In the new Apple TV series, Margo Has Money Problems, Michelle Pfeiffer, in a comeback performance, plays a mom, Shyanne, who got pregnant after a one-night stand with a married man. Now her daughter, Margo, whom she raised on her own, has herself given birth to a child with a married man who’s not in the picture.
At one point, in a parking lot outside the chain restaurant where Margo works, Shyanne has a total breakdown. Having failed at her first stint babysitting her grandchild, she hands over the boy to Margo and shouts that she is a horrible grandmother just as she was a horrible mother: “I wish I could be a better person, but I’m not!…and I will not be judged, by him or anyone else.”
As much as we may recoil from shame and guilt, these emotions are a part of being human. Yet so many of us, maybe most of us, handle them very poorly.
This is a classic shame spiral. We start feeling bad about something we’ve done or are unable to do, then leap straight to the appraisal—not of our wrongdoing or inability, but of ourselves: We are bad and we want to hide away because of it, lest we be judged even more.
Guilt and shame are dirty words, painful words. As much as we may recoil from them, though, these emotions are a part of being human. Yet so many of us, maybe most of us, handle them very poorly. We beat ourselves up psychologically. We beat others up verbally (and in extreme cases physically) in an effort to inflict guilt and shame and retribution for wrongdoing. At a global level, wars are fought and people die out of vengeance—simply because we have so much trouble dealing with how to respond when we do something wrong or are wronged.
Taking a Closer Look at Guilt and Shame
Yes, these are tricky emotions, and this is likely not the first time you’ve considered them, but it never hurts to contemplate the thornier sides of life with a fresh mind. If you meditate, you spend your life doing that. Each time, hopefully, with a more open mind.
To begin, it helps to distinguish guilt and shame.
Meditation teacher Caverly Morgan expresses the difference succinctly in her book The Heart of Who We Are: “When you feel guilty, there’s a judgment that something you’ve done is wrong. When you feel shame, you believe that your whole self is wrong.”
Is it realistic to think that an emotion that’s been around as long as anyone can imagine is just going to be removed from the human toolbox?
Brené Brown, author of the groundbreaking book on human vulnerability, Daring Greatly, says on her website that while guilt is “adaptive and helpful” and can spur accountability for our actions, shame, “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging” is neither helpful or productive. She goes on to “call for an end to shame as a tool for change.”
I’m a huge Brené Brown fan, so I get where she’s going. Shame is so damaging. It ruins whole lives and families (witness Shyanne’s breakdown in the parking lot). And it is quite often wildly ineffective in bringing about change. I’m sure we’ve all tried to shame someone into better behavior only to have it backfire.
Yet, is it realistic to think that an emotion that’s been around as long as anyone can imagine is just going to be removed from the human toolbox?
If They’re Not Going Anywhere…How Do We Learn to Live With Them?
Other researchers are not quite as ready to completely eliminate shame from the spectrum of human responses. Rather, they simply caution us to notice the ways our responses are so very often maladaptive.
In his recent book, The Power of Guilt, developmental psychologist Chris Moore says we have guilt in the first place to motivate us to repair harms and heal relationships. Shame, he goes on to say, by contrast, tends to make people shy away from interacting with others, leaving a relationship damaged, perhaps permanently. This tendency to descend into a deep dark place makes shame into a dangerous drug.
Psychologist June Tangney, co-author of Shame and Guilt, however, admits to being shame-prone herself and counsels that it’s possible to be resilient in the midst of shame and divert ourselves from spiraling. In other words, we might be better off accepting that shame is going to emerge and figure out how to work with it more effectively.
Our problem with shame, then, may not be that as a group we have no need for it, but rather we have a bad habit of taking it way too far.
Evolutionary psychologists like Dacher Keltner see shame as part of a family of human responses known as the self-conscious emotions—guilt, shame, pride, and embarrassment—that all play a role in regulating social behavior. According to these students of human behavior, “…shame serves the important function of appeasing observers of social transgressions, a function which reestablishes social harmony.” In other words, publicly blushing when you’ve done something wrong signals to others that you know you’ve made a mistake and you care. To say, for example, that someone “has no shame,” means they don’t care what others think about their behavior. Think of certain world leaders who seem to do and say whatever they want, regardless of how immoral or illegal it is, and without concern for the harm those actions cause.
Our problem with shame, then, may not be that as a group we have no need for it, but rather we have a bad habit of taking it way too far. A very little bit of shame can go a long way. Even a little bit too much can be destructive. The lesson then, seems to be: Shame is likely to be a part of life, respond appropriately and in proportion to that feeling, and focus entirely on action in the future.
In other words: Do not beat yourself up. Meet the feeling, but don’t build a home there.
Focusing on Repair
Knowing how guilt and shame tear at the heart and sever the bonds that hold communities together, spiritual traditions developed forms of atonement—honest acknowledgment of harm, repairing the harm if possible, and vowing not to repeat it.
Catholics have the confessional and the season of Lent. Judaism has Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. In Islam, tawba, repentance, is practiced continuously, but especially in the last ten days of Ramadan. Twelve-step programs devote several steps to atonement and making amends. While the place of confession in Buddhism is little known, the ancient code of monastic discipline calls for regular acknowledgement of wrongdoing, including in some traditions the collective wrongdoing that has occurred “since beginningless time.”
It’s not necessary to engage in one of these traditions to develop a healthy relationship with guilt and shame—but it can certainly help to examine our own experience to see how we might be easier on ourselves and on others while still addressing the feelings that emerge when things go wrong.
