Review A systematic review of the strength of evidence for the most commonly recommended happiness strategies in mainstream media, 2023, Folk et al

Sly Saint

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Why mindfulness might NOT be all it's cracked up to be: Review finds no proof trendy, A-list loved programme boosts happiness

Trendy mindfulness practices beloved by Hollywood stars may not do anything to boost your happiness, a scientific review has found.

Canadian experts analysed 57 high-quality studies on five popularly recommended ways to boost happiness, including meditation and mindfulness.

Other methods assessed were exercising, expressing gratitude, being more social and immersing yourself in nature.

While some evidence showed gratitude and being social worked, experts found none of the other three tactics stood up to scrutiny.

University of British Columbia academics said the supposed benefits of mindfulness courses might actually be due to participants feeling less lonely by participating in classes, rather than any intrinsic mood-boosting.

While it's been frequently touted as an easy way to boost your mental wellbeing, the authors who conducted the review found these benefits have likely been oversold.

Writing in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, they claimed many of the supposed benefits seen in experiments could be explained by other factors.
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Why mindfulness might NOT be all it's cracked up to be: Review finds no proof trendy, A-list loved programme boosts happiness | Daily Mail Online

paper (paywalled)
A systematic review of the strength of evidence for the most commonly recommended happiness strategies in mainstream media | Nature Human Behaviour
 
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LOL

I cant even... I just cant, I am laughing too much.

A. Is this a psychologist on psychologist furball ? If so .... yay!?

B. What is a Canadian expert ? What does nationality have to do with it, are they trying to imply an inappropriate national stereotype, suggesting they are toting axes, or something? (No offence to our Canadian friends intended.)

C. Do Canadian experts hate Hollywood hippies? is that what this is really about? Who is gonna win? Experts with axes I reckon.

D. Empirical experimentalism is very rare in psychology, though we do like Prof Jason.

E. Lack of proof is not the same as proof of lack but I welcome the attempt to be critical among handwavy psychowafflers.

F. Is this more or less useful than the International Hairdressers Expedition to Everest sketch?
 
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Canadian experts analysed 57 high-quality studies
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Unfortunately, not a thing. There are no high-quality studies of this, only ones that aren't impossibly biased or plain silly. Which is why this New Age stuff was always bunk. But whatever the point stands.

And why would this even work? It makes no sense whatsoever. We are complex beings living in even more complex cultures. There are no easy solutions to complex problems like this. This mindfulness thing has always been a business, now it's an industry. Just because there are tons of gullible academics and clinicians who decided to overlook how foolish this is doesn't change that. Medicine going all in on pseudoscience was always going to lead to the same outcome as mixing clean water and sewerage, and, spoiler, you never end up with clean sewerage.

It's not a coincidence that almost all of the stuff that falls under this is recreational. People like recreational stuff, but only while they are doing it. You can't just "do a recreation" and change your life, reap unlimited benefits, and there are many valid and rational reasons why people are limited, but also most people already do plenty of recreational stuff anyway. People will do what they like and if they don't keep doing your stuff it's because they don't like it that much, or that they don't want to do the same stuff all the time.

What this fashionable nonsense did is distract away from the reality that people need to be able to regularly engage in recreational stuff, without suffering penalties for it. This usually means working less, and that's just not acceptable when the singular goal of modern health care is, sadly, to keep people working as much as possible, two mutually exclusive goals.
 
A systematic review of the strength of evidence for the most commonly recommended happiness strategies in mainstream media
Folk and Dunn

Abstract
We conducted a systematic review of the evidence underlying some of the most widely recommended strategies for increasing happiness. By coding media articles on happiness, we first identified the five most commonly recommended strategies: expressing gratitude, enhancing sociability, exercising, practising mindfulness/meditation and increasing nature exposure. Next, we conducted a systematic search of the published scientific literature. We identified well-powered, pre-registered experiments testing the effects of these strategies on any aspect of subjective wellbeing (that is, positive affect, negative affect and life satisfaction) in non-clinical samples. A total of 57 studies were included.

Our review suggests that a strong scientific foundation is lacking for some of the most commonly recommended happiness strategies. As the effectiveness of these strategies remains an open question, there is an urgent need for well-powered, pre-registered studies investigating strategies for promoting happiness.
 
there is an urgent need for well-powered, pre-registered studies investigating strategies for promoting happiness.
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The inevitable nefarious careerism becomes obvious, jobs for the gang because psycho-pop.

Considering the damage certain psychologists have done in the field of ME I distrust those who promote themselves to investigate questions about happiness.

If they did for happiness what King's and the SMC did for understanding ME... the mind boggles at the dismal depths of the future dystopia they would create.
 
Oh, well, this is a disappointing, and downright bizarre, conclusion. This is obviously not what's needed, it's clearly not going to change minds, and it means more money wasted to feed egos and businesses that could be put to better use elsewhere, although the latter is probably not very likely, it'd just be wasted on doing the same stuff but with tiny variations of the same theme.

There is no evidence. That's it. End of this garbage. There is no need to keep faking research into pseudoscience, no matter how strongly believed it is.
 
There’s an urgent need to stop publishing crappy reviews calling for more crappy studies. I had high hopes for this before I read the conclusion. I thought someone was finally taking on the cult of toxic positivity.
 
Sid said:
There’s an urgent need to stop publishing crappy reviews calling for more crappy studies. I had high hopes for this before I read the conclusion. I thought someone was finally taking on the cult of toxic positivity.
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And since this morning I've had a depressing thought about who would get that money for that research. The very same people, of course! I mean who else could do this research if not for the very same people who have years of experience with it?

This is like debunking Theranos' research and concluding that someone should shovel huge amounts of money at Theranos so that they could properly research their technology. With public academic funding. Completely ridiculous, and yet here we are.

After all, this is also the approach for the failure to research Long Covid, where the same people who failed to produce anything and caused the disaster in the first place are about, and already have, been shoveled even more money than they wasted in the first place.

* Offer void for actual serious chronic illness researchers with years of actual experience doing research, of course
 
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