Mindfulness Isn’t Enough: Here’s Why We Need Kindfulness

We’ve spent the last couple of decades falling in love with mindfulness. It’s in our apps, our workplaces, our schools, even the US Army. And rightly so.

It’s a brilliant tool. It calms the nervous system, sharpens focus, softens anxiety, and gives us a fighting chance against the noise of modern life.

But here’s the twist almost nobody talks about: mindfulness on its own doesn’t necessarily make you a kinder person. In some cases, it can do the opposite.

Where mindfulness actually came from

Mindfulness as most of us know it today – the version you get from an app in about ninety seconds, like Neo downloading kung fu in The Matrix – is a slimmed-down descendant of something much bigger.

The original teaching, what scholars now call traditional mindfulness, came from Buddhism, and it was never meant to stand alone. It was one small step on a much longer path – the Eightfold Path – which was really a training manual for being a decent human being.

Right speech. Right action. Right livelihood. Right intention, which meant cultivating a kind mind, not just a calm one. Mindfulness meditation was in there, sure, but it was embedded in a whole framework of ethics and compassion.

Then, in 1979, a molecular biologist named Jon Kabat-Zinn had an idea. He’d fallen in love with meditation during his MIT days, and he wanted to bring it into Western hospitals to help patients who weren’t responding to conventional treatment.

But he knew that if it looked too “mystical, New Age, or just plain flakey” (his words), nobody in a Boston hospital was going to touch it.

So he stripped it down. No robes, no chanting, no ethics curriculum – just the seated practice, repackaged as stress reduction. It worked brilliantly. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR, became one of the great public health success stories of our time.

But something got left on the cutting room floor in that process: kindness. The divorce between mindfulness and its ethical roots wasn’t a falling out – it was a practical necessity for a secular, clinical world.

Still, a divorce is a divorce. And the kids – all of us, practicing our breath-counting apps on the train – never got told what we were missing.

The three chairs experiment

Here’s where it gets genuinely fascinating, and a little uncomfortable.

In one study, researchers taught a group of people mindfulness meditation over three weeks, then invited them in one at a time for what they were told was a “cognitive test.” It wasn’t. It was a hidden-camera setup.

Each person walked into a waiting room with three chairs, two already occupied by actors instructed to ignore anyone who came in. A minute later, another actor arrived on crutches, wincing in visible discomfort, with nowhere to sit.

People who’d practiced mindfulness were more than twice as likely to offer up their seat as those who hadn’t – 37% versus 14%. A win for mindfulness, right?

Except when researchers checked participants’ empathy levels afterwards, there was no difference between the meditators and the non-meditators.

Mindfulness hadn’t made anyone more empathic, hadn’t made them care more. It had simply made them more aware. It pulled people out of their own heads long enough to actually notice the person in front of them.

Noticing and caring are not the same thing. Whether we act on what we notice depends on something else entirely – and that’s where it gets interesting, and a little uncomfortable.

When mindfulness backfires

A separate set of studies measured people’s dispositional empathy – how naturally empathic they already were – before teaching them mindfulness. The result: mindfulness only increased kind behaviour in people who were already high in empathy.

For people low in empathy, it did the reverse. They became less likely to help someone in need than people who’d done no mindfulness training at all.

Other researchers found something similar using a concept called self-construal – essentially, whether your default lens on life is “it’s about me” or “it’s about us.”

People primed to think in more individualistic, independent terms (typical of Western cultures) actually became less helpful after mindfulness practice, stuffing fewer envelopes for a homelessness charity than a control group who hadn’t meditated at all.

People primed toward an interdependent, “we’re all in this together” mindset (typical of Eastern cultures where Buddhism has its roots) became notably more generous.

There’s even research on narcissism: people high in narcissistic traits became measurably less empathetic after a short mindfulness session. As the researchers themselves put it, mindfulness backfired among those who seemed to need it the most.

The pattern across all of this is consistent. Mindfulness doesn’t create kindness from nothing. It amplifies whatever is already there. It’s less a moral compass and more a mirror – and a rather flattering, enlarging one at that.

