Areas › Your body › Grounding and settling
If you are going to try a mindfulness course, give it the full eight weeks before deciding. Expect a real but moderate change rather than a different life.
Courses of this length help a good number of people and do very little for others, which is worth knowing at the start so that being in the second group does not feel like a verdict on you. What people notice is often less about attention and more about being less easily thrown, which for many is the harder problem anyway. Go along for the weeks, then judge.
Qur’an and Sunnah
so that you may find contentment (Quran 20:130). Contentment is named as what a repeated practice is for, and it is placed at the end of the repeating rather than the start.
فَٱصۡبِرۡ عَلَىٰ مَا يَقُولُونَ وَسَبِّحۡ بِحَمۡدِ رَبِّكَ قَبۡلَ طُلُوعِ ٱلشَّمۡسِ وَقَبۡلَ غُرُوبِهَاۖ وَمِنۡ ءَانَآيِٕ ٱلَّيۡلِ فَسَبِّحۡ وَأَطۡرَافَ ٱلنَّهَارِ لَعَلَّكَ تَرۡضَىٰ
so [Prophet] be patient with what they say- celebrate the praise of your Lord, before the rising and setting of the sun, celebrate His praise during the night, and at the beginning and end of the day, so that you may find contentment
Qur’an 20:130read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review of randomised trials of mindfulness based programmes for university students found mental health improved overall, but effects varied widely and many trials were of moderate quality. Overall benefit with wide variation is the honest summary: likely to help, not certain to help you. That review was in students, so its numbers do not transfer neatly to other groups.
Dawson AF, Brown WW, Anderson J, Datta B, Donald JN, Hong K, Allan S, Mole TB, Jones PB, Galante J. (2020). Mindfulness-Based Interventions for University Students: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomised Controlled Trials.. Applied psychology. Health and well-being doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A practice that works slowly cannot be judged fairly after a week of it.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
When you offer someone a practice, ask them to tell you if it did nothing, and mean it. Say out loud that plenty of these do not land.
Start with a couple of minutes of movement before any of the difficult talking. Not a warm up for its own sake: a body that has moved is easier to think in.
Think of your thoughts as traffic on a road. Practice thins the traffic. It does not close the road, and nobody has ever managed to close it.