Classroom Mindfulness Put to the Test

Emma Varvaloucas: The kids were realizing that the instruction that they were getting or how they were understanding the instruction didn’t really make sense, and there were also some kids that felt like the mindfulness lessons had them circling around bad thoughts and feelings. I described one in the article where she’s walking down the hallway at school or at the mall and she feels anxious and she says, “I start to try to do these, and everything just feels worse all of a sudden, like the voices are louder and I feel like everyone is staring at me and I just want to run away.”

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Emma Varvaloucas. Emma is the executive director of the Progress Network, a nonprofit media organization that aims to take a constructive approach to solving some of our most intractable problems. In her article in the February issue of Tricycle called “Classroom Mindfulness Put to the Test,” she explores the surprising results of recent research on mindfulness programs for adolescents. In my conversation with Emma, we talk about how mindfulness first entered the classroom, whether mindfulness is developmentally appropriate for adolescents, and the importance of pairing mindfulness with broader access to mental health services. So here’s my conversation with Emma Varvaloucas.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with my former colleague, Emma Varvaloucas, who is now the executive director of the Progress Network. Hi, Emma. It’s great to see you again.

Emma Varvaloucas: Hi, James. It’s great to see you too.

James Shaheen: So you’re calling in from Athens. Is that right?

Emma Varvaloucas: I am. I’m calling in from sunny Athens, Greece, where we don’t have central heating, so I’m all bundled up.

James Shaheen: Oh, OK. I was going to ask you if it was great to be away from all the political chaos, but really you’re in the thick of it. So why don’t you tell us first about the Progress Network and your work with that?

Emma Varvaloucas: Oh, sure. Yeah, so the Progress Network is a media arm that is headquartered at the think tank New America, and we focus on underdiscussed progress that occurs off the radar of the mainstream news, as well as trying to take a constructive approach to solving some of our most intractable problems. Of course, right now, I’m sure a lot of people are feeling very overwhelmed and frustrated with the political climate in the United States, so we have been doing some work around that, approaching that with a measured way, a measured tone, trying to give people some way to navigate a very heavy media blitzkrieg of information as well. So, on the one hand, I will say it is kind of nice to be out of the US, but I always say this when people ask this. When you’re in Greece, still, the comparison between Greece and the US, particularly if you’re looking at the Greece of five or seven years ago, there’s not much to sing the praises of with Greece. It’s not a country where you’re like, “Man, I’m really in paradise, and thank God I’ve left the United States.” It does bring some of the benefits of the United States into very sharp relief as well as its weaknesses, obviously. But the last thing I would say about that is that it also shows you that there is a path out of some very unstable days, right? Greece has come a long way in a short time, so nothing is irreversible in the US either.

James Shaheen: Well, I’m a big fan of your newsletter, “What Could Go Right?” And so for our listeners, at a time like this, it’s great to listen to the What Could Go Right podcast and read the “What Could Go Right” newsletter put out by the Progress Network.

So Emma, we’re here to talk about an article you wrote that may get me in trouble. I’m not sure yet. We’ll find out. The letters could start coming in. But the article is “Classroom Mindfulness Put to the Test.” So could you tell us about that article and how you came to write it?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, for sure. So the article is really centered around this really large randomized controlled trial of mindfulness that was done in schools in the United Kingdom. I think it was in 2022 when all of the data was published, and it was a very long study. I believe it began around 2016, and forgive me if some of my details are off because it’s been some time since I wrote this, but we actually—we being Tricycle, I’m using the collective “we” here, since I was at Tricycle for so long. So we didn’t publish anything about it, I don’t think, when it first came out. It slipped by us, but I saw a mention of it in a New York Times article that I just happened to be reading because we were doing a podcast for What Could Go Right about therapy generally and therapeutic approaches in schools. And it mentioned this big study, this MYRIAD trial, that had come out with, quote unquote disappointing results around mindfulness in schools. And I was like, “Huh? I didn’t hear about this. What is this all about?” And I pinged you about it, and we discussed and we thought like, wow, there’s a whole lot that you can dive into here about basically how to analyze the study, what it means, what it doesn’t mean, and where researchers are going now after it.

