This kind of desocializing logic is a central part of neoliberal formulations of subjectivity. It is also a central element in many popular forms of mindfulness. When negative emotions are seen as things that must be acknowledged and let go of, but never engaged, they lose their significance. This has the effect of neutering the politically generative potential of emotions by consigning feelings of anger, sadness, or disappointment to the realm of personal pathology.23
Teachers tend to model this behavior with slow and deliberate speech in gentle tones, expecting others to copy it. In many respects, the pursuit of “mindful correctness” resembles the acquisition of manners and social etiquette among the courtly class in medieval Europe. In The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias chronicled how a once barbarous Middle Age gradually became affectively transformed and civilized through changes in feelings of delicacy, shame, refinement, and repugnance.24 If one wanted to climb the social hierarchy, one needed to move, gesture, and speak with civility. Should there be any doubt about the link to modern mindfulness, the “Manners and Mindfulness” website offers “an etiquette program designed to provide the necessary and foundational training to help children and teens navigate the social skills in life.”25 Meanwhile, the Protocol School of Washington’s blog has a module on “How to be ‘Manners Mindful’ at Work.”26 The blog gives a number of tips on mindful correctness. You should “control your temper,” and “refrain from using offensive or demeaning language to colleagues and subordinates,” while “showing gratitude,” and so on. Attending a mindfulness conference reveals the pretentious facades of the holier than thou. Speaking loudly or showing any signs of strong emotions or criticism tends to elicit incredulous looks. Yet admitting that one doesn’t practice mindfulness will certainly provoke people’s inner evangelists.
Mindfulness practice is embedded in what Jennifer Silva calls the “mood economy.” In Coming Up Short: Working-
Class Adulthood in the Age of Uncertainty, Silva explains that, like the privatization of risk, a mood economy makes “individuals solely responsible for their emotional fates.”27 In such a political economy of affect, emotions are regulated as a means to enhance one’s “emotional capital.” At Google’s “Search Inside Yourself” mindfulness program, emotional intelligence (EI) figures prominently in the curriculum. The program is marketed to Google engineers as instrumental to their career success — by engaging in mindfulness practice, managing emotions generates surplus economic value, equivalent to the acquisition of capital. The mood economy also demands an affective resilience, the ability to bounce back from setbacks to stay productive in a precarious economic context. Like positive psychology, the mindfulness movement has merged with the “science of happiness.” Once packaged in this way, it can be sold as a technique for personal life-hacking optimization, disembedding individuals from social worlds.
A Cruel Optimism
All the promises of mindfulness resonate with what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” a defining neoliberal characteristic.28 It is cruel in that one makes affective investments in what amount to fantasies. We are told that if we practice mindfulness, and get our individual lives in order, we can be happy and secure. It is therefore implied that stable employment, home ownership, social mobility, career success and equality will naturally follow. We are also promised that we can gain self-mastery, controlling our minds and emotions so we can thrive and flourish amidst the vagaries of capitalism. As Joshua Eisen puts it, “Like kale, acai berries, gym memberships, vitamin water, and other new year’s resolutions, mindfulness indexes a profound desire to change, but one premised on a fundamental reassertion of neoliberal fantasies of self-control and unfettered agency.”29 We just have to sit in silence, watching our breath, and wait. It is doubly cruel because these normative fantasies of the “good life” are already crumbling under neoliberalism, and we make it worse if we focus individually on our feelings. Neglecting shared vulnerabilities and interdependence, we disimagine the collective ways we might protect ourselves. And despite the emptiness of nurturing fantasies, we continue to cling to them.