Guilt—that uneasy feeling about doing something wrong or not fully showing up—can be a motivator. But as all the researchers, teachers, and commentators here note, it too can gnaw away at us and morph into shame. Fortunately, a practice like mindfulness can help interrupt the descent into needless shame and help us focus on our future actions. In mindfulness practice, we can begin to see what’s happening more clearly and as the ancient prayer goes, forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
Several years ago, I experienced what at the time I did not realize was the beginning of a life-changing journey into chronic illness.
It started with noticing shortness of breath when I bent over to pick something up off the floor, and rapidly snowballed. It felt as if I had stepped into an alternate reality, where I went from being a healthy person whose life was punctuated with hiking, dancing, and travel, to someone whose body would no longer cooperate with life. At my worst, my heart rate spiked throughout the day and night to levels that would send healthy friends running to the ER. I was exhausted and at times too weak to walk.
Already a Buddhist meditation teacher and hypnotherapist, I found myself on a crash course in treating a complex medical condition and learning how to live a meaningful life inside a body that had fundamentally changed.
This was the beginning of a complex condition involving almost every system in my body, eventually traced back to my time living in a small cottage that unknowingly housed an uninvited tenant: black mold. At the time, I couldn’t have imagined how profoundly this experience would change my body, my life, and my work.
Already a Buddhist meditation teacher and hypnotherapist, I found myself on a crash course in treating a complex medical condition and learning how to live a meaningful life inside a body that had fundamentally changed.
Over the years that followed, I worked to carve out spaces of healing, resilience, and joy, rebuilding a life that in many ways felt happier and more free than the one I had lost. I also found myself supporting more clients navigating complex illnesses themselves. Again and again, I saw how mindfulness and hypnosis could help people feel a renewed sense of hope, agency, and capacity to relate to their lives and bodies differently.
A Nervous System Mobilizing Against Threat
When we live with chronic illness or pain, it can often feel like we are stuck on high alert—and with good reason. The body is designed to detect danger and mobilize quickly against threat. We have survived across generations of human evolution because of this finely honed system. It’s an incredible gift—until it’s not.
Pain, stress, illness, and other issues can send signals throughout our body communicating that something is profoundly wrong. It’s our system’s way of saying, “Hey! Stop! Please take care of me.”
“Maladaptive neuroplasticity” happens when the body and mind begin to reorganize in order to address the ongoing threat that is occurring. Unfortunately, we don’t always reorganize in a way that helps us long-term or feels particularly good. To our brain and body, it’s about one thing and one thing alone: our survival.
But in chronic conditions occurring over time, this repeated activation can make our nervous system extra sensitive to threat. Our body’s warning system begins to fire over and over, responding to even small changes in posture, environment, or life conditions as if they were a five alarm fire. This is part of why hypnosis and meditation have been shown to be highly supportive for chronic illness and pain, when used in complement with appropriate medical care.
You’ve probably heard the term “neurons that fire together wire together,” meaning that when we repeat anything over and over, we build strong neural pathways that operate automatically. This trait is fantastic in so many situations: we effortlessly remember how to drive a car, we see the face of someone we love and a feeling of warmth washes over us, we wake up and go to our meditation cushion because it’s a habitual part of our routine.
Our brains are incredibly efficient. They want to save energy, so they create shortcuts to do so. This is often helpful, but when it comes to chronic pain and illness, this can result in heightened sensitivity, and what some researchers call maladaptive neuroplasticity.
What does that mean for us? Essentially, the body and mind begin to reorganize in order to address the ongoing threat that is occurring. Unfortunately, we don’t always reorganize in a way that helps us long-term or feels particularly good. To our brain and body, it’s about one thing and one thing alone: our survival.
Over time, an inner algorithm is created in the brain, body, and nervous system: We get exposed to a trigger or feel the beginning of the symptom and automatically, a cascade of chemical, physiological, and emotional responses fire up within a fraction of a second. Emotions are heightened, thought loops start spinning, discomfort worsens, and the neural pathways connecting things like fear, grief, hopelessness, frustration, and physical symptoms grow stronger.
The wonderful thing about neuroplasticity is that you have agency over more of this process than you might imagine, especially when it comes to navigating habitual thoughts and reactions, distress, and overwhelm.
Neuroplasticity Means You Have More Power Than You Know
It’s understandable that these processes can feel big, automatic, and beyond our control, but that’s not the full picture. The wonderful thing about neuroplasticity is that you have agency over more of this process than you might imagine, especially when it comes to navigating habitual thoughts and reactions, distress, and overwhelm.
This is where mindfulness and hypnosis can offer real support. Both practices help you notice when the alarm bells start going off, so that you can interrupt the cascade of reactivity and learn to steer it in a different direction. Through relaxation, breath, focused attention, visualization, and active work with the subconscious mind, you can begin to support the nervous system and create space where triggers, symptoms, and recurring attitudes and thoughts can be met and worked with.
The more you practice cultivating and resting in qualities like safety, compassion, kindness, and relaxation, the more hardwired and automatic they become. Just like you’ve strengthened the muscles of stress and overwhelm, you can strengthen the muscles of ease, trust, and permission to rest and take care of yourself.
One of my clients has described this process as being able to access her “own little sanctuary”—a place where even in the midst of years-long, complex illness, she is able to rest, remember her wholeness, and feel relief. With that, her sleep has significantly improved along with her overall sense of hope, personal power, and wellbeing.
Addressing the Whole Person
Of course, this does not mean thinking we can just “meditate away” a condition that needs treatment. These practices are best done in conjunction with medical care, because they allow us to navigate the full spectrum of our experience—from stress around doctor’s appointments and treatment protocols, to changes in our relationships and career, to celebrating the wins and progress when they do come. Living with pain and illness touches our bodies but also our identities, spirituality, and outlook on the world. These practices can allow us to show up for all parts of it.