James Shaheen: So to back up a little bit, could you tell us how mindfulness first entered the classroom or what the point of that was, these mindfulness-based programs in schools, and when did they really take off?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, so they’re relatively new, right? And my understanding—and granted, I didn’t do a deep dive into the history for this piece, so I can’t do a super deep dive with you now, but my understanding is that they got, they being people that brought mindfulness into schools, took a lot of cues from the Transcendental Meditation movement, who I think were really the first to bring Transcendental Meditation into prisons and into schools, and that was in the late 1970s, early 1980s. So they were really the pioneers of this kind of approach. So all the stuff that mindfulness advocates have done afterward in prisons and schools and things of that nature, the TM people really did it first. 

There was a lot of science. I think Jon Kabat-Zinn coined “mindfulness” in 1970, and there was kind of this slow roll into a bunch of science studying mindfulness’s effect on adults. And there were a lot of positive results for well-being, for anxiety, for depression, things like that. And I think it was in the early millennium that researchers started to say to themselves, well, there’s all these mental health challenges that children are facing. Why not see if mindfulness will be helpful for kids since it’s proven to be helpful for adults? And I think the first curriculum in the UK was in 2007, I want to say.

So this was all kind of post-millennium where the ball really started to get rolling about. Organizations started to develop curriculums, things were getting brought into schools, and then there were different studies by researchers to examine whether mindfulness would have the same effect on kids.

James Shaheen: Well, what did their early research studies on classroom mindfulness show? Were there studies early on before the MYRIAD study?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, there were quite a few. I talk about this one meta-analysis in the piece that was published in, when was that? I think also 2022. And that went over sixty-six different studies. I mean, that’s certainly not going to be completely comprehensive, but it just gives you an idea of the fact that there were quite a few studies that have been done.

The difference between the studies that have been done previously and MYRIAD is the funding behind it, the breadth of the study and the good design. So a lot of those studies that have been done previously were quite small. They might only have passive control groups versus active control groups. In the meta analysis, they found that there were signs of publication bias, which sounds more nefarious than it actually is. It just means that if they found a positive finding versus they didn’t find anything, a null finding, it’s more likely that that would be published as research. So there might have been studies that found that nothing really happened, and they never got out there. These were small groups, like small groups of kids that they were studying, and their studies were all over the place, like different ages, different locations, and so that meta analysis that I talked about in the piece, the earlier studies showed that mindfulness was helpful when it came to anxiety and depression. And then as the science went along, they’re saying, no, actually, it doesn’t really help with depression, and maybe there’s no beneficial effects for well-being either.

James Shaheen: So the study you end up focusing on is a randomized control trial. So how is that different from the earlier studies?

Emma Varvaloucas: So the other studies I think were also RCTs, or randomized control trials. It’s just that the MYRIAD one was massive. It was eight thousand kids in the United Kingdom, which is much larger than RCTs that had been done previously. I think even the second largest study that has been done for Mindfulness in schools is four or six thousand. And again, those are rare. That’s not like that’s being done all the time. The MYRIAD trial cost a total of, I think, eight million pounds. It’s expensive to run these kinds of studies. So they were all RCTs. It was just the breadth of MYRIAD and the funding and how the study was designed.

James Shaheen: And this study took place in the UK, where classroom mindfulness was more the norm than, say, here.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, and I think that the first ever curriculum for mindfulness in schools was done in the UK. So there is a history there as well.

James Shaheen: Yeah, and also, you talked about bias, and in this particular case in the UK, I believe that many of the people who led this study were very sympathetic to the idea of mindfulness in the classroom. Is that right?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. I mean, I think that that’s the case for it generally, right? I don’t know for sure if there have ever been studies led by people that were skeptical. The people that would go after funding for this kind of thing are people who believe that mindfulness would be useful. Otherwise, it’s like, why would you test this? What would be the point? So that is another issue as well, that the people devising these studies are people that are hoping for a particular outcome. That being said, that was another reason why the MYRIAD trial was so interesting was because it was massive. It had a massive team and the data was just, there was a lot of it and it was well handled, let’s say, which is not always the case when you’re talking about a classroom study of fifty kids led by one researcher. It’s comparing oranges to apples.

James Shaheen: Right. So how specifically were they measuring the impact on study participants, on these kids who were practicing mindfulness in the classroom?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, so they do it through these three larger buckets, and the three buckets are risk for depression, social, emotional, behavioral functioning, and well-being. And then under those three buckets, they were testing for twenty-eight different secondary outcomes. So there was quite a lot going on here. The way that they do that is by way of certain questionnaires that are well-established in these fields. One of them is a social behavioral questionnaire, one of them is an anxiety and depression questionnaire, and another one of them is a mindfulness questionnaire, so they’re essentially doing these questionnaires giving them to the control group and the group that is doing the mindfulness lessons and then doing it again. I think it was a one-year follow-up, which is also unusual, by the way. A lot of the previous studies did not have a really lengthy follow-up the way that MYRIAD did.

