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Mindfulness has sometimes been oversold, and that invites understandable critique.

Evidence shows that mindfulness can help people live well with depression, pain, and illness.

The challenge now is helping people access what we know helps.

Recently, a colleague said: “I think mindfulness has had its day.” I felt alarm, confusion, quiet hurt, and a flash of anger. I didn’t trust my reaction or my impulse to push back. So I sat with it. I’ve heard some version of this comment in different countries, from a range of colleagues—each time with a different mix of curiosity, concern, even relief. As if we’ve been surfing a wave, and now it’s time to move on to the next one.

My work over more than 30 years has been a vocation rather than a career—and that’s partly because it has been personal. I was raised in Nigeria, where as a young child I witnessed both tremendous suffering and extraordinary resilience. My experience of depression started in my teenage years. My first job at the World Health Organisation, travelling through China, India, and Thailand, was formative: I encountered ways of approaching the challenge of living well amid very real hardship that made me rethink much of what I’d learned growing up. For three decades, I have explored ideas and practices from contemplative traditions and modern psychology, and used them to learn how to live with recurrent depression—and, more than that, how to live well.

Depression will affect around a billion people worldwide at some point in their lives; it is already the second-leading cause of disability globally. We’ve learned a great deal about how to treat and prevent it, but that knowledge isn’t reaching the people who need it: In developed countries, only a minority of people access adequate treatment, and in lower-income countries that figure drops to a small fraction. We also need to focus on prevention. Heart health wasn’t changed by treating people after a heart attack; remarkable improvements around the world came from diet, exercise, sleep, and tackling risk factors early. Mental health is no different. What we’ve learned is that foundational psychological skills are essential to resilience for all of us, whether we’re depressed, languishing, well, or even thriving. The pressing challenge becomes how we reach younger people, how we connect with those living with depression, how we understand the barriers they face in accessing what we know helps, and how we make mental health a priority for all of us.

Maybe there’s something in my friend’s challenge. Yes, there is a version of mindfulness that got packaged as a panacea—a quick fix, something everyone should do, especially children, something that might help us feel better about a life or a world that hasn’t changed. She’s right: This version of mindfulness needs to be challenged, refined, or debunked in line with a growing body of scientific evidence.

But over 25 years of research, teaching, and clinical work, I have seen something much more substantive emerging that needs cultivation and development. No, mindfulness is not a quick fix, nor a panacea, nor a salve for discontent caused by real-world problems—injustice, inequality, conflict, and challenges to planetary health. But it is a set of ideas and practices for training the mind—drawing on the evidence of ancient wisdom and modern psychology alike—that helps people see and change the habits and patterns that create and recreate suffering. There is a substantive body of research that shows clearly that mindfulness-based interventions can help people with depression, pain, and living with chronic disease. There is also promising evidence that it can help teachers and health-care professionals, and that it can be an important part of healthy relationships, families, schools, and workplaces.

When people say the mindfulness wave is over, perhaps what they’re actually saying is that the way we’ve been talking about it has to change. It needs to be honest, nuanced, responsible, and grounded in evidence. It needs to be clear that we’re talking about a set of ideas and practices rooted in ethics, awareness, and attitudes of interest, kindness, and care—tested against two forms of evidence: the evidence of our own experience and the findings of science. It also requires teachers who are rigorously trained and supported.

As I sat with my colleague’s challenge, the image of waves kept coming back to me. A wave rises, it breaks, it returns to the body of water. It doesn’t disappear; it was never separate from the body of water. The history of contemplative traditions and psychology moves the same way. The ideas and practices that are true and useful keep returning, refined, made useful again. In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be sharing some of the work my team and wider collaborators is working on. The vision driving it is simple, even if achieving it is not: a world where people flourish, free from the devastating impacts of depression—where ancient wisdom and modern psychology together help us teach lifelong skills, build resilience in individuals, relationships, families, schools, and workplaces, and make that learning genuinely accessible. I hope it’s a conversation you want to be part of.

Take our Mindfulness Test

Find a mindfulness-based therapist

Montero-Marin, J., van der Velden, A., & Kuyken, W. (2024). Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy's Untapped Potential. JAMA PSYCHIATRY, 81(11), 1059-1060. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2024.2741

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