn Flakes however his reasoning behind the invention is surprising. He was consumed with sin, and in particular masturbation, seeing bland foods as a suppressor of such appetites. There is more than a touch of the Kellogg inspiration in contemporary health, happiness and mindfulness training. We are seen as in requirement of redemption with deficits that need corrected by HR. We are advised on how to be well, happy and mindful … as that will lead to greater efficiency. How on earth did this happen, that HR ended up being the expected masters of our innermost feelings?A battery of techniques has emerged in organisations from the treatment culture that grew out of psychoanalysis and other trendy social trends in the 1960 s, such as meditation. Numerous narratives underpin these trends; the therapy narrative where all are in need of cognitive treatments, deficit story where all experience some sort of psychological deficit and binary stories where the language of deficits is reinforced; well – unhealthy, delighted – unhappy, mindful – mindless. The proof is oddly absent. What went wrong?All is not well with wellnessThis is a substantial business, around $8 billion in the United States alone. It is mainly based on articles of faith, not research study. The first big, randomised-controlled trial of a staff member Wellbeing programme recommended they are a waste of cash. Jones et al (2018) in their research study What Do Workplace Health Programmes Do, took 12000 staff members, arbitrarily appointed them into groups, however found no “considerable causal impacts of treatment on overall medical expenditures, health habits, employee efficiency, or self-reported health status in the very first year”. This research study is necessary, as it prevents the self-selecting nature of the audiences so common in other studies on wellness. The absence of controls renders most research studies in this field mainly useless as the basis for recommendations. Did they minimize sickness? No they didn’t. Did it result in staying in your job, getting promotion or a pay increase? No, it didn’t. Did it decrease medication or hospital visits? No, it didn’t. This was true for practically each of the 37 features studied. The bottom line is that there is no bottom line, no return on investment. The interesting conclusion by the authors of the study is that health programmes, far from assisting the desired audience (the overweight, cigarette smokers etc.), merely screens out those who are already healthy, yet the concern of cost is borne by all.Workplace ‘health’ programmes are plentiful, mostly surveys and weak files no quicker read than forgotten. Since when did HR think they have the right to take control of the role therapists and obligation for the psychological well-being of workers? HR, instead of staying with the worthy function of worker advancement, pay and rations, has actually constantly wished to be taken more seriously. What provided them the right to take control of our emotional lives? Why do they think they are qualified to end up being healing and ethical professionals? In practice, this often indicates checking out a couple of self-help books or a brief course run by people who themselves cobble together some evidence-free, PowerPoint and downloaded study template. In reality it ends up being shallow, if not hollow.And it is not only in the work environment that therapy culture has settled. In schools, health and wellbeing is viewed as an essential condition for discovering and achievement. A longitudinal study that looked at the relationship between achievement and subjective health and wellbeing, measured 3 times over six months on 807, 790 and 792 students respectively, showed that wellness did not predict academic achievement.In some US Universities, students are asked to sign Health agreements. The University of Massachusetts, along with many others, has a Campus Health Agreement. Undergraduates are asked to sign a contract that dedicates them to a healthy lifestyle (roughly conforming to white, Christian values). Maybe the last thing many require at that age of delight, interest, expedition and risk, is some contract that turns you into a dull, conformist. Is that the genuine objective of education, to be ‘well’, as specified by some dull, abstentious benchmark?Wellness Syndrome by Carl Cederstrom and Andre Spicer, is another welcome remedy to this wave of woolliness. The authors rightly expose it as a faddish syndrome, truly an ethical obligation and vital to manage your feelings and behaviour. The well – unhealthy, delighted – dissatisfied dualism slips into the great – bad moral crucial. What they posit as the real mechanism for this movement is an interest narcissism. It is a programme actually interest the ‘me’ in all people. Their bottom line is that it is disadvantageous. The more you look for health, the less well or happy you end up being. If you have any doubts about the business pressure, keep in mind the Australian ‘wellness’ blog writer, Belle Gibson, who lied about having terminal cancer, just to offer her blog site and book. Belle is a silly girl that is worthy of pity instead of reject but lots of advocates of mindfulness, health and joy are playing a comparable game. It is a game that appears time and time once again in HR. A book appears, training courses appear, ‘professionals’ pop up, then an army of HR people go out there promising utopian boosts in performance and organisational productivity on the back of their own self-propelled beliefs. The entire thing becomes a marketing exercise that uses its own hot air to fuel itself.HappinessThe health, happiness and now mindfulness dispute returns to the Greeks and reached its peak with Bentham, Mill and subsequent philosophical and political dispute around’ Utilitarianism ‘in the late 19 th C. ‘The Best Joy Concept’ caused a meaning of happiness in regards to enjoyment and the lack of discomfort. Bentham’s ‘hedonic calculus’ showed too primitive and awkward to utilize in any useful sense. Mill selected quality, not amount, with a concentrate on greater pleasures, but there were still problems of definition, and measurability. The arguments that ‘joy’ is vague, tough to measure and can not be used as a guide for ethical or social well-being, remain a problem for positive psychology.Unfortunately, just as we believed it had declined into history, specious psychoanalysis brought all of this back under another guise; therapy culture. Everything began with Freud but it was Rogers and more just recently Seligman, that dragged it into the world of education and training. The idea that ‘happiness’ is the sole function of life, or perhaps an end-in-itself, seems to have settled in our restorative culture. Life is not an easy calculus of happiness – unhappiness. Even a cursory look at the intricacy of human sensations, feelings and behaviour make that idea seem childish. Even Seligman, the pied-piper of joy, came to reject this simple term and moved towards ‘thriving’. Constantly stressing over how well you are is no way to live your life. In these 2 