James Shaheen: So is it fair to say that these people who tended to favor mindfulness practice in the classroom were stunned by the results? And what were those results?

Emma Varvaloucas: I don’t know about stunned. Maybe it wasn’t the results that people were hoping for.

James Shaheen: Disappointed, maybe?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I think Willem Kuyken, I think he was one of the lead authors on the study, and he is definitely a mindfulness advocate, and I think he did use the word disappointed when he was speaking to me for the article. He says in the piece, “When I looked at the results, I had two hats on. One was as a mindfulness advocate, and the other was as a researcher. Despite the fact that as a mindfulness advocate, I was disappointed, as a researcher, I was like, wow, when you look under the hood of this, you can learn a ton,” which is really what the article ends up being about because there are so many secondary or tertiary questions that the MYRIAD trial brings up.

But basically the findings, which I would say that they were stunning for the media, because the media definitely did a lot with this study because, like I said, it was so large, because it was so well funded, because it was well designed, the fact that the finding was essentially null was very surprising. So they basically found that the mindfulness intervention for the kids that had the mindfulness classes didn’t do anything. It showed no change.

James Shaheen: Yeah, what surprised me is that, yeah, maybe there was no change, but in some cases it actually made things worse. Could you talk about that?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. So of the twenty-eight secondary outcomes that I spoke out before, they found for five of them that there is some evidence of a difference between the two groups, or the groups that were practicing mindfulness and the groups that weren’t. The groups that were practicing mindfulness had higher self-reported hyperactivity or inattention, both when they measured that right after the mindfulness classes and one year later. They had higher panic disorder and obsessive compulsive scores. They had levels of mindfulness skills, which is very shocking considering they just went through a bunch of mindfulness classes. And they had higher teacher-reported emotional symptoms at one-year follow-up, only suggesting that they’re doing worse, the study says, although marginally on these outcomes in the control arm. So in addition to that, they also found with a secondary analysis of the data that it seemed, especially for kids who were at risk of developing various mental health issues, like depression or anxiety, that quote unquote negative outcomes of the mindfulness was even worse for those kids.

James Shaheen: Yeah, so that’s pretty surprising. It seems to be doing, in some cases at least, the reverse of what it’s intended to do. How did the kids themselves view the mindfulness program? Were they asked how they felt about it?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, definitely. The overall conclusion of the trial was that—I should say, they weren’t testing to see if mindfulness worked, right? They were testing to see if mindfulness could be used as a universal approach in schools, meaning, can we give this to everybody and it will have some benefit? So they said that no, we can’t suggest mindfulness as a universal approach and that it might be contraindicated for kids with emerging mental health symptoms, which is what you just mentioned before.

So how did the kids feel about it is actually one of my most favorite things of reporting on this article. I keep repeating that the MYRIAD trial was really well done. It was well designed. It had lots of different papers that came out as part of the suite of results. And there were a couple that tracked not only some of the adverse experiences that kids had, but also exactly how they felt about it and if they wanted to do it. And it was bifurcated in half. Half of the kids rated the lessons five or six or above on a ten-point scale, meaning, “I liked it. I found it useful.” And then the other half of the kids rated it under. I have my sheaf of research for this article, and this isn’t even everything. I did want to pull this out because it’s so interesting. One of the papers from the suite of results, they have this word cloud, I’m going to hold it up, but I’ll describe it obviously so people can know what they’re looking at. They do this word cloud about what kids had to say about the mindfulness lessons, and you have in these really big letters, “physical sensations,” “managing feelings,” “changes in energy.” So those are the biggest in the word cloud, the ones that were mentioned the most when they talked to kids about how they felt about it. Then the next two largest ones are “bored” and “distress,” which I thought was so interesting because it’s not at all what you would expect, right?

