David Brendel is concerned that mindfulness is gaining a cultlike status in the business world.

As a physician, psychiatrist, and executive coach, Brendel doesnt have anything against mindfulness and meditation techniques. He knows the benefits mindfulness poses for stress levels and life-threatening illnesses. He's well aware of the growing neuroscience research that demonstrates the positive effects mindfulness has on the brain. He incorporates a lot of cognitive psychology into his own work to help clients transform their mindsets and work on important behavioral changes needed for career success.

The problem he has with mindfulness is that everyone seems to be for it, and Brendel is worried were all just blindly following the leader.

"Ive been struck by the growth of different mindfulness approaches over the years, and I recommend them to many of my clients," Brendel tells Fast Company. "At the same time, Ive noticed over the past year or so, [mindfulness] has just sort of exploded in the popular press and popular imagination, and you see almost nothing about it thats critical, negative, or cautionary."

Brendel says this kind of "blind acceptance" can prevent people from using the constructive critical eye so desperately needed when thinking about potential risks of a practice thats gained so much traction, it was called a "revolution" by Time magazine in 2014.

Below are the risks, according to Brendel, of a blanket acceptance of mindfulness in the office:

Brendels biggest concern with mindfulness is that it can lead to avoidance in thinking through overwhelming situations and having difficult conversations. Instead of pushing through internal barriers to change thoughts and behavioral patterns, people accept them.

"So, instead of carefully, logically, and rationally thinking about difficult issues and coming to very difficult decisions, [some of my clients] were kind of backing up from those scary and overwhelming thoughts that they needed to have or decisions that they needed to make or difficult conversations that they needed to have, and just going into a state of acceptance," he explains, "and just noticing whats going on but not actually changing."

Instead of pushing through internal barriers to change thoughts and behavioral patterns, people accept them.

Meditation and mindfulness can lead to analytical thought processes if people use the practices to change their usual way of doing things. But the practices can also lead people to block out the world and accept their lives. If this is the case, mindfulness can have adverse effects on creative breakthroughs since, so often, you need to change the way you think to have "aha" moments.

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The Downsides To Mindfulness Practices At Work