Mindfulness

Have you ever reached the end of the day without knowing exactly what you did? You answered messages, took care of loose ends, crossed town on a packed bus, and in the end you were left with the feeling of having lived it all on autopilot. That vague exhaustion is what opens the book.

The authors start from the idea that the pace of modern life keeps the mind chronically busy, jumping between memories, plans and worries. Even when the body rests, the head keeps working. The result is chronic stress, poor sleep, irritability and a sense that time is slipping away.

The proposal is an eight-week program, with short practices that take around twenty minutes a day. The promise isn't to eliminate problems, but to change the way we relate to them. The focus is on training attention the way you'd train a muscle.

Mindfulness is paying attention on purpose to the present moment, with openness and curiosity, without judging whatever shows up. It sounds simple, but it's rare. The mind loves to comment, compare, plan and complain. The practice consists of noticing all of that with kindness and coming back to what is happening right now.

It isn't emptying the mind, or reaching a state of permanent peace. Thoughts keep showing up. The difference is that you learn to notice them without being dragged along by them. It also isn't religion: although it comes from Buddhist traditions, the book's program is secular, nonreligious, and can be practiced by anyone.

A useful image: think of a bus window. Thoughts are the scenery going by. You can keep watching from inside, without jumping out after every single thing you see. That small distance is what, according to the authors, gives back some space between what happens and how you react.

Mindfulness was brought into Western medicine by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the 1970s, in a program to reduce stress and chronic pain. From there, researchers at Oxford, Cambridge and Toronto adapted the method for another goal: preventing depression from coming back after a person gets better.

Mark Williams is one of those researchers. The therapy he helped create, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, combines meditation practices with ideas from cognitive therapy. It was tested on people who had already had several episodes of depression, and that is the group where the results are strongest.

The book Mindfulness turns this research into a program for the general public. It isn't a clinical treatment, but an accessible version designed to deal with stress, mild anxiety and mental fatigue. It's important to keep that difference in mind as you read.