Are you one of the millions of mindfulness meditators?

Everyone from entrepreneurs to investment bankers are turning to the ancient practice seeking reduced anxiety, sharper focus and potentially more success in their careers.

What exactly is “mindfulness meditation”?

While meditation has been common in many spiritual practices since antiquity, mindfulness took form in the late 1970s when Jon Kabat-Zinn developed an eight-week program called Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (M.B.S.R.) to help people with stress, pain, and illness. The program was derived from a Buddhist meditation method that uses the bodily sensation of breathing as a focus, as opposed to repeating a mantra like Transcendental Meditation.

Fast-forward 35 years and there are now online courses, mobile apps, and weeklong seminars teaching mindfulness. The idea is that regular practice can help anyone become more attentive, less judgmental, and more aware of emotions and thought processes. That, in turn, improves performance at any kind of endeavor.

Among the high-profile converts is Richard Branson, who has made meditation exercises a feature on the audio program of some Virgin Airlines flights. Portions of Arianna Huffington’s book “Thrive” discuss the value of practicingmindfulness meditation daily with her team at The Huffington Post. The World Economic Forum in Davos opened each day with meditation sessions. Companies such as General Mills and Target offer employees “contemplative programs” based on the principles of mindfulness meditation. Goldman Sachs and Unilever have encouraged employees to use Headspace— a web and app-based mindfulness program created by former Buddhist monk turned meditation entrepreneur Andy Puddicombe.

While mindfulness has well-documented benefits, some see the wave of promotion as unaligned with its original intent: to use self-awareness to expand one’s capacity for self-care, balance, and peace of mind. As Ronald Purser, management professor and Zen practitioner, explained in The New Yorker, corporations are using mindfulness programs as a Band-Aid for their stressful work environments. “It’s saying, ‘It’s your problem!’” said Purser. “Get with the program, fix your stress and get back to work!”

Purser’s sentiments echo what popular philosopher Slavoj Žižek saw coming over a decade ago. In an essay for Cabinet Magazine, Žižek explained that Buddhism tweaked for popular western consumption was a “fetish” that “enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it.” In other words, a far cry from the original intent of Buddhist meditation practices.

Still, the mindfulness movement continues to gather steam and research on its effects is stacking up.

A meta-analysis last year published in JAMA Internal Medicine showed that “meditation programs can result in small to moderate reductions of multiple negative dimensions of psychological stress,” which includes anxiety, depression and pain. A UK study published in the Lancet found that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy can be as effective as antidepressants in preventing the recurrence of depression.

So the growing popularity of mindfulness programs is a good thing — but it’s probably also a signal that way too many of us are stressed out.

A collaborative paper from Harvard and Stanford Business Schools found that job-related stress leads to hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and decreased mental health while costing the United States $180 billion a year in healthcare expenses.

So take it easy on your brain and your bank account. Just breathe.