Mindfulness isn’t cruel in and of itself. It’s only cruel when fetishized and attached to inflated promises. It is then, as Berlant points out, that “the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.”30 The cruelty lies in supporting the status quo while using the language of transformation. This is how neoliberal mindfulness promotes an individualistic vision of human flourishing, enticing us to accept things as they are, mindfully enduring the ravages of capitalism.
chapter three
The Mantra of Stress
Mindfulness would not be where it is without the problem of stress. The two phenomena are opposite sides of the same modern coin. So pervasive is the discourse of stress, and such is the drain on profits due to stress-related work leave, that a professor of psychology has claimed that “stress is the 21st-century equivalent of the Black Death.”1
Similar hyperbole is used to sell mindfulness. Take, for example, the inside jacket of Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living: “Stress. It can sap our energy, undermine our health if we let it, even shorten our lives. It makes us more vulnerable to anxiety and depression, disconnection and disease.”2
Although people clearly get anxious and depressed, what is far from clear is that the cause of this suffering lies solely in their minds. However, this is Kabat-Zinn’s diagnosis, saying that we are “so caught up in our heads and in what we think is important, that it is easy to fall into a state of chronic tension and anxiety that continually drives our lives.”3 As a leading spokesperson for the mindfulness movement, his message is one of fear and uncertainty, with a distant prospect of relief. Stress is a noxious influence, he says, and it is up to us, as individuals, to mindful up. Nothing else can help:
There are no drugs that will make you immune to stress or to pain or that will by themselves magically solve your life’s problems or promote healing. It will take conscious effort on your part to move in a direction of healing and inner peace.4
It’s a seductive proposition, with potent side effects. Mindfulness helps people face pain with equanimity. But it also conditions us to think about stress in unhelpful ways. First, it says we face an epidemic, which is simply an inevitable part of modern life. Second, since stress is endemic, it is up to us all to get it under control and adapt to these conditions as best we can. It sounds like an empowering tool, but it ignores any source of pain outside our heads, such as the capitalist system, which exerts so much pressure in everyday life. The result is to pathologize stress, while offering a treatment that fails to address its broader causes.
The Stress Discourse
Like mindfulness itself, the concept of stress can be hard to define. Its very ambiguity makes it ubiquitous, but it should also make us wary of accepting some assumptions in popular discourse, particularly those that relate to inevitability. The discourse of stress has ideological components, and the mindfulness movement adopts these to build a whole industry around the stressed subject. However, this subject is also an object of outside forces. Professionals — including academics, practitioners and journalists — help to create it, observes Tim Newton in Managing Stress, “by telling us about ourselves and our world through, say, the discourses of psychiatry, psychology, biology, medicine, economics which reveal the secret of our selves.”5
Most of us know about stress through the discourse of science, whose biomedical descriptions make the problem individual, with no historical, social or political context.
Leaders of the mindfulness movement have rarely questioned this discourse of stress. As purveyors of a therapy sold as the only way to treat it, they have significant investments in this way of understanding it. Of course, one is free to decide if one wants to learn mindfulness or not, and it is this emphasis on individual agency that makes the discourses on stress and mindfulness appealing.
The problem is what gets obscured. By individualizing so
cial problems, the practice of mindfulness disadvantages those who suffer the most under the status quo. Critiquing definitions of stress in such limiting ways, Dana Becker has coined the term “stressism” to describe the current belief that the tensions of contemporary life are primarily individual lifestyle problems to be solved through managing stress, as opposed to the belief that these tensions are linked to social forces and need to be resolved primarily through social and political means.6
The mindfulness movement has adopted a doctrine of stressism, promoting itself as the remedy for a wide range of “stress-related” conditions. The focus is squarely on the individual, who is expected to heal what Kabat-Zinn likes to label the “thinking disease.” By practicing mindfulness, he says, we can switch from a frantic fixation on “doing” — and our accompanying hopes and fears — to a more harmonious mode of “being,” in which we learn to let go of and flow with stressful situations. To use the scientific framing of mindfulness, it becomes a mental vaccine that helps us to “thrive.”