If you’re already inclined toward kindness, it draws more of it out of you. If you’re not, it can leave you more comfortably, contentedly self-absorbed than before.

The science just got more interesting

A study published in Scientific Reports in 2023 adds a layer to this that I find genuinely striking.

Researchers looked at nearly 800 university students and found that most intelligent students tended to be more prosocial – more generous, more helpful, more inclined to donate and volunteer – largely because they’re better at empathising with other people’s situations.

Of course, that’s a statistical average and in no way represents any individual person.

But then they added dispositional mindfulness into the mix as a moderating factor. And the findings were almost the mirror image of what you’d expect.

Among people with low mindfulness, the usual pattern held: higher intelligence meant more empathy and more prosocial behaviour. 

But among people with high mindfulness, that whole chain quietly broke down.

The link between intelligence and empathy became statistically insignificant. The link between empathy and generous action weakened substantially. And the direct relationship between intelligence and prosocial behaviour actually flipped from positive to negative.

The researchers’ theory is that mindfulness, by anchoring us so thoroughly in present-moment awareness and non-judgemental acceptance of things as they are, can quietly dial down the emotional arousal that usually pushes us into action when we see someone struggling. 

If part of you is busy accepting the status quo and staying peacefully present, there’s less of you left to feel the pull toward fixing things.

For the very people you’d expect to be well equipped to read a situation and respond to it – the more cognitively sharp among us – mindfulness may be dampening exactly the spark that would otherwise move them to help.

It’s a genuinely humbling finding, and it lines up almost eerily well with what those earlier waiting-room and envelope-stuffing studies were already telling us.

Awareness without warmth doesn’t reliably produce kindness. Sometimes it produces something closer to well-regulated indifference.

Bringing kindness back into the room

None of this is an argument against mindfulness. I practice it myself, and I still think it’s one of the more valuable tools we have for managing stress, sleeping better, and generally not losing our minds in a world that seems to be accelerating every year.

Mindfulness sharpens your senses. It’s just not, on its own, a moral education.

There’s an analogy I keep coming back to. Mindfulness is like handing someone a really good pair of glasses. Suddenly the world comes into focus – the person struggling at the bus stop, the colleague who’s gone quiet in meetings, the tension in your own chest before you snap at someone you love. 

You see it all more clearly than before. But glasses don’t tell you what to do with what you see. That part is still entirely up to you, and it depends on what you were carrying inside you before you put them on.

But on its own, it was never designed to make us better to each other. That was always kindness’s job – and somewhere in mindfulness’s journey from the Bodhi tree to the App Store, kindness got left behind.

This is why I like to talk about kindfulness: mindfulness with the ethics put back in. It’s not a rejection of mindful awareness – it’s what happens when you pair that awareness with an intention to care.

Where mindfulness whispers “notice,” kindfulness adds “…and also care.” 

And the research on this is genuinely hopeful: even a small amount of explicit teaching about kindness alongside a mindfulness practice – just a few extra lessons on compassion, on how we’re all connected – was enough to lift generosity across the board, even among people who started out low in empathy.

Kindness, it turns out, is learnable. It doesn’t require some innate disposition you either have or don’t.

So here’s an invitation, not an instruction.

Next time you sit down to meditate, or open that app, or simply try to be more present in your day – what would it look like to bring a small measure of warmth along with the awareness?

Not as an extra task to perform, but as something you let yourself notice is already there, waiting to be included.

Maybe it’s as simple as this: before you focus on your breath, spend ten seconds thinking of someone you care about. Let that feeling sit alongside the stillness, rather than being crowded out by it.

Awareness shows us the world more clearly. Kindness is what we choose to do with what we see.

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This post was adapted from my book, ‘The Joy of Actually Giving a F*ck’ (Hay House, 2024). Link.

References

The 3 chairs experiment. Link.

Dispositional empathy study. Link.

Self construal study – independent self-construal vs interdependent self-construal. Link.

Mindfulness and narcissism study. Link.

Intelligence study. Link.

Putting kindness back into mindfulness study. Link.