Adding meditation and hypnosis to our chronic illness care regimen can reveal that we have more power than we think: the ability to interrupt familiar thought loops, to create moments of relief and inner safety, and even to reshape the emotions, beliefs, and patterns that can make life with chronic illness feel harder than it already is.
Adding meditation and hypnosis to our chronic illness care regimen can reveal that we have more power than we think: the ability to interrupt familiar thought loops, to create moments of relief and inner safety, and even to reshape the emotions, beliefs, and patterns that can make life with chronic illness feel harder than it already is.
This is so powerful because in the type of mind states available through meditation and hypnosis, the mind becomes more flexible, creative, and adaptive. In fact, early research suggests that mind-body practices like meditation and hypnosis may influence brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a molecule linked to neuroplasticity, learning, pain modulation, and the nervous system’s capacity to adapt in response to stress.
When we add these practices to our toolbox, we are partnering with the subconscious mind so that we can remodel our relationship to illness from the inside out.
There is a moment so small you almost never notice it.
The moment before you click. Before you reply. Before you reach for what’s easy.
These moments shape your life.
And they’re the ones most meditations never touch.
The Belief I Never Paused to Question
I’ve meditated for over two decades—Vipassana retreats, MBSR certification, thousands of hours on the cushion. I’m also a mindful marketing professor who teaches conscious marketing and consumer behavior, a former town councilor, and a mindfulness teacher. I care deeply about this work.
So when I say I ordered from Amazon for over ten years, I want to be clear: I was not unaware. I knew about the working conditions. I watched local bookstores close. I taught my students about values-aligned consumption. When I could, I shopped local.
Underneath all of it was a quiet belief I had never paused to examine. But the assumption I had built my consumer life around was simply not true.
But life was full—raising a family, teaching, serving on council, writing, offering free community classes. Amazon was convenient. Books, audiobooks, protein bars, gifts—it was one-click easy, and I was doing good in so many other ways.
Underneath all of it was a quiet belief I had never paused to examine: There is no real alternative to Amazon. Not an articulated belief. Just an assumption so woven into my decision-making that it felt like fact.
Then I learned that Amazon was actively funding politics that conflicted with everything I teach and stand for. That was the moment I felt compelled to confront my belief—and visible beliefs can be questioned.
I paused. I looked for alternatives and almost immediately found Thrive Market. It had been there the whole time. So had a local food cooperative. Some items were actually cheaper in the alternative stores. The assumption I had built my consumer life around was simply not true.
This is about something deeper: whether mindfulness can change how we actually think and make decisions—beyond the cushion, in our lives.
I want to be clear: this isn’t about judging anyone who shops at Amazon. It’s about pausing long enough to ask whether my choices are aligned with my values—and discovering that when I finally asked, the answer had been waiting for me all along.
Three qualities of mind that I had cultivated in meditation for twenty years seldom showed up at checkout—Curiosity, Compassion, and Inner Calm. They’re three of eight mindfulness skills that disrupt the default habits running our decisions. We’ll meet the others as we go.
The evidence that mindfulness reduces stress is well established. That’s not what this article is about. This is about something deeper: whether mindfulness can change how we actually think and make decisions—beyond the cushion, in our lives.
Reducing stress and changing decisions are not the same thing. A person can feel calmer and continue making the same unconscious choices—choices that may perpetuate the very conditions that create stress in the first place.
We don’t have one unified self making all these decisions. We have different selves that take turns being in charge depending on context. Each runs on its own defaults. And the mindfulness your morning self cultivated does not automatically transfer to the decision the consumer self is about to make.
The deeper question is whether mindfulness can reach the place where our decisions are actually formed. The emerging evidence says yes.
Researchers Maymin and Langer presented participants with 22 classic cognitive biases—the endowment effect, overconfidence, anchoring, loss aversion, confirmation bias, and seventeen others. Half received a brief induction in active noticing—instructions to look for what’s new and unfamiliar in their environment. On 19 of the 22 biases, those induced into this curious, attentive state were significantly less likely to show the bias. Not through years of meditation. Through a brief shift into the kind of active noticing that disrupts our habitual ways of categorizing and assuming—what I call Curiosity.
This is not stress reduction. This is the quality of thinking itself changing.
My own research adds another layer. We don’t have one unified self making all these decisions. We have multiple I-positions—different selves that take turns being in charge depending on context. Your morning self sets intentions on the cushion. Your consumer self shops. Your work self navigates meetings. Each runs on its own defaults. And the mindfulness your morning self cultivated does not automatically transfer to the decision the consumer self is about to make.
Longer meditation matters enormously. It builds the nervous system’s capacity to stay present with difficulty. It deepens the reservoir that micro-practices draw from.
What Meditation Builds, What Micro-Practices Reach
Let me be clear: longer meditation matters enormously. When we settle the mind over twenty, forty, or sixty minutes, patterns rise to the surface that are invisible in the rush of ordinary life—the conditioning we inherited, the beliefs we absorbed without choosing them, the default ways of thinking that shape our decisions before we’re aware a decision is being made. Formal practice is where we discover them. It builds the nervous system’s capacity to stay present with difficulty. It deepens the reservoir that micro-practices draw from.
Even though the research suggests we don’t need decades of meditation to begin shifting decisions, the ability to calm the mind enough to see deeper interconnections and patterns comes from taking time for that—whether in mindful walking, a sitting practice, or any practice dedicated to sharpening our attention and perceptions.