James Shaheen: I should ask, there are some kids who seem to benefit. Is that correct? Or are they just generally not finding that at all?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, like I said, half of the kids that responded about whether they liked it or found it useful did. And in the study, they also found that there was a correlation between teachers that were rated as more competent as delivering these lessons, those kids enjoyed mindfulness more and found it more appealing. So yeah, there were definitely kids that liked it and enjoyed it. 80 percent of them did not do their mindfulness homework at home, so it wasn’t exactly something that was inspiring and exciting them, but there were certainly kids that found benefit to it, especially if they had good teachers.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I wonder what sort of mindfulness homework they were assigning that required a computer in the first place. Were they supposed to be recording their experience? Or what was the homework?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. So I can’t tell you for sure because the curriculum that they use, it’s called .b, and it’s from the Mindfulness in Schools Project in the UK. And I wasn’t able to look at the entire curriculum, only a sample of it. But my impression is that they were at-home practices, like you would listen to maybe a recording and practice whatever it is that they wanted you to do, if you were dropping your focus into your feet or like any of those like standard mindfulness practices that people know about.

James Shaheen: So apparently, some rebelled against being forced into mindfulness classes. Can you say something about that?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, you can see in some of the papers that talk about the kids’ reactions that they didn’t appreciate the fact that they were forced into doing this. I think I make the point in the piece that even people in prison who are taught mindfulness in prison elect to go and learn mindfulness, right? There are no adults that are forced into learning mindfulness. You have the volition to go do it, which kind of explains why when you talk to a bunch of adults that do mindfulness, they’ve chosen to do that because they liked it or they kept going back or they got something out of it.

But if you were to test eight thousand different adults and force them into doing mindfulness, it’s not really surprising if a bunch of them are like, “Hey, I’m not really interested. I don’t want to do this.” And that was the case for the kids as well. They didn’t have a choice about it. It was just kind of announced to them that like, hey, we’re doing this. And some of the kids even complain in these papers that no one explained to them why they were doing it. They didn’t really understand what the whole purpose of it was. It was just sort of like, “We’re going to do this now, and here we are,” and there was no opt in or out in the beginning or anything like that.

James Shaheen: You know, you mentioned opt in or out. An opt-out might have been nice for those who did not want to do it. I don’t know if you remember Candy Gunther Brown. We interviewed her about mindfulness meditation and other practices like yoga in the schools, and her feeling was that people should have an opt-in rather than an opt-out. So in other words, those who would self-select, there would be a self-selecting group of people who said, “Yes, we want to do this” rather than feel peer pressure of “We’re doing this. You can opt out.” Her idea was that you should opt in, and that would probably be best.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, I will say one thing that just from a general perspective, I would agree with her—you don’t want to force kids into doing something that they don’t want to do. However, it was great for the science because it’s going to be really hard to find eight thousand kids that will all opt in to a mindfulness program, right? Especially if you’re taking the 80 percent not doing their homework, I mean, that’s most of them gone if you think that maybe those are the ones that aren’t going to opt in, right? So it was great in the sense of having an enormous amount of data.

James Shaheen: Yeah, well, some of the researchers suggest that the study’s results may be because of the age of the participants, and they say that mindfulness may not be developmentally appropriate for adolescents. What about that argument? Because obviously some adolescents do like it or benefit from it.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. So I think with this when you talk to not only the researchers involved in this MYRIAD trial but just mindfulness researchers generally, they talk a lot about something called metacognitive awareness, which is just the fancy way of saying the ability to be aware of your own thoughts. We are not born with the ability to be aware of our own thoughts. It’s actually a function that comes online, quote unquote, around the ages of the children that were in the MYRIAD trial, which is 11 to 14. So we don’t know exactly. It’s not like, oh, you hit your 11th birthday and your Hogwarts acceptance letter comes and your metacognitive awareness comes on. It’s not like that. We don’t know exactly when it comes on, but we do know that it gets better with age. So something that Mark Greenberg pointed out to me, who was involved with the trial and has done other mindfulness RCTs, is that if you look at studies for mindfulness for adolescents that are 16, 17, 18, or sometimes college students, 18, 19, 20, the results are very different than the results that we saw in the MYRIAD trial, and if you teach, let’s say, an 11-year-old mindfulness before that process has fully come online, what people point out is that they do not have the ability to properly understand what they’re supposed to be doing, and they can end up suddenly hyperfocused on their thoughts and their feelings and end up ruminating about them, so they’re just circling and circling and circling around the same thought or feeling.

James Shaheen: So that’s without metacognition.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. It can happen to adults too. Some adults are prone to rumination. You know, you can certainly be a 25-year-old prone to rumination, and you might end up doing the same thing with mindfulness, but you’re especially prone as a kid just starting to kickstart in your mind.

