Episode Details

Is becoming more mindful automatically better for us and our well-being? And does being more mindful help those around us? The research is really clear - more mindfulness is not always better. Thankfully we also know how to avoid these mindfulness downsides.

Hello and welcome to episode 111 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we bring research to life in your leadership. This week we explore whether it's possible to overdose on mindfulness.

Mindfulness has seen dramatically increased popularity in recent years, particularly within Western organisations. And why not? Mindfulness has repeatedly demonstrated lots of personal benefits for individuals. As a result, mindfulness almost automatically appears in leadership development training with the typical recommendation being that people should just do more.

But can you have too much of a good thing? Let's take optimism and curiosity as an example. Both are generally positive. However the research shows us that you can absolutely be too optimistic and you can also be too curious. Not only can having too much optimism and curiosity have negative impacts for the individual, it can also have negative impacts on those around them. Does mindfulness demonstrate a similar pattern? And does mindfulness encourage people to help others more?

It's important to appreciate that mindfulness is not one thing, so let's take a look at some of the research around specific types of mindfulness.

There's mindful attention which focuses on mind–body awareness and perception of what is going on for us mentally and physically in the moment. The research shows that mindful attention is positive up to a point, but too much can lead to worse mental health outcomes. As the researcher Amit Bernstein highlights, this includes increased rates of depression, anxiety, dissociation, and substance abuse, along with decreased ability to tolerate pain. These negative outcomes can be somewhat decreased when the individual is being non-judgemental and non-reactive. Mindful attention works best when we are observing rather than responding. But that's easier said than done.

Research demonstrates that mindful meditation can help increase the amount and depth of sleep up to a point. But once people get beyond around 30 minutes of mindful meditation a day, people actually demonstrated decreased quality of sleep in both depth and amount.

Then there's mindful emotion regulation where we seek to gain greater control over our emotions, increase our emotional regulation and accept what we are experiencing. Again, this can have lots of positive impacts, but in excess research demonstrates it can lead to emotional blunting - where people experience fewer positive and fewer negative emotions. As a results life can become flat and dull.

It is better to think of mindfulness like many other things in psychology as having an inverted U relationship to well-being. Up to a point mindfulness can absolutely increase wellbeing. But as someone continues to increase the amount of mindfulness, there will be a point where well-being actually declines.

So for the individual you can have too much of a good thing. But what about the impact on others? What's the impact of mindfulness on what us psychologists call 'pro-social behaviour' - effectively, doing good things for other people.

Research about to be published in the journal of Psychological Science shows that mindfulness can make some people more selfish - that is, they do fewer good things for others than they otherwise would have as a result of mindfulness. This is the case for those participants who had more of an independent outlook to start with. Increased mindfulness for those who tend to be more independent resulted in them undertakin