But calm alone is not enough. Wagner and colleagues demonstrated why in their 2025 study published in Communications Psychology. Simply repeating a choice in a given context—independent of any reward—biases us toward making that choice again. Each repetition increases our valuation of the option and decreases our uncertainty about it. We become more confident in choices we’ve merely repeated—mistaking familiarity for wisdom.
Longer meditation is like going to the gym—it builds capacity, strengthens attention, and uncovers the deeper patterns running our decisions. Micro-practices are like taking the stairs instead of the elevator—small, repeated choices woven into the day that change how we actually move through our lives.
This repetition bias operates at the checkout, in the meeting, at the dinner table—deepening every time we make the same choice without awareness intervening. A morning meditation may bring calm and clarity, but it is often not enough to offset a bias that has been compounding with repeated decisions throughout the day over time. To disrupt repetition bias, we need micro-practices that meet the moment and invite the right skills to disrupt and transform the defaults.
Longer meditation is like going to the gym—it builds capacity, strengthens attention, and uncovers the deeper patterns running our decisions. Micro-practices are like taking the stairs instead of the elevator—small, repeated choices woven into the day that change how we actually move through our lives.
And unlike a longer meditation, micro-practices don’t require separate time. They happen inside what you’re already doing—in the pause between activities, the breath before you speak, the moment before you reach for your phone. Saying we’re too busy for micro-practices is like saying we’re too busy to breathe.
What makes them powerful is that they meet the nervous system and mind in context, where change is actually possible. And the more we practice in non-critical moments—with the morning coffee, the commute, the routine checkout—the more available these skills become in critical ones. Over time, we gradually shift from our old default reactions to making mindfulness itself our new default.
We need both. The gym builds the strength. The stairs put it to use. One without the other leaves a gap—a gap our defaults will happily fill.
Eight Defaults, Eight Skills
Through my research—studying original contemplative texts alongside modern psychology and neuroscience, and testing this framework with hundreds of practitioners and students—I’ve identified eight default habits that consistently run our decisions and eight innate qualities of mind that disrupt them.
We’ve already met several. Curiosity disrupted confirmation bias. Compassion disrupted the judging mind. Inner Calm disrupted attachment. Awareness made autopilot visible.
My research published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs found that these eight skills relate differently to stress and life satisfaction—confirming that we need different skills in different situations. A one-size-fits-all approach to mindfulness misses this.
Figure: Eight Mindfulness Skills to Disrupt Default Habits, from Return to Mindfulness
The question is not, “Which skills do I need to learn?” but “How do I get them to show up in the pause before the click, the reply, the reaction?” That is the work of a micro-practice.
These skills are not new qualities we need to acquire. Every human being has experienced moments of compassion, curiosity, and calm. The problem has never been their absence. It has been their absence at the moment they are most needed.
The question is not Which skills do I need to learn? but How do I get them to show up in the pause before the click, the reply, the reaction?
That is the work of a micro-practice. And it has a specific architecture.
Three Steps to Meet the Moment: Return–Listen–Begin
Knowing that our defaults run faster than conscious thought still leaves a practical question: what do I actually do in the pause? Return–Listen–Begin is a three-step framework—simple enough to use in a single breath, deep enough to draw on the full architecture of the eight skills.
Step 1: Return
Return is a deliberate redirection of attention from the automatic pattern to present-moment experience. The body is the most reliable anchor—feeling the breath, the heartbeat, sensations of touch.
In my Amazon moment, Return was the pause itself—the instant before the click when something said wait. Awareness made the autopilot visible. Inner Calm softened my attachment to convenience long enough for a question to arise.
If restlessness, attachment, or resistance arises, that is not an obstacle to the practice—it is the practice. The hindrance becomes the path.
Return is not about pushing past whatever is in the way. If restlessness, attachment, or resistance arises, that is not an obstacle to the practice—it is the practice. The hindrance becomes the path. We invite the relevant skill to meet what’s blocking our presence, and in doing so, we learn what we need to return to our inner knowing.
Step 2: Listen
Listen is turning toward what lies beneath the surface of what is immediately observable—within ourselves and between ourselves and others. This is not an analytical process. It is heartfelt. We listen for the underlying causes and conditions of the situation—the needs, fears, assumptions, and patterns that aren’t visible in the immediate reaction but are driving it. We listen to our own deeper knowing and also seek to understand others’ experiences and perspectives. We open to possibilities we couldn’t see when the default was running.
In my Amazon moment, Listen was the question beneath the question—not just Is there an alternative? but What do I actually value here, and who is affected by my choice?
When Confirmation Bias is present, we invite Curiosity to question assumptions.
When the Judging Mind is present, we invite Compassion—for others and for ourselves.
When Negativity Bias is present, we invite Appreciative Joy to stay open to what might actually be possible.
Trust that you will know what you need to know. Be patient and kind to yourself.
Step 3: Begin
Begin is taking the clarity gained from listening into skillful action. But here is an important truth: profound insights don’t automatically translate into action. Our deep-seated habits may impede our ability to act on what we’ve seen. We may need to invite the skills again:
Energy to move past Status Quo Bias
Focus to gather the Distracted Mind
Equanimity to steady us against Impulsivity
Begin wasn’t just the act of closing Amazon that day—it was choosing, in every subsequent moment of temptation, to pause again rather than let the old groove pull me back.
Before acting, we can ask: Are my thoughts, speech, and actions aligned with my intentions? Are they promoting well-being for me and others, or are they causing harm?
And in moments when there isn’t time for a full pause—when a response is needed now—three questions can serve as a compass:
What’s present?
What’s important?
What’s possible?
In a culture that has turned mindfulness into a billion-dollar commodity, the difference between true micro-practices and what gets marketed as “mindfulness in five minutes” is easy to miss.