American Nervousness
How did we arrive at this stress-filled moment in our history? Before World War II, psychological stress wasn’t really discussed. Little attention was paid to the word or the underlying concept, even in scientific circles. However, there are earlier versions of a similar idea. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, American life was prone to “nervousness.” As the engines of industrialization and urbanization gathered steam, this was the fashionable diagnosis for the anxieties associated with modernizing lifestyles — adjusting to railroads, the telegraph, stock market tickers, daily news and a proliferation of watches and clocks.
In 1869, George M. Beard, a New York neurologist, published an article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal diagnosing a condition called “neurasthenia.” Its debilitating symptoms included physical and mental fatigue, lethargy, headaches, heart palpitations, depression, anxiety, insomnia, an inability to concentrate, a lack of ambition, and even tooth decay — all qualified for the same diagnosis. It was a blanket description of discomfort in the face of rapid change.
Neurasthenia, from the Greek, denotes a “lack of nerve energy.” Lacking a clear physical pathology, neurasthenia was conceived as a condition brought about by a finite amount of nerve energy. One could only expend so much, or one’s nerves would malfunction. This theory was often compared to how electric current flows through a wire to power light bulbs and motors.
The majority of those diagnosed with neurasthenia were from the middle and upper classes, primarily women. In addition to the impact of social and technological change, Beard thought women were more vulnerable because of their increasing participation in society, putting them under greater strain. Late-nineteenth-century physicians generally agreed with him. In accordance with the social Darwinism of the time, the upper classes viewed themselves as more highly evolved, with more sensitive nervous systems. And due to the belief that women were especially delicate, they were considered more susceptible to neurasthenia than men. Beard, like other neurologists, portrayed neurasthenia as a disease of civilization, a medical testament to the challenges of adapting to the pressures of modern society.
By the turn of the century, neurasthenia was a household word in American culture.7 Many public figures fell victim to the disease, including William James, Jane Adams, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The press often called the condition nervous exhaustion, or simply “nerves.” Rather than being stigmatized, a neurasthenia diagnosis was often viewed as a badge of honor among middle- and upper-class men and women. It medically explained their symptoms and linked them to sacrifices made in pursuit of American competitiveness. Beard later contended in his book American Nervousness that neurasthenia was not only uniquely American, but a testament to the nation’s greatness as an advanced civilization, characterized by citizens (especially the upper class) possessing active minds, competitive characters, and a love of liberty.
This rationalization of the “brain work” performed by the upper classes served to make them feel better about their struggles to adapt to the demands of capitalism. A little discomfort seemed a small price to pay, in Beard’s analysis, for fine achievements. His social Darwinian leanings excluded laborers from the same diagnosis. They did not have to bear the same burden as the elite, whose more mentally taxing obligations supposedly made them more prone to nervous exhaustion. Those on the lower rungs of society — including non-whites and non-Protestants — had to resort to tonic and pills from “snake-oil” salesmen, as well as other dubious patent-medicine remedies for “bad nerves.”
What was the cure for this mysterious disorder? Treatments for men and women differed considerably. Showing signs of “nerves,” or missing work, was socially unacceptable for men in the nineteenth century. Their treatments often included rugged outdoor activities, strenuous physical exercise, and retreats in the wilderness. Many men were sent to the American West to live and work on cattle ranches. Theodore Roosevelt, the “conservationist president,” was one prominent figure diagnosed with neurasthenia.
For women, physicians usually prescribed the “rest cure.” Depending on the severity of the diagnosis, this often involved staying in bed for six to eight weeks in isolation from their family and children. Because mental activities were considered to drain and deplete a woman’s nervous energy, patients were denied access to books and periodicals. Nervous women were also considered to be too thin and their blood too weak. Silas Weir Mitchell, a prominent Philadelphia physician, was well known for trademarking the rest cure. His variant recommended a modicum of mental activity.