James Shaheen: Right. So can you tell us about some of the adverse experiences that the study documented?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. So this is another under-the-hood moment that Willem Kuyken was talking about. A lot of the studies for mindfulness, and also I should say, a lot of the data, quote unquote, like questionnaires, if you look at organizations that teach mindfulness in schools, a lot of them will say, “Look how much these kids love mindfulness,” and they’ll show you a questionnaire, and all the questions on the questionnaire were like, “How happy did this make you feel? Did you enjoy this? On a scale of one to ten, how much better did you feel after it?” So obviously your data is going to be skewed toward that. A lot of people have not been tracking adverse experiences not only with mindfulness for kids but just like with meditation with adults in general. But the MYRIAD trial did. I’m going to pull some out for you. Let me get my sheaf of paper out again. So there were a few that were kind of repetitive. One was that the kids generally seem to be confused about the difference between mindfulness—in particular, they talked a lot about an exercise where it’s like your thoughts are like school buses and the school buses are passing by, and you can just let the bad thoughts pass by. And that was interpreted—and of course, we don’t know if it’s because of how it was explained, or was it the curriculum, or was it the kids just not understanding? We don’t know. They interpreted that as don’t pay attention to your bad thoughts. If you have bad thoughts, just let it go in one ear and out the other, right? So, I mentioned this in the article. There’s this one circumstance that gets brought up in this study that tracked adverse experiences. The teacher asked the pupils about an email that they’re worried about, and the pupil in a rather perturbed fashion replied, “Delete the email.” 

James Shaheen: But anyone could have said that. That’s very funny.

Emma Varvaloucas: And then it’s interesting because you also have kids writing in their journals. They were writing in journals about this. One kid wrote, “If you don’t think about your problems, how are you supposed to solve them?” So the kids were realizing that the instruction that they were getting or how they were understanding the instruction didn’t really make sense. And there are also some kids that felt like the mindfulness lessons had them circling around bad thoughts and feelings. I described one in the article where she’s walking down the hallway at school or at the mall and she feels anxious and she says, “I start to try to do these, and everything just feels worse all of a sudden, like the voices are louder and I feel like everyone is staring at me and I just want to run away.” There’s another kid that talks about how the mindfulness lessons brought up memories of his grandmother dying, things of that nature.

James Shaheen: You know, this brings up a question, too. You mention the example of likening bad thoughts to school buses passing by. It seems that either they misunderstood or the teaching itself is in question, that maybe they weren’t being taught properly. I know you looked at that or heard from people who felt that way. Can you say something about that?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, so this again goes back to the description of the MYRIAD trial that I talked about in the beginning, as it was testing a universal approach, meaning, can we use studies for mindfulness in schools to help everyone’s mental health, which is a little bit of a different question than some mindfulness researchers or mindfulness advocates will talk to you about, which is the efficacy of a teacher in one particular classroom who is not the normal school teacher, but an outside teacher that has been trained in mindfulness to come in and teach the kids, which is how some curriculums do work. In MYRIAD, it wasn’t people that specialize in mindfulness, right? It’s not like they’re a Buddhist teacher or a mindfulness teacher that has gone through extensive training, or maybe not extensive training depending on who you’re talking about. These were just your ordinary politics teacher or history teacher or social studies, whatever, that had gone through a quick training to do these. And so some people say, about MYRIAD, they will tell you, “I don’t really think this was like testing whether mindfulness in the classroom works. It was just testing that it doesn’t work to have ordinary teachers do this.” And the teachers themselves also put in their descriptions of the trial that they had a hard time moving even between the mannerism that you would have as a normal teacher and a mindfulness teacher. So it’s like, “Hey, Freddie, listen to the lesson right now and stop throwing your eraser,” and then all of a sudden it’s mindfulness, and then it’s like, “OK, Freddie, we’re all going to listen to our thoughts with nonjudgmental awareness.” It’s a hard jump between those two things.

James Shaheen: OK, but you say for some kids, mindfulness made them more aware of their issues without giving them the tools to address them. And it’s something I wondered about when we first talked about this article. What is a kid to do who really has very limited agency over his or her life? They’re made aware of these things, and then what?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, exactly, and I think that that’s what was happening. Willem Kuyken, who I spoke to for this piece, we talked about this specifically as well where he told me that if you have a kid who’s in really dire circumstances and they don’t have enough to eat, they don’t have proper clothing, they’re getting beaten at home, or their mother’s getting beaten at home, where you’re really talking about serious circumstances, teaching them mindfulness is not the priority. I think that’s common sense. If some kid came to you with these problems, it could be the case that teaching them to focus on—and maybe you don’t mean to teach them to focus on these kinds of thoughts and feelings, but maybe that’s what ends up happening by accident, right, Is that you focus them around these bad things, and they, as a child, don’t have any agency to solve any of these problems. Or their understanding that they’re supposed to quote unquote delete the email, right?

