The contemporary version of mindfulness originated in the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who in the late 1970s developed what he called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) to help patients cope with chronic conditions, especially chronic pain.  In an influential HuffPost Contributor article, Purser and Loy offered a trenchant critique of what this work on mindfulness has become, which they refer to as ‘McMindfulness’, equivalent to a standard hamburger with little nutritional value.  

Mindfulness has joined a long list of panaceas promoted as offering greater happiness and good health, from supposed ‘Palaeolithic’ diets to meditation.  They all fade more or less quickly in popularity, defeated either by the discipline required to maintain them or being exposed as little more than fads.  Like meditation, mindfulness is promoted in part by invoking the cachet of being ‘Buddhist-inspired’, but to make mindfulness more acceptable as a means for enhancing corporate productivity, there is an accompanying insistence that the modern version is not tied to its Buddhist origins.