creative research studies, Can looking for joy make people dissatisfied? Paradoxical impacts of valuing happiness, two groups enjoyed a happiness inducing video. Those who had undergone direct exposure to ‘joy’ treatment prior to watching the video felt worse than those who had not. The authors argue that valuing happiness is self-defeating as the more it is valued, the more disappointed you end up being. It would seem that happiness expectations can result in dissatisfaction, and for that reason feeling less pleased, when faced with real world situations.Unfortunately HR has caught a bad dosage of ‘pleased clapping’ and middle managers have latched onto the idea that we must attempt to engineer this joy. You see it in the work-life balance argument (read work= unhappy, life= pleased). You also see it within organisations, as HR tries to take control of the psychological well-being of staff members. Self-appointed armies of mentors, coaches, counsellors and therapists are all over organisations looking for pathological deficits. Daily feelings and ordinary contention are identified as diseases and individuals are provided remedies, well bromides. This is not a plea for grumpiness, it is a plea for realism and peace of mind, prior to the restorative culture starts seeing the entire of society as an asylum loaded with pathological clients who require to pay for their sins. Individuals should have self-respect at work, reasonable pay and conditions, a safe work environment and a great environment. They are adults, not children. my joy is MY service. The terrific Barbara Ehrenreich, in Smile or Pass away, is one of numerous who have criticised the increase of positive psychology and thinking. She believes the ‘health’ and ‘joy’ movement replaces truth with positive illusions. You can believe favorably but “at the cost of less realism”. Seligman’s book Genuine Joy was been seen by Ehrenreich as a “jumble of anecdotes” and found his formula for joy banal: H = S F C (Happiness = set variety, scenarios and voluntary control). In the Journal of Joy Studies she reads research study after research study linking joy to every imaginable result however it is a lop-sided view of the world, without any room for the realism of unfavorable outcomes.’ Mindfulness’ yet another meaningless fad in education More recently, a particular types of health swept through education and business training– mindfulness. In truth, it is not brand-new at all. It goes back to Buddhism, Freud, then Rogers and the relentless effort to get therapeutic theory into education. There is plenty of factors for rejecting this specific manifestation of the wellbeing madness.Mindfulness is yet another example of grownups taking their new-age, adult fixations and requiring them on the young. It is not as if kids take naturally to such unnatural behaviours, as they are naturally exuberant. Education should have to do with opening up young minds not forcing them to do things that faddish grownups believe is ideal for them. Education is about both mind and body however that means being alive and kicking, hanging out with others through play, games and sport. Kids are lively and locking them up for the majority of the day in class, often accompanied by enforced silence, is bad enough, without forcing them to sit in even more total, common silence. They are gloriously alive at that age and ought to play and learn, be dynamic and curious, not simulate artificial, adult trends. Education is about both mind and body but that means living and kicking, socialising with others through play, games and sport. Kids are lively and locking them up for most of the day in class, often accompanied by enforced silence, is bad enough, without requiring them to sit in even more total, common silence. They are gloriously alive at that age and ought to play and learn, be dynamic and curious, not imitate synthetic, adult fads.Enforced silence and focus can often remain in order, especially when finding out to believe, show and produce significant analysis, synthesis and composed work but to fetishize non-productive silence as part of self-development, is a stretch. For adults, it represents an easy but illusory solution to what is actually rather hard, confronting the fact that numerous things in life are in fact rather hard and complex. When. The service is to simply neglect this by periods of forced inaction, we are possibly worsening issues, not resolving them.Mindfulness plays a neat trick. It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing as it is really mindless meditation under the guise of mindful attention. What we require is more mindful, external attention on knowing, instructors and other individuals in learning. This suggests getting involved, not idle internalizing. It suggests looking out and attentive, as we understand with certainty that outward-looking, psychological attention is an essential condition for learning. The sort of internal attention that is needed for learning is to do with the coding, elaboration, scene setting, deep processing and practice, particularly spaced practice, that results in cognitive improvement.The therapy company, and it is quite a service, finds it hard to define ‘mindfulness’. Some relate it directly to Buddhist meditation, others to reflection on your physiological procedures, others to internal cognitive reflection. It is rather contradictory, a stilling of the mind yet a strong sense of presence or attention to self, using a selfless, meditation-based practice. There’s no consistency as mindfulness is numerous things to many people. This is always a concern and typically a sign that all is not well with a practice. It has all the hallmarks of a fad; not evidence-based (in terms of knowing), promoted by celebrities and suddenly erupts as the ‘next huge thing’. Naturally mindfulness will have been long forgotten in a few of years’ time, as another short-lived bromide hits the market.Behind every trend, there is frequently a book. In this case, it is Mindful Work: How Meditation Is Altering Company from the Inside by David Gelles. His proof is largely anecdotal, generally the testaments of the stressed-out executives who mess around a little in meditation, like it and do a top-down task using their pastime to their staff members. Even when workplace studies are considered they are of such bad design that they can be marked down. The crucial examples are, obviously, business who have the high-end of attempting this stuff out. Currently, enormously successful, cash-rich companies in tech, medical insurance and finance. Google, Aetna and Goldman Sachs – yes Goldman Sachs! Picture utilizing the business that contributed in the financial crisis, dreadful damage of the Greek economy and participator in Malaysian corruption, to sell the concept of being ‘conscious’. A company that has inflicted financial anguish on millions utilized as an argument for increasing ’empathy’? This is an Orwellian world, where scoundrels specify good behaviour. Hedge-fund supervisors are even priced quote. Practice meditation in orde
Learn More