Beard supplemented these treatments by administering electrotherapy, thinking human nerves could be recharged like a battery. Applying a mild electric current to patients, he placed one electrode on the scalp and then moved his hand with the other over parts of the body. Many said they felt refreshed after electrotherapy, even in cases where the battery had died without their knowing. Similar to a placebo effect, Beard called this “mental therapeutics.”
Eventually, neurasthenia faded into the annals of history, only to be replaced with something almost as nebulous: stress.
The Caveman Theory
Most modern explanations of stress — and therefore mindfulness — invoke the idea that we are maladapted cavemen inhabiting twenty-first-century lifestyles. If we can learn to rewire a few default responses, our brains can be optimized to cope with the present. If we don’t, we fall victim to stress. This biological account can be summed up as follows. Our ancestors had to be ready to face fearsome predators like saber-toothed tigers. As a result, they evolved the capacity to draw quickly on vast amounts of energy so they could respond to potential threats. For Stone Age man, the adrenalin-fueled “fight-or-flight” instinct was a survival mechanism, which became “hard-wired” into human biology. And since our brains have evolved very little in the intervening centuries, we still fall back on this overreaction to things that unsettle us.
However, unlike a relatively leisurely hunter-gatherer, we do not retreat to a cave and take time out so our systems recover from pumping adrenalin. If we did, we’d have no problem. Instead, we get on with our lives and stress accumulates. We are so stressed out (a phrase which only became popular in the 1980s) because our fight-or-fight alarm gets pushed so often, throwing our homeostatic systems out of whack. This wears down our bodies and immune systems, whittling away at our natural resilience. However, mindfulness can teach us the skill of self-regulation, and by paying attention to present experience we learn to unwind. Or so the basic theory goes.
Although it gets jazzed up with the latest neuroscience, much of what it says is a century old. And while it clearly has some relevance — particularly to the treatment of post-traumatic stress — it is all too often used as a general explanation, obscuring other causes of modern discomfort. The original ideas date from 1914, when the Harvard medical professor Walter B. Cannon first used the word “stress” in a scientific paper. Cannon performed experiments on
cats and dogs. The latter were placed in the cages of the former, which caused them distress. Cannon’s interest was in how they recovered. The physiology of stress seemed less important than that of instincts and emotions, and biological mechanisms responsible for homeostasis. He wanted to know how animals could return to a state of equilibrium after facing a threat.
Cannon’s theorizing mainly referred to biological conditions such as “cold, lack of oxygen, low blood sugar, loss of blood.” Having observed how distressed cats in his laboratory experiments released the hormone adrenalin when exposed to barking dogs, he inferred that responses such as fear and rage were part of our biological evolution, and that instinctual reactions arose “for quick service in the struggle for existence.”8
Cannon was heavily influenced by social Darwinism, eugenics, and the theory of instincts. To prevent the degeneration of the population, he advocated that our “fighting instinct” should be satisfied, especially if we wanted to avoid war. He concluded that aggression was biological in nature, rather than arising in a social context. He therefore planted the seed for the popular notion in mindfulness discourse that social problems are induced by biology. Regardless of the social complexity people now have to deal with, the root of their problems is reduced to outmoded caveman instincts.
Naturalizing Stress
There is a strange idea implicit in this oft-repeated tale about an ongoing battle between Stone Age physiology and modern lifestyles. Although no one quite says it this clearly in mindfulness literature, the underlying suggestion is that if only we had evolved further biologically, capitalist societies would have no stress or conflicts. Meanwhile, the practice of mindfulness can help change our brains so we can eradicate these antiquated problems.
In other words, there is nothing inherently wrong with our modern age. It’s just our maladaptive responses that make us unhappy. Having inherited this flawed biology, it is up to us to compensate and self-correct. Biological reductionism, inherited from Cannon, puts the onus on individuals to monitor and manage unruly emotions. The capitalist economy is simply a given, to which all must adapt. It’s a survival-of-the-fittest ideology that naturalizes stress, ignoring structural factors that cause the response.
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