The Future of the Mindfulness Industry
What is the future of the mindfulness industry? Because industry it is. The meditation industry in the United States alone is now estimated to be worth $1B. A small chunk of the $4.5T global wellness industry. Central to that industry is mindfulness.
This ancient upstart is the fastest-growing wellness intervention in the world today and a culture increasingly engaging with anything that addresses the global rise of burnout and work-generated stress is propelling it forward. As a consequence, analysts project the mindfulness industry will be worth $9B globally by 2027.
The Rise of the Meditation App
A plethora of smartphone apps such as Headspace and Calm, both billion-dollar industries, are aiding and abetting this, capitalising on the growing scientific evidence for the health benefits of mindfulness. Analysts expect the global mindfulness app market to be worth $4,206M by 2027.
Alongside the surge in smartphone apps is the Covid-19-propelled move to more online spaces providing mindfulness trainings. Breathworks, the UK-based leader in mindfulness for health programmes, has now moved all their training programmes to an online format. To be fair, they were in the process of implementing this prior to the pandemic, but Covid-19 certainly accelerated it. There are many other organisations and individuals filling the online space with mindfulness training programmes of varying quality and integrity, a number of them for free.
It seems that the future of mindfulness will be largely digital, but to engage in this way it must overcome the potential within the form for shallow learning and low engagement.
What Will it Take for Mindfulness to Become Mainstream?
Right now, there are many people suffering from mental health conditions that, due to cultural or socio-economic factors cannot access mindfulness. What steps are needed for mindfulness to gain mainstream traction and be fully accepted within the clinical canon as a recognised treatment for mental health conditions? In 2014, 16 million adults in the US had at least one major depressive episode. Practicing mindfulness can help to foster resilience in the face of chronic stress and depression, regardless of socio-economic status and the evidence for this is mounting.
The advantage that mindfulness intervention as therapy has is that it is astonishingly cheap. In the UK, the government is promoting a widespread roll-out of MBCT (Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy) to address the rise of various mental health conditions. The danger here is in trying to address widespread social problems with an entirely individualised solution. However, policymakers are emphasising mindfulness as a public policy cure-all because it is extremely politically attractive and is therefore receiving significant public investment.
The advance of digital technology, the rise of serious mental health disorders, and growing research evidence supporting mindfulness interventions, combined with intense political scrutiny and massive public funding, are securing the future of mindfulness.
Mindfulness is Not Just About Meditation
Whether this is ultimately beneficial remains to be seen. As any Buddhist will tell you, mindfulness, developed by the Buddha 2,500 years ago, is not just about meditation.The three elements of a good mindfulness meditation practice are ethics, meditation and the arising of wisdom. All three elements are interdependent. Focusing only on the meditation element leads us to the current situation, where the US Marines adopt the practice in their pre-deployment training to help deal with chaos and battlefield stress. You can’t get much further from the teachings of the Buddha than this.
The danger in the exploding mindfulness industry is that the practice could lose its main purpose for existence which is, as the Buddha expounded, the complete cessation of suffering through an intense realisation of non-self and the impermanence and emptiness of existence.
