What do YOU want to do after a relaxing nap?

One answer may be mindfulness meditation, that is a Buddhism-inspired practice in which you “focus your mind entirely on the current moment”. It seems that dozens of studies have linked mindfulness to “job satisfaction, rational thinking and emotional resilience”.

Three years ago, however, another set of studies found something that, if you ask me, is much more intuitive, if not banal: strong evidence that meditation is demotivating, as far as work is concerned.

Some of the participants to the studies were trained in a few of the most common mindfulness meditation techniques.

Other participants were led through a different exercises. Then the researcher gave everyone an office-like task to do, like editing business memos or entering text into a computer.

Eventually, those who had meditated reported, on average, lower motivation to finish those tasks. Besides, financial bonuses did not “overcome the demotivating effect of mindfulness”, as they were not “substitute for internal motivation”.

And that was in 2018…

I am not a psychologist, nor a doctor of any kind. This said, the results of those studies seem absolutely plausible, if not banal. As that article itself puts it, “mindfulness is perhaps akin to a mental nap, [but] who wakes up from a nap eager to organize some files?"

Above all, please note that that was in 2018. That is, before COVID-19 forced hundreds of millions of office workers worldwide to spend much more time than before to meditate about their lives and jobs.

One conclusion of those studies was that “once you’ve reached a peak level of acceptance, you’re not going to be motivated to work harder”. In the long term, altering that “peak level of acceptance” may be a huge “long-COVID” effects. Because it affected everybody, not just those who got COVID, and still is. We’ll see.