I agree with you to a degree, but I think you might be missing a major benefit mindfulness meditation. In particular, mindfulness meditation helps you to reprogram the way you relate to experiences and thoughts in a way that, in my experience, does eliminate stress.

In other words, my relationship with experiences and thoughts can tend to be either more objective or more subjective (perhaps reactive is a better word). The more objectively I view things, the less those things elicit a stress response. Again, this is in my experience and might not be universally true.

Sure there are stimuli that, for most people, will always elicit a stressful response. I would guess (emphasis on the word guess) this comprises at most ~10% of a person’s thoughts and experiences which is likely much less than most people think.

Anyways, just my two cents.

You also realize when someone is trying to appeal to your insecurities to extract something from you. You start avoiding those situations and the kinds of stress that they embody.

You just named a very specific thing that I've been wondering how to fortify myself against. Thank you for the succinct endorsement, this is very helpful for me

Stress is your internal reaction to a situation. Meditation can give you the skills to modify your reactions. What is a stress-inducing situation to some becomes just a calmly observed event to the skilled meditator. So sure, work on removing or reducing the stress inducers. But meditation is a personal super power that does not depend on anything external.

Absolutely agree, but there are many situations where stress is not able to be reduced easily (relationship problems/breakups or other family problems, anxiety issues, athletic events, work issues which come up even in relatively healthy work environments). Having coping strategies ready when things doesn't go as expected is important, and something I'm still working toward myself.

>We should work on actually reducing stress instead of abusing mindfulness to handle stress better.

yep, and to achieve that the people causing us stress should use mindfulness to better handle their own stress and cause us less of it as a result.

For me, mindfullness wasn't about "handling" stress. It made situations that were previously stressful into non-stressful situations.

That's not quite what mindfulness does in the long run. It actually reduces gray matter density in the amygdala, which is associated with immediate stress response. These changes are permanent. Therefore, it not only helps you "handle" stress, but also causes situations to "cause" less stress in the first place. Check out https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-t...

Also, you do not actually need to practice an hour a day to get the benefits. The above study has participants practicing on average 27 minutes per day.

Sorry, how does your comment relate to mine? Was this meant for somebody else?

Both/and in my opinion. I've had to work to reduce a lot of stressors in my own life, but I also had to learn to handle necessary levels and sources of stress. Humans need stress, just in the right quantity, and with the right activities to process it healthily.

I find that mindfulness both reduces my stress in the short term, and causes me to reflect and choose to eliminate stress-causes in my life in the long term. Both effects are positive.

Sometimes you need to become calmer first before you even understand what exactly is the source of your stress and/or are able to act on removing that source.

Besides of that, any kind of life consisting of anything else than lying in bed in a closed, dark, sound-protected room includes handling a kind of stress. And that is only if you consider hunger, thirst and the urge to pee and shit to be no stress.

It’s clear the management types who are pushing that agenda don’t really understand what they’re asking. I have a feeling it’s going to blow up in their faces when all of a sudden people don’t want to play their other mind games anymore.

Why not both?

exactly.

and it's more like "handle" stress better