James Shaheen: Yeah, I like that one.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, it was pretty funny. I mean, one of my favorite things about this article is actually all of the little quotes and things you get from the kids because they’re so hilarious. But yeah, anyway, you don’t want to hyperfocus someone around everything that’s going poorly in their life, and this is the case for adults too. If you have traumatized adults that are going through trauma in that moment, it’s not a good idea, as people have learned in the last few years, for those people to focus on mindfulness practices in that moment. That’s just not the appropriate tool. When I spoke to, for instance, people for this article that do mindfulness curriculums for schools and things like that, the answer to this, a suggestion was, well, a mindfulness teacher is supposed to be scanning the room for signs of distress, like if a kid starts crying or they might know that maybe a kid’s parents are going through a divorce or there’s something happening at home, so those kids could opt out for the mindfulness lessons generally, or mindfulness that day specifically. I always found that answer to be unrealistic given I think most schools’ reality. I brought this up in several of my interviews. I was like, “Listen, when I was exactly the age of these kids, 11 to 14, I was going through a lot at home, and none of my teachers in the public school in central New Jersey knew what was going on in my home life, and I wouldn’t have expected them to.” I think it’s too big of an ask for teachers to be aware of every single student’s home life, especially if it’s a large public school.

James Shaheen: Some people you interviewed suggested that mindfulness programs should be paired with broader access to basic safety and mental health services. Did any of them elaborate what this might look like?

Emma Varvaloucas: Having therapists at school and guidance counselors and potentially the connections between, like when the school steps in for situations in which a child is being abused for being hungry or is not properly being taken care of at home, then it becomes less of a school issue and more of a government issue. But I think that those challenges are not probably being adequately answered as it is regardless of mindfulness being in the classroom or not. And that was some of the people I spoke to, like Miguel Farias, his point was exactly that, where if mindfulness doesn’t work and the answer to mindfulness is not working is having these kids be sent to guidance counselors or programs the school already has in place for kids who might need them, why not make those programs more robust?

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, I think he called mindfulness programs a cheap way of trying to deal with kids’ mental health problems without really addressing what is driving the problems. So this echoes what Ron Purser popularized as the McMindfulness critique, the notion that mindfulness has been co-opted by corporations as a stopgap to avoid actually addressing their employees’ needs. I’m curious how you see this parallel.

Emma Varvaloucas: I think that that parallel or that comparison only really goes so far, because in the situation of corporations, you’re talking about employees where the corporations are wanting them to be productive, flourishing employees, and so they need to—well, if your employees are burned out because they’re making you work 12-hour days, the answer is to fix that, not to give them mindfulness. And so that’s within the power of the corporation, and that makes sense insofar as the relationship between a corporation and an employee.

The relationship between a school and a student is not the same. The mental health flourishing of children is not completely in the domain of a school. I mean, the school is there to educate you. And if the child is having problems with their mental health or problems at home, the school can only do so much, and I’m not really sure if it’s fair to say we’re co-opting mindfulness, or schools are co-opting mindfulness so that they can’t fix the problems of these kids. I think that people are just genuinely trying to find ways to help these children. And there was evidence at least for adults that this might work, and if it can be done in a cheap manner,, fantastic, because Lord knows, the funding is always a question for these things. But I see it less as trying to get away with solving something cheaply and more as they’re just genuinely trying to solve a problem that they might not have the money to have, right? Corporations probably do have the money to solve these problems or the methods.

James Shaheen: I came away from this thinking that mindfulness could be a very useful tool for people in this cohort, adolescents for whom metacognition has begun developing. It just seems odd to me when I heard you talking just a moment ago, talking about how the history teacher all of a sudden says, “OK, now we’re going to meditate.” It just seems that it would need to be separate, a classroom environment dedicated to precisely that, and a teacher dedicated to precisely that, for a certain time in the day. I don’t know how it would really work otherwise, along with opt-ins rather than opt-outs, so it’s people who want to do this. So it doesn’t really seem to me to tell me whether or not it’s age appropriate as it is, as with adults, something that is appropriate for some people and not for others. Does that make sense?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I think that does make sense. I mean, I think that the attraction of the universal approach is that the solution that you’re proposing where you have a set time of the day and a teacher who is a mindfulness teacher to come in, you can’t scale that very easily, and yes, Miguel Farias says they’re just trying to find a cheaper way to solve this, which is not an unfair critique. However, it’s not like a lot of these schools just have hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around that they’re just trying to find the right thing to spend it on, particularly in a context like the US where you’re talking about such a large country with vastly different resources with schools. It’s really hard to imagine a dedicated mindfulness teacher coming into classrooms for a specific time of the day. It’s just hard to imagine that reality happening across the country.