What Makes Micro-Practices More Than a Hack
Ron Purser coined the term “McMindfulness” to describe what happens when mindfulness is stripped of its ethical roots and sold as a quick fix for busy people—a do-it-yourself technique for stress reduction that leaves the systems producing the stress completely unexamined. His critique is worth taking seriously, because in a culture that has turned mindfulness into a billion-dollar commodity, the difference between what I’m describing and what gets marketed as “mindfulness in five minutes” is easy to miss.
On the surface, these look like micro-practices. Both are brief. Both fit into a busy day. But the difference runs deep—and it starts with intention. The intention shapes what the practice holds and what it leaves out.
A hack privatizes the problem. It treats difficulty as an individual deficiency—you’re stressed, you’re distracted, you’re reactive—and offers a personal fix. Breathe for five minutes. Sharpen your focus. Calm your nerves before the presentation. These effects are real. But the hack never asks whether the meeting itself needs examining, whether the system that produced the stress needs changing, or who else is affected by how you move through the situation. It adjusts the person to fit the system. The system stays intact.
A micro-practice situates the person inside the larger picture. It starts not with a goal but with what is actually present—the causes and conditions for this moment to arise, not just in the last five minutes but in the patterns and systems we’ve been participating in. It asks: What default is running? What does this moment need—not just for me but for everyone involved? Are my actions promoting well-being or perpetuating harm?
A hack draws on one dimension—typically cognitive—to produce one outcome: improved individual performance. A micro-practice draws on the full range of our intelligences—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual—not to force our way into being present but to realign with what is genuinely important: our values, our intentions, the others we are present with, and the systems our choices help sustain or disrupt.
In Thich Nhat Hahn’s concept of interbeing, we do not exist as separate selves improving in isolation. When I pause before a purchase, I am not practicing consumer discipline. I am reconnecting with the people and communities my choice affects.
The same five-minute practice can carry either orientation. A breathing exercise before a meeting can be a tool for sharper performance—or it can be a return to awareness that includes the people in the room, the conversation, the values we want our next words to reflect. We can be effective and aligned with what matters most. The technique is identical. What it holds is not.
Thich Nhat Hanh called this interbeing—the understanding that we do not exist as separate selves improving in isolation. When I pause before a purchase, I am not practicing consumer discipline. I am reconnecting with the people and communities my choice affects. Our awareness—or our autopilot—shapes not only our own experience but the experience of everyone our lives touch.
The question is not, How do I feel after five minutes of breathing? The question is, What kind of person am I becoming through the way I practice—and what kind of world am I participating in through the choices that practice shapes?
The Invitation
This week, try both.
Practice a longer meditation—whatever length and tradition is yours. Let the mind settle. Let the deeper patterns surface. This is the foundation.
Then, practice the Art of Stopping at transition points and decision points in your day—before a purchase, before hitting send, before reaching for what’s easy, between meetings, during the commute, in the pause before you speak. When you feel the pull of a habit, stop and return to the three steps.
Return. Simply stop. Without judgment, observe the momentum of your thoughts, strivings, or emotions. Take three deliberate, deep breaths and exhale slowly, releasing any tension in the body.
Listen. Once you find stillness, listen within. Notice your ingrained habits of rushing and reacting. What are your actual needs and intentions? What are the causes and conditions that brought you here?
Begin. Once you soften the grip of your habitual reactions, begin your response with inner calm and clarity. Let your next action arise from awareness rather than autopilot.
This practice might be five or six minutes—a guided meditation before a difficult conversation or while waiting in line. It might be sixty seconds—pausing before opening your laptop to check in with your intention. Or it might be a single conscious breath—the space between the impulse to add to cart and the click that completes the purchase.
At the end of the week, notice what’s different. Not whether you feel calmer—though you might. Notice whether any decisions changed. Whether a belief you hadn’t questioned became visible. Whether a habit you thought was fixed turned out to be a choice you’d simply been making on autopilot.There is a moment so small you almost never notice it.
Now you know it’s there. The practice is learning to meet it— both in meditation and in the moments that shape your life.
Experiencing a season of struggle with your kid? You’re not alone. This gentle practice can help reconnect you with steadiness so you can keep parenting from love.
In our concern for our children, sometimes we respond from a place of fear and worry. From time to time, we can even lose touch with the love that lies beneath that concern.
Reconnecting with the ground of our love and the wish for our children to be happy and well, especially in moments of difficulty, can be incredibly beneficial.
This practice from Wendy O’Leary offers a pause of support and encouragement that can bring you back to that core of compassionate wisdom—and you can return to it anytime you need help parenting from love.
A Meditation on Working With Our Fear And Parenting From Love
Read and practice the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.
Get into a comfortable seated position. You can close your eyes or gently look down and soften your gaze, whatever works best for you.
As we settle in here, bring your attention to your breath or feel the sensations of your body as it connects with the earth. Feet on the floor, backs of the legs on a chair or a cushion. Invite the attention to settle in a bit. Arrive in this moment by dropping into the body with the breath and the sensations of the contact points of the body. Gently settle in.
Now, I invite you to shift your attention to think about your child, maybe even picturing them in your imagination, calling to mind a time when you felt warm and loving feelings towards them. Notice what they were doing and remember how you felt in that moment. You might even imagine that someone has asked you, What do you love about your child? What words, phrases, images, or descriptions come to mind?
Gently check in and notice how you feel in your body, mind, and heart as you recall what you love about your child. You could even invite that feeling of love and connection to grow and expand in your body, gently resting here in this felt sense of love for your child. Let yourself marinate in this feeling of love and warmth and care.
