Practices

If your child is learning to settle, learn it alongside them rather than supervising. Parents who practise report less stress of their own and less flying off the handle.

Attention difficulties run in families, so the adult in the room is often working with much the same wiring at the end of a longer day. Practising…

If your imagination runs away with you, use it rather than fight it. Guided imagery gives a vivid mind somewhere to go.

Being able to disappear into a scene is a real ability, even when it has mostly got you into trouble at school and in meetings. A recording that…

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…

Attention problems often travel with anxiety or low mood, and those two eat working memory as well. Settling that layer can make everything else look quite different.

If you are anxious most of the day you will lose track of things, forget what you came into the room for and struggle to hold a plan, whether or not…

Reaching for your water at dinner is a chance to practise. Stop your hand for a second, notice that you want it, then go ahead and drink.

No cushion is involved, no mantra, nothing to schedule. The point is to rehearse the shape of the thing many times a day at almost no cost: impulse,…

You are practising the pause, not giving anything up. Once you have paused, go ahead and drink the water.

This gets misheard quickly and turns into one more rule about denying yourself, which most people rebel against inside a week. The target is the…

Nobody sees the times you did not say the cutting thing, including you a week later. Put them somewhere you can look at: one sticky note on the wall for each.

Memory is unfair about this. The single evening you lost your temper stays vivid while thirty quiet successes disappear, and then it feels as though…

If the word mindfulness makes you wince, leave the word out. Paying attention to your breath, or to the sounds in the room, is the whole of it.

A lot of people turn the practice down before trying it, because the label sounds like it belongs to somebody else's religion or somebody else's sort…

One or two minutes every day will do more for you than forty minutes once a week. The long sit sounds serious and is mostly a good way to end up dreading it.

Set the price so low that skipping it would be odd: a minute, at a moment you already have. The aim is that it happens again tomorrow, not that it…

Treat it like brushing your teeth rather than like meditating. Nobody is good at brushing their teeth, and nobody skips it because last night's went badly.

The hygiene framing takes the achievement out of it, and achievement is where perfectionists quit. Put it next to something already automatic: after…

Sit still, choose a position, and hold it. Within seconds your body will be asking to move the chin or scratch the neck, and each of those small urges is a free repetition of letting an impulse pass.

You do not need anyone to provoke you for this. Notice the urge, breathe once, let it sit there without obeying it, and carry on. Two or three…

A cold shower hands you a clean, timed urge to work with. You plan a minute, and four seconds in every part of you wants out: notice it, breathe, let the wave pass, then notice it come back.

The useful discovery is not toughness. It is that urges arrive in waves rather than climbing forever, so waiting one out turns out to be a real…

Meditation does more as upkeep than as a fire extinguisher. Doing it on the calm days is what lowers the level your threat system sits at.

If you only reach for it when you are already furious, it will seem useless and you will drop it, which is what usually happens. Practise it when…

When you offer a practice to someone, use their words for it rather than yours. Keep the fuller version ready for the day they ask where it comes from.

A plain, unmystical version suits most people and costs them nothing to accept. Anyone who gets curious can have all of it, and they will take more…

Pick the news channel you cannot stand and watch ten minutes of it on purpose. The only job is to notice what rises in you and let it go by.

Real provocation turns up when you are least ready for it. This gives you the feeling with nothing at stake: the indignation, the tightening, the…

It does get better, but not by waiting for time to pass. The improvement comes from the walking, and the walking is small and unremarkable.

Every rep you did today changes almost nothing you can feel, which is the honest and irritating truth of it. Progress here shows up over months and…

Before you start a practice that needs a pen and paper, have the pen and paper. It sounds too small to matter and it is the difference between doing the exercise and daydreaming about it.

The physical object is what turns something happening inside you into something you can count. If you are doing this with someone over a screen, ask…

What you are doing when you sit on the bank has a name. Researchers call it metacognitive distancing, and it has been studied for decades.

Knowing the name matters more than it should. Plenty of people, and especially people who were sent to get help rather than choosing it, quietly file…

The river is a way of talking, not a scene to imagine. You are not trying to see water, you are looking inward and noticing what turns up.

This is the most common way the practice goes wrong. People build a lovely picture of a stream, get bored of it, and decide the exercise does nothing…

If the thought arrives that this is going too fast and you cannot keep up, that thought gets a dot like everything else. There is no version of this you can fail.

Fast minds are common and they are not a disqualification. When too much is going past to mark, mark that. The exercise is not a race against your…