Great post, thank you for doing this. I very, very briefly (2-4 hours) looked into this a few months ago myself, and came away with broadly similar concerns.
In particular, the point that MBSR and MBCT are at first glance very different from “meditate every day for 10 minutes” seems worth emphasizing to me. Anecdotally, most people I know who hope for beneficial mental health effects do something more like the latter.
(My own experience from when I used to meditate daily for 10-30 minutes, which I did mostly out of curiosity rather than hoping for specific benefits: no clear effect on depression, extremely short-term [a few sec to min] positive effects on alertness and maybe mood, some changes in mental habits e.g. spontaneously switching to a ‘mindful’/aware state more often. Interestingly, for me the positive effects noticeably diminished over time, which is also why I stopped.)
Great post, thank you for doing this. I very, very briefly (2-4 hours) looked into this a few months ago myself, and came away with broadly similar concerns.
In particular, the point that MBSR and MBCT are at first glance very different from “meditate every day for 10 minutes” seems worth emphasizing to me. Anecdotally, most people I know who hope for beneficial mental health effects do something more like the latter.
(My own experience from when I used to meditate daily for 10-30 minutes, which I did mostly out of curiosity rather than hoping for specific benefits: no clear effect on depression, extremely short-term [a few sec to min] positive effects on alertness and maybe mood, some changes in mental habits e.g. spontaneously switching to a ‘mindful’/aware state more often. Interestingly, for me the positive effects noticeably diminished over time, which is also why I stopped.)