James Shaheen: Well, researchers remain divided on the implications this has for classroom mindfulness going forward. So what were some of the perspectives you encountered in your interviews?

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s really a discussion over—well, there’s a larger discussion, right, about the age group and what kind of mindfulness practices work for that age group.

James Shaheen: Say again what that age group is, just to remind us.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. So the age group of the MYRIAD trial was 11 to 14, and they were doing fairly traditional mindfulness practices, where you sit, close your eyes, feet on the floor, that kind of thing. So somebody like Tish Jennings, who I spoke to for this piece, she wasn’t connected to the MYRIAD trial, but she is a leader in social-emotional learning research. She talks about incorporating mindfulness into other social-emotional learning contexts, so you might use mindfulness where you’re just talking about simple awareness for kids who are younger, and that’s incorporated into a broader social-emotional learning curriculum. So it’s not just mindfulness; it’s mindfulness plus a bunch of other things that we know to work for actually even kids that are younger than the ones that were in the MYRIAD trial.

And then there’s a discussion over the universal approach like we have just spoken about, like whether a universal approach for depression or anxiety or mental health issues even works at all, whether it’s mindfulness or something else, or whether it’s better to do this on a more case-by-case basis. But yeah, I mean, to decide on the path forward, it just really depends on how you analyze the study and what the study results mean. Are we talking about the efficacy of mindfulness? Are we talking about the efficacy of mindfulness in this particular age cohort? Are we talking about the efficacy of mindfulness in this particular age cohort with the fact that there wasn’t an opt-out and the fact that these were classroom teachers, right?

Once you start breaking it down, there are all these different factors present here that will change someone’s opinions, or maybe they won’t change at all. Some of the advocates who have always been doing small-scale experience practice, mindfulness teachers who’ve designed a curriculum, they’re like, “Why would I change what I’m doing? I don’t think this disproves what I’m doing at all.” But as a universal approach, I think it’s certainly questionable, and as like a massive RCT with thousands of people and millions of dollars, I’d be really curious to see if something like that comes up again in the future.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I wonder what the children are even told this is for. I mean, is it explained to them that this is to help them more easily regulate emotionally? Or are they told that this will calm them down when they’re troubled? What is it that they’re told?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I can’t say. Like I said, I haven’t seen the curriculum, I haven’t seen the training that the teachers went through before they did the curriculum, and of course, it’s going to vary across teachers. Maybe there was a teacher that did explain, or maybe they didn’t. There’s a bunch of different teachers in this trial. I did mention before that some of the kids mentioned that it wasn’t really explained to them. But again, that’s one kid out of eight thousand. Like, I don’t know for the whole trial whether it was explained generally or not.

James Shaheen: Right. You know, it’s interesting because this is also a deviation, generally, from the Buddhist tradition, where children are typically not taught meditation, if at all, until their late teens. So can you say more about this? What are the risks of teaching mindfulness to kids when such programs don’t even exist in Buddhist cultures? 