Now, think of the time when your child was struggling. You don’t need to think of the most difficult struggle—instead, go with something that is a three or a four on a one to 10 scale.
As you allow the situation to more fully enter your awareness, check in again with your body. Often, when we are focused on a difficulty, especially when it’s related to our child, there can be a habitual tendency to contract and lean forward. Check it out and see if that’s true for you. To counteract this tendency, gently lean back just a little. This can be a physical leaning back or even an energetic settling back. Settle back and now invite the body to soften, even widen, creating space to hold whatever is there. We aren’t forcing anything here, it’s just a very gentle invitation to settle back and soften. Gently softening around the edges of any emotions we’re experiencing.
Now intentionally invite back that sense of love, holding the challenge in a spacious field of loving care and awareness. To help you do this, you might once again remind yourself of all the things you love about your child. You could even offer them some wishes of well-being and happiness as you picture them in your mind. May you be happy. May you well. May you safe. Or any wishes that feel true for you in this moment.
If the situation you’re calling to mind requires some response from you in some way, you might ask yourself, How would this love respond?You can also offer yourself a bit of care, because if your child is struggling, you are, too. So maybe place a gentle hand on the heart, or take a moment to remind yourself of our common humanity. You might say something to yourself like, Every parent struggles with their children sometimes. Every parent worries about their child at times. Or another phrase that might fit your situation. You could even say to yourself, This is hard, and I’m here for you, honey.
As you’re ready, you can open your eyes to close our formal practice. This practice can be a powerful way of reconnecting with feelings of love and cut through the worry and fears that we often experience as parents. It can be helpful to do the first part, remembering the love and care as a brief daily practice for a while, so you can more easily call up those feelings of love and connection in the midst of a challenging moment when you need the most help parenting from love. We want to acknowledge the hard stuff and not lose sight of the good and love that is underneath our worries and sometimes even our difficulties with our children. With my very best wishes, may you be happy and peaceful and move through life with ease and equanimity. Thank you for practicing with me.
The crack team at How to Adult takes on basic seated meditation. Take 5 minutes and follow the demonstration.
It takes so much energy to just be sometimes.
Add in adult responsibilities like work, family, relationships, finances, and worry about the world, and it can all feel like way too much.
While mindfulness meditation can’t take away the stressors of grown-up life, it can help us regulate our nervous systems, process emotions, improve memory and sleep, and bring clarity in our decision-making. And these are all benefits that can help us at least learn how to adult with a little more peace.
If you’re curious about starting a practice but aren’t sure where to start, the creators of the How to Adult Youtube channel crafted a five-minute primer on how to meditate. They discuss the benefits, the practice—including some pointers from Mindful on basic seated meditation.
All you need is five minutes and a chair to follow the demonstration.
I recently walked into an abstract art class for the first time. I’m not a painter. I had no idea what I was doing. I stood in front of a blank canvas with a brush in my hand and a small, anxious voice in my head asking, What now?
With encouragement from the passionate teacher, I dipped the brush in the paint, touched it to the canvas, and watched a streak of colour appear. The voice in my head got a little softer. The studio smelled of turpentine and quiet joy. I could hear the bristles dragging across the surface. There was no algorithm telling me what to do next. No notification. No metric of success for once. Just the paint, the canvas and whatever was about to happen.
I left that first painting class feeling something I hadn’t felt in a while: fully engaged. Not because I’d done nothing, but because, for three whole hours, there had been nowhere else to be.
I left that first class feeling something I hadn’t felt in a while: fully engaged. Not because I’d done nothing, but because, for three whole hours, there had been nowhere else to be.
It turns out I’m not the only one feeling this. Quietly, all around us, something is shifting.
Revisiting analog living: a cultural turn
People are buying film cameras again—not because they can’t afford digital, but because they actually want the grain. They want the uncertainty of not knowing how the photo turns out. They’re filling their bags with paper journals and puzzle books and leaving their phones in their pockets. Searches for analog hobbies have surged. Sales of film photography equipment have more than doubled since 2020. Craft kits are flying off the shelves. There’s even a viral trend called the Analog Bag—a curated little collection of essentials (a journal, a puzzle book, a film camera, a magazine) so that when your hand reaches for something to occupy itself, it finds something other than your phone.
Forbes has called this the year of Analog Living. Design platforms are calling it the year of imperfect visuals: grain, hand-drawn lines, messy textures. Interior designers have moved from sterile minimalism to what they call dopamine decor: bold colours, personal heirlooms, physical collections that make a room feel something rather than merely photograph well.
A phrase that caught my attention recently is brain wealth. This is the idea that mental longevity comes from slow, attentive activities: long-form reading, writing by hand, making something with your hands. One survey found that around a quarter of Brits are actively looking for creative, non-digital hobbies specifically to help them switch off after work.
That’s a quarter of a country quietly raising its hand and saying, Something isn’t quite right with the way I’m living.
Why a brush in your hand changes things
Here’s what struck me in the abstract art class. The information available to me was, in one sense, far less than what’s available on my phone. There’s no infinite scroll. I won’t find tutorials autoplaying. There’s an obvious absence of comments and likes. And yet I felt more, not less. More awake. More here.
Every piece of digital technology we use has been brilliantly, expertly designed to remove friction. To make things faster, smoother, more seamless. You don’t have to wait or be patient. You don’t have to sit with uncertainty. On the surface, that sounds wonderful.
But here’s the thing: some friction is the point.
Why does holding a physical book feel different from reading the same words on a screen? Why does a handwritten letter land differently than an email of identical content? Why does a grainy, slightly imperfect photograph feel more alive than a flawless high-resolution image?
I think one answer is friction.
