Think on this: Meditation apps are not good enough

Mindfulness needs to be practiced, not just checked off a to-do list.

If you’re like me, you love the idea of meditation but don’t have time to do it because it would cut into your TV time.

What good are mindfulness and inner peace if you have no clue what’s happening on “Game of Thrones”?

This presents a problem because, more and more, people are telling us that our fast and wired lifestyles must now include a quest for mindfulness, a greater sense of living in the moment and not letting work stress bring us down. But who has time to be mindful?

To rescue us from this dilemma, companies have been tripping over each other to crank out meditation apps. For example, the company Headspace has an app, reportedly being used by upward of 3 million people, that provides guided meditation exercises.

The Huffington Post recently reported that Headspace closed a $30 million funding deal and now “plans to release an enterprise product next year for companies that want to provide mindfulness training to their employees.” Sounds like a lot of us will be chilling out whether we like it or not.

I looked at the Headspace website and came across this slogan: Meditation Made Simple.

That seems to perfectly encapsulate the folly of making mindfulness a fad or a commodity. We want the benefits of meditation, as long as we can get them by popping in our earbuds and listening to an app for no more than seven minutes a day.

It’s a bit like a health magazine that offers an “Only 5 Minutes A Day!” workout promising washboard abs. Buyer beware.

I believe in the benefits of meditation, and I think mindfulness is a noble concept. What worries me about these apps making their way into workplaces is that they’ll allow us to go through the motions without really making an effort to be more at peace.

Doing a daily app meditation might just become another item we check off our list of things to do. Exercise? Check. Finished work project? Check. Focused on my breathing while gaining perspective of my place in the world for six minutes? Check!

I spoke with Jon Lieff, a psychiatrist and a specialist in the interface of psychiatry, neurology and medicine. He has a blog called “Searching for the Mind” and has written about how meditation can help the brain.

He sees the apps as a fine starting point but shares some of my concerns. “This is a wired generation,” he said. “If they can wire themselves to un-wire, then I guess that’s good. It can get you started, but you can’t just depend upon it because otherwise you’re missing the key ingredient of doing it yourself.”

He added: “I’ve been meditating and training people in meditation for 40 years, and now it’s become a business. And people are making money off of it. Certain groups are sort of co-opting and taking over the concept. It’s not as easy as people think it is. It takes practice.”

Sharon Salzberg, co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society and author of “Real Happiness at Work,” said she is working on a project that helps bring meditation and yoga to international aid workers. An app will be part of that program, but it’s a tool for continued practice rather than a starting point. “It’s a reminder,” she said. “If you start to get anxious, you’ve got a tool. It can remind you, just breathe. Do this stretch. It can be great to be a kind of continuing education.”

She said most meditation apps that are out there are no different than books that introduce people to meditation. “An app is just a delivery system,” she said. “But the tricky thing about an app is that you don’t have a teacher. A teacher really helps you come to balance, points out when you’re trying too hard or not trying hard enough.”

She said that if an app gets a person to meditate even a little, it’s a good thing. But she does see people who do the minimum and treat it as though they’ve fully engaged in the practice. “People say I did one class or I tried it once, now I’m a meditator,” she said. “People use the word mindfulness very casually these days too. It’s all kind of part of the same thing — I’ve just done a tiny little bit of it and that’s enough.”

And that’s my concern. There is much we can gain from actually taking the time to meditate.

“It helps all kinds of things,” Lieff said. “The evidence in programs is that it helps anxiety, fearfulness. It decreases the response to pain, helps the immune system, helps the cardiovascular system.”

An app is a start.