Emma Varvaloucas: They might teach a form of it, right? Like younger kids chant in some contexts, but they’re not being taught sitting meditation, it’s my understanding, until they’re in their late teens, which would be exactly around the time that we’ve spoken about their metacognitive awareness coming online, and again, we’ve spoken about some of these mindfulness studies having better results in people who are teens. So the science and the traditional Buddhist practices actually track each other on that point. What I find really fascinating about this question in general is that you can answer it in two different ways, depending on whether you think that we should be honoring the traditional Buddhist practices and maybe they knew something about their own practices that modern Westerners don’t, or if you take the opposite approach and you think that because we have the power of modern science behind us and all these learnings about how the brain works and how kids’ brains works and this, that, and the other thing that we know more than them. I actually think that it should be in tandem. It should be balanced. I think that it really should be a red light for people that for centuries Buddhists have not taught sitting meditation to younger kids. It’s hard for me to imagine that they didn’t have a reason for that or that wasn’t a thought through. You have to imagine that at some point somebody tried, right? There must have been something. And maybe that does exist and I just don’t know about it. On the other hand, if the science had come out so far that mindfulness or meditation generally had all these amazing results for kids over 10, maybe we’d be looking at the tradition a little bit differently, but that’s not what we’re seeing so far. We’re seeing a very mixed bag.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I also wonder, I keep going back to this idea that the universal application is where it becomes really tricky. How is that even possible, given what a teacher needs to know in order to teach and how they would need to monitor the student who might be having trouble? It doesn’t seem possible except in more limited environments in which the person practicing is held and, and there’s a context and some sort of coherence to the experience. Still, the age of the participants is also salient. I think there’s so much to be said about that. So did the research for this article change how you think about mindfulness programs for kids or mindfulness programs more broadly? You talked a little bit about it, but where did you really come out, and what did you come out thinking? 

Emma Varvaloucas: So I think I came into the article with a pretty healthy dose of skepticism. I’ve never been someone that had a horse in the mindfulness advocate race, and I think that my mind was more skeptical about the good that it could do. I think I actually came out of it very similarly to you did, where there is a lot of evidence for its efficacy for adults, evidence for its efficacy for teens. I think that it will certainly be efficacious for people who want to learn how to do it and put it into practice. And we probably shouldn’t be surprised that it wasn’t for a bunch of kids who it was foisted upon. Also just with universal approaches generally, I mean, you could teach eight thousand kids to go running and there would be adverse experiences with that too. You know, some kid would get shin splints for sure. So I definitely agree with you about as a universal approach, maybe not. As something where maybe you have a really gifted teacher and you happen to be lucky that you go to a school that has such a program, yeah, that sounds really nice and potentially really helpful for kids, especially if it’s done with the kind of oversight that we’ve been talking about.

I should say too, one thing that we didn’t get into yet with this MYRIAD trial is that they did find, ironically enough, that the mindfulness curriculum that was taught to the teachers really helped the teachers. It alleviated burnout, and it helped the school function better. So, again, maybe not so much for the 11-year-olds, but the teachers were like two thumbs up.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, the interesting thing about studies in general that appear in the media, most of them have been about the miraculous effects of mindfulness meditation, and it has also driven funding for those programs. And yet, when you talk to the scientists, even those most zealously advocating for mindfulness, they even question the optimism of what they’re reading in the mainstream media. It does drive funding, on the one hand. It also creates a misperception that an article like this or the MYRIAD study debunks and comes as a shock, but really it shouldn’t be shocking at all. They’re simply looking at what works and how it works and whether it works and for what groups and on what scale. So if you live in our world and you’re reading about these things all the time, you may not be so surprised. If you’re reading the New York Times or any of the mainstream media and you’re hearing all of these wonderful things about mindfulness, this may be shocking. But really, in fact, I didn’t talk to anybody about this who actually does this for a living who was surprised.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely correct. And it’s not like when you talk to mindfulness researchers about this stuff that they’re like zealots about it. These people are people who have really thought this through and are really trying to figure things out and go where the science leads them. That’s how I felt like doing the deep dive into this trial, which is that it’s really just hard to explain to people, especially in a short-form media article, not only the results of one trial but how the trial fits into the existent scientific literature. It really takes time, and it takes focus and attention from readers and it’s just not possible in a 500-word article. You really need to dive into all this stuff to figure out exactly what’s going on. So I really enjoyed that. I have to say with this piece, the subdiscussion on subdiscussion on subdiscussion about what was going on here was fascinating.

James Shaheen: OK, Emma, anything else before we close?

Emma Varvaloucas: I don’t think so. I guess I should have said this in the beginning, but the caveat is I’m not a scientist. I’m not a mindfulness researcher. I’m a journalist. I’m a gatherer of information. Certainly there are people that have strong opinions about all of this and have made it their life’s work, and I just hope that I have represented the science accurately.

James Shaheen: Well, I think you did a very balanced job. It’s not that mindfulness is good or mindfulness is bad; it’s just looking more closely at what it does and doesn’t do. So I really appreciated it for that reason. So, Emma Varvaloucas, it’s been a pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to check out Emma’s article in the latest issue of Tricycle at tricycle.org/magazine. Thanks again, Emma.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thank you so much for having me on.

James Shaheen: ​​You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Emma Varvaloucas. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!