Mindfulness in politics and public policy

Abstract

A key factor in the popularity of mindfulness training in public life is the conviction of grassroots advocates seeking to pass on the benefits they have experienced through personal practice. In this manner, mindfulness training has found its way into the realm of government, with parliamentary programmes seeding ambition among politicians to research and employ its transformative potential at both interpersonal and policy levels. In a high-stakes, adversarial setting, mindfulness practice helps elected representatives to cope with specific challenges, and an inquiry by the UK Mindfulness All-Party Parliamentary Group has contributed to the emergence of mindfulness training in numerous policy narratives. By developing a new kind of familiarity with their own inner lives, a growing number of politicians are finding a new way to approach political discourse, and a corresponding enthusiasm for policy that tackles society's problems at the level of the human heart and mind. Some are starting to ask whether mindfulness might be more than a targeted intervention for specific issues, and may in fact contribute to the flourishing of society more broadlymarking an important development from concern with individual benefits to benefits for the whole.

Love thy (partisan) neighbor: Brief befriending meditation reduces affective polarization

“…The word mindfulness was never mentioned in the mindfulness condition, but it was mentioned repeatedly in the talk about mindfulness meditation, which was focused on the concept (rather than the practice) of mindfulness. The audio recording for the control condition was a combination of talks by Professor Mark Williams, who has delivered mindfulness teachings to British politicians together with Chris Cullen from the Oxford Mindfulness Centre (Bristow, 2019). The audio recordings used in the mindfulness and befriending conditions were also recorded by Professor Mark Williams and were derived from Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World (Williams & Penman, 2011), which forms the basis of an eight-week mindfulness course that has been taught in the UK Parliament.…”

Motivating individuals for social transition: The 2-pathway model and experiential strategies for pro-environmental behaviour

“…The group launched a Mindfulness Initiative to develop policy recommendations for governments, focussing on the sectors health and education, the workplace and the criminal justice system (MAPPG, 2015). In the years since founding, the initiative rapidly grew beyond the UK and politicians worldwide started engaging with mindfulness (Bristow, 2018). Experiential strategies are no 'quick fix' way to change a specific set of environmental behaviours.…”

Healing Anthropocene Syndrome: Planetary Health Requires Remediation of the Toxic Post-Truth Environment

“…The WHO has identified the "infodemic" as one of our grand challenges; remediation of the toxic environment should, perhaps, occur along the lines of the WHO's doctrine that health is not merely the absence of disease; in other words, if misinformation is a diseasecausative agent, to what extent can learning in the realm of health-promoting aspects of social contagion fill in the void left by the removal of misinformation [177]. Mindfulness, best-known for its potential in personal health and flourishing at the individual level [208], may have far-reaching benefits at scales of community and planet [195,209].…”

“…Trying to determine the influencers throughout massive social networks is labor intensive; the extent to which select individuals can spread public health messages through social networks is an area of interest for researchers [194]. If research continues to demonstrate that social media mindfulness increases critical appraisal and lowers cognitive biases [183], it might suggest that those with higher levels of dispositional mindfulness would be important assets in the post-truth era-slowing the spread of misinformation and enhancing the likelihood of flourishing at scales of person, place and planet [195] (Figure 8). already well documented that authoritarian narratives (no matter how factually correct they might be) do little to curb vaccine hesitance [191,192].…”