Every piece of digital technology we use has been brilliantly, expertly designed to remove friction. To make things faster, smoother, more seamless. You don’t have to wait or be patient. You don’t have to sit with uncertainty. On the surface, that sounds wonderful.
But here’s the thing: some friction is the point.
When you wind a film camera, you only have thirty-six photos. That constraint forces you to actually look before you press the shutter. When you write by hand, you can’t type as fast as you can think—so you slow down, choose your words, dwell in a thought rather than blasting through it. When you stand in front of a canvas with a brush in your hand, the paint doesn’t care that you’re running late or that your inbox is full. It simply is what it is, and it asks for your full attention.
In mindfulness, we sometimes call this beginner’s mind. The quality of meeting something freshly, without the overlay of habit or expectation. Analog activities seem to invite beginner’s mind almost by default. There’s no algorithm predicting what comes next. There is only this moment, and what you do with it.
The deeper question to hold in our awareness
Now, I could stop here and tell you to go and buy a film camera or sign up for a pottery class. And that wouldn’t be bad advice! But I want to go a layer deeper, because I think this cultural shift is pointing at something that no number of analog hobbies can fully resolve on its own.
Here’s the question I keep returning to:
Who is the one who wants to switch off?
We talk about digital overwhelm as if it’s a problem out there—the apps, the notifications, the powerful and persuasive algorithms. And those things are real. But the deeper discomfort, the thing that makes someone reach for the puzzle book or the film camera, isn’t really coming from the phone. It’s coming from inside.
It’s restlessness. A constant low-level mental buzz. A sense that you’re never quite here, because some part of your mind is always somewhere else—planning, comparing, scrolling, performing.
The phone made the restlessness visible. It gave the restless mind somewhere to go, constantly, without relief.
The phone made the restlessness visible. It gave the restless mind somewhere to go, constantly, without relief.
So when people say they want to switch off, what they’re really saying, I think, is: I want a break from being so relentlessly me. From the constant commentary. The self-monitoring. The performing. The quiet undercurrent of not-good-enough.
That’s the beginning of an inquiry that meditators and contemplatives have been pointing at not just for decades, but for centuries. No phones around then!
The self is exhausting. And somewhere, on a level we don’t usually put into words, we know it.
Why craft is therapeutic—and where it leads
When your hands are full, literally full of clay, or yarn, or paint, the chattering mind gets a little quieter. Its attention has been absorbed somewhere more immediate.
These activities work with the mind’s natural tendency to rest in sensory experience. They give the thinking mind something to do that doesn’t feed the anxiety loop.
This is why craft is therapeutic. Why gardening is meditative. Why cooking from scratch feels centring in a way ordering delivery never does. These activities work with the mind’s natural tendency to rest in sensory experience. They give the thinking mind something to do that doesn’t feed the anxiety loop.
In my abstract art class, I notice this every time. There’s a moment, usually about twenty minutes in, when something settles. I’m no longer thinking about whether the painting is good. I’m just there, with the colour, with the canvas, with whatever wants to emerge. It’s not unlike the moment in meditation when the breath stops being an object you’re observing and just becomes something happening, here, now.
But—and this is the gentle but—analog hobbies are the doorway, not necessarily the destination. Because after the painting class, the restlessness comes back. After the lovely walk without headphones, you get home and the self returns. The deeper practice that mindfulness points towards isn’t to keep busy enough that the restlessness can’t find you. It’s to learn to meet it. To get curious about it. To eventually ask, gently, without demanding an answer: Who is this restless one?
That inquiry is where analog living and deep mindfulness practice can become something far more profound than a passing trend.
How to connect to this analog living moment more mindfully
If any of this lands with you, here are a few suggestions.
Choose friction on purpose. Pick one activity each week where you deliberately use the slower version. Write a card by hand instead of sending a message. Read a chapter of a physical book instead of an article on your phone. Cook something from scratch that you’d normally order in. The point isn’t efficiency. The point is the friction itself.
Let the activity be the meditation. When you do your analog thing, resist the urge to put a podcast on in the background. Let it be the only thing happening. Notice the sensations: the weight of the pen, the smell of the paint, the sound of the page turning. This is mindfulness in plain clothes.
Don’t pick the impressive one. People often assume the analog hobby has to be photogenic like pottery, calligraphy, vinyl records. It doesn’t. Making a slow cup of tea counts. Folding laundry without a screen counts. Walking somewhere without headphones counts. The hobby is not the point. Presence is the point.
Pick the activity your hands already want. Notice what your hands do when you’re idle. Some people, like me, doodle. Some people fiddle with objects. Some people are always tidying. Some people are drawn to texture—fabric, wood, soil. Your hands have already been telling you, for years, what kind of analog activity would suit you. Listen to them.
Pick what your inner critic dismisses. I almost didn’t go to the abstract art class because a voice in my head said, But you’re not an artist. That voice is often a useful clue. The thing it tries to talk you out of That’s silly, that’s frivolous, that’s not productive—is frequently the thing your nervous system most needs.
Pair the activity with one quiet question. While you’re doing your analog thing, gently hold one question in the back of your mind: Who is the one noticing this? You don’t need to answer it. In fact, the not-answering is the whole point. Just hold it lightly. That question, if you let it, is a thread that leads somewhere extraordinary.
Let it be imperfect. The grain on the photograph. The wobble in the handwriting. The stripe of colour you didn’t plan in the painting. These are not flaws to be edited out. They are the signature of something real having actually happened. A life that has been touched leaves marks. Let it.
Walking through the door
The analog movement is giving millions of people a small, daily taste of presence. A moment of real, embodied, here-ness. That taste is the beginning. That’s the door.
Mindfulness is what teaches you to walk through it.
So this week, pick one analog thing. Make it small. Make it ordinary. And while you’re doing it, instead of just doing it, get a little curious. Notice the quality of attention that arises. Notice the way the mind settles. And then, very gently, notice the one who is noticing.
That noticing—that quiet, unhurried looking—is where this all leads. Not back to a romanticised past, but forward, into a life that is actually being lived.
May you find at least one moment this week that is beautifully, imperfectly analog.
Join Us: The Seven Strengths Global Event
Looking for more ways to slow down and anchor in an interior calm—even (or maybe especially) when the world feels so frantic and uncertain?
From May 13–19, 2026, I’ll be joining some of the most respected teachers alive – including Sharon Salzberg, Rick Hanson, Kristen Neff, Tami Simon, Mamphela Ramphele, and Melli O’Brien – for a free, seven-day online global event called The Seven Strengths.
The event is hosted by Mindfulness.com in collaboration with Sounds True and DailyOM, and all proceeds support the Global Compassion Coalition’s work to build a more compassionate, resilient world. That means joining is both an act of personal growth and an act of collective generosity.
Part of this resurgence in interest in analog living is that we are all intuiting something vital: the world doesn’t need more anxious, exhausted people trying to hold everything together. It needs calmer, wiser, more compassionate human beings choosing to show up, day after day, from a place of genuine inner strength.
Have you ever found that on some days, no matter how good your intentions, you just can’t manage to get around to doing what you said you most wanted to do?
No matter what we’re trying to do—say, establish a new habit such as meditation, exercising more often, eating more healthfully, or diving into a new creative hobby—there will be days when life gets in the way. We may feel too tired; some emergency might arise; or we might simply forget to do what we had very good intentions of doing.
It’s exactly in these moments of failure that we need to offer ourselves some self-compassion. In fact, the whole creative process needs to be a compassionate one.
The compassionate road to creativity
One of the keys to creativity is testing different solutions to a problem—that is, iterating on the solutions and the design that you’ve come up with. Simply put, this means the first few attempts we make are not necessarily going to be the end result. There will be moments of failure, and this is part of the creative process.
To pick ourselves up after a moment of failure (or perceived failure) and carry on, we need to offer ourselves some self-compassion, and it’s our mindfulness practice that can help us build that.
Self-compassion for failure simply means turning the lens of compassion back onto ourselves.
What do we mean by “self-compassion for failure”?
It simply means turning the lens of compassion back onto ourselves. That is, recognizing our own moments of stress and suffering and being motivated in those moments to come up with a solution to alleviate our stress and suffering. There’s a great deal of scientific evidence now that shows how self-compassion builds motivation: people who are self-compassionate tend to navigate failure better and tend to stick with behavior changes and habits they originally set out to change or establish.
Acknowledge, Admit, Accept
Here’s a three-step process of self-compassion, as outlined by one of the premier researchers in this field, Kristen Neff. This three-step process consists of, first, offering ourselves a moment of mindfulness.
When we’re feeling a sense of failure or feeling inadequate, or even navigating the stress that arises when we feel things are out of our control—we take a moment in there to acknowledge the facts, admit we don’t like those facts, but accept the way things are. The key things to remember is not to get caught up in the narrative or story about what’s happening and not to suppress any difficult emotions that may come up. We’re simply acknowledging that this moment is stressful.
The second step is to connect with our sense of common humanity. Take a moment to acknowledge that no matter what we might be going through, there are many other people just like us who’ve encountered the same difficulty. So, we’re not alone—this kind of failure or this kind of stress is just part of the human condition. This is not only true, it can help us feel less isolated in moments of imperfection. It’s a little easier to foster a sense of self-compassion for failure when we know we are never alone.
The third step is offering ourselves some kindness. Consider what you might say to a best friend if they were going through what you might be going through in this moment of stress.
A Simple Practice to Foster Self-Compassion for Failure
Let’s try this model of self-compassion through a practice, keeping a creative goal in mind as we go. Here’s also a guided audio version with Dr. Neff if you’d like to listen instead:
1. I invite you to sit up in a way that’s alert yet relaxed and close your eyes. Make sure both your feet are planted firmly on the floor to help stabilize you and ensure your back is straight but not rigid. Allow the front of your belly to be soft. You may rest your hands gently on your lap.
2. Let’s start by bringing to mind something in your life that’s not going well. Maybe it’s a creative goal you’ve been working on that hasn’t gone according to plan. Maybe you’ve encountered some kind of failure at work or at home. Or maybe you’re just dealing with a painful situation that’s beyond your control.
3. Keeping this situation in mind, let’s start the process of self-compassion with mindfulness: Take a moment to acknowledge things as they are, not as you wish them to be. Take this moment to acknowledge things exactly as they are.
4. You might say something like, “This is a moment of stress,” or, “I don’t like this, but this is the way it is right now.” Keep in mind we’re not trying to problem solve. We’re also not getting caught up in the story around the pain and stress. We’re simply staying present to what’s happening.
5. Next, bring to mind the fact that no matter what you’re going through, there have been many people who’ve been through the same experience before. You might say something like, “I’m not alone in this,” or, “This is simply a part of being human.”
6. And now I’d like you tooffer yourself some kindness. If this were your best friend or a loved one who was going through what you’re going through, what might you say to them? What advice might you offer?
7. As you offer yourself the same kind of unconditional love and friendliness, I want you to send yourself a few wishes of well-being: May I be kind to myself. May I be patient and accepting of myself. May I be strong and resilient in this moment.
8. From this place of greater warmth and kindness for yourself, I’d like you to take a