Despite the prevalence of mindfulness-based programs in everything from health care to the classroom, the science behind these methods remains far from conclusive.Nearly a decade has passed since I wrote the book, A Catholic Guide to Mindfulness, and I was surprised to learn that while scientific evidence supporting mindfulness meditation has grown considerably since that time, studies are still failing to prove that these techniques are uniquely effective and/or superior to other established approaches. Whatever benefits have been found, particularly for anxiety, depression, and some forms of chronic pain, they are generally quite modest, the quality of the evidence varies considerably, and many of the more ambitious claims remain unproven.
For those who might not be aware of it, today’s mindfulness movement is a psycho-spiritual movement that is mainly driven by psychologists who have adopted an ancient Buddhist meditation practice as a means for helping people who are suffering from a variety of mental health issues. Minduflness is the seventh step in the Noble Eightfold Path, which Buddhists believe is a process that leads to awakening to one’s true nature.
It was brought into the mainstream by a biomedical scientist and practicing Buddhist named John Kabat-Zinn who used it as a foundation for the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. Thanks to his influence in the medical field, and aided by glowing coverage by the secular media, it swiftly infiltrated the Western health-care system and beyond.
Despite its popularity, however, serious questions have arisen over the years about the substandard state of research on the therapy. This dearth of scientific backing eventually roused a group of 15 experts in the mental health field to publish an article in a prestigious journal calling upon the mindfulness industry to “replace ambiguous hype with rigor in its research and clinical implementations.”
At the time, co-author Willoughby Britton, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University stated bluntly: “We are sometimes overselling the benefits of mindfulness to pretty much any person who has any condition, without much caution . . .”
That was ten years ago - and not much has changed. Even after Brown University opened a research center dedicated to improving the quality of the scientific research into mindfulness, the results have remained unimpressive.
For example, in a 2021 systematic review published in Clinical Psychology Review, researchers examined 44 meta-analyses covering 336 randomized controlled trials and more than 30,000 participants. The review found that mindfulness-based interventions generally outperformed doing nothing or being placed on a waiting list, but when compared with active treatments, such as established psychological therapies, the advantages became considerably smaller and often disappeared.
This was followed by a 2024 study published in Nature Human Behaviour involving 2,239 participants at 37 research sites. Investigators tested four brief mindfulness exercises against an active control condition and found that all four exercises produced somewhat positive results.
“Our findings suggest that mindfulness may be beneficial for reducing self-reported short-term stress for English speakers from higher-income countries,” the study concluded. However, while it proved effective for short-term stress, it failed to establish long-term therapeutic effectiveness or prove that mindfulness is superior to other stress-reduction methods.
More recently, a 2026 systematic review examining second-generation mindfulness interventions found improvements in depression and anxiety across dozens of randomized trials. However, most studies had at least some methodological concerns, and the evidence for lasting benefits was less consistent.
For this reason, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) acknowledges that much of the literature on mindfulness remains preliminary, methodologically weak, or interpreted too optimistically.
McGill University’s Jonathan Jarry M.Sc. sums up these dismal results: “On the surface, it all looks promising. Beneath it, however, we find so many problems that the best conclusion I can come to is that something is better than nothing.”
He adds: “The bottom line, though, is that I am not against mindfulness meditation. I am against its promotion as a coping tool by organizations that refuse to change and against its proselytizing as a revolution-in-the-making, when the mountains of scientific evidence so far show that, in the short term at least, its benefits are no different than those of similar stress-relieving activities and its potential harms are poorly understood.”
Speaking of which, potential harms are definitely present among those who practice mindfulness meditation, but studies of these adverse events are strangely absent. Even the small amount of research on negative experiences, including increased anxiety and depression, the subject of adverse effects in general has not been consistently monitored or reported in mindfulness studies.
Dr. Britton, who is a pioneer in this area of research, has fought against bias in the multi-billion-dollar mindfulness industry to get the word out about the prevalence of these adverse events.
As she found in a 2021 study of 96 participants in mindfulness-based programs, 58% reported unpleasant meditation-related experiences; 37% reported negative effects on daily functioning; and anywhere from 6 to 14% reported lasting adverse effects depending on duration.
The study concludes: “As a result, the widespread dissemination of MBPs [mindfulness based programs] into schools, hospitals, prisons and mobile apps has proceeded without sufficient information about potential harms."
These alarming statistics are not being overlooked, she recently told ABC News – they’re being ignored. "There is a problem that is being systematically ignored....It's a pretty common problem and there's just this kind of system of denial and gaslighting."
In spite of these less than encouraging results, and thanks mostly to the typical glowing coverage mindfulness gets in the media, it remains very popular.
As the NIH reports, a National Health Interview Survey found that the percentage of U.S. adults who practiced meditation more than doubled between 2002 and 2022, from 7.5 to 17.3 percent. Of seven complementary health approaches for which data were collected in the 2022 survey, meditation was the most popular, beating out yoga (used by 15.8 percent of adults), chiropractic care (11.0 percent), massage therapy (10.9 percent), guided imagery/progressive muscle relaxation (6.4 percent), acupuncture (2.2 percent), and naturopathy (1.3 percent).
The majority of those adults who practice (73%) say they do so for general wellness and to prevent disease, and 92% say they do so to relax or reduce stress. More than half of those surveyed said a desire for better sleep was motivating their practice of mindfulness meditation.
Many Catholics write to us to report being pressured into the practice of mindfulness from their health care providers who insist that they’ve stripped the Buddhist roots out of the practice. However, that can never be completely possible because the spiritual worldview and meditative philosophy from which the practice originates remains. It was designed around a Buddhist understanding of the self, consciousness, suffering, enlightenment, etc., influences that are inherent in the practice.
The bottom line is that the scientific record still does not support the sweeping promotional claims attributed to the practice of mindfulness-based programs. And its paltry and inconsistent clinical benefits certainly do not validate the philosophical or spiritual beliefs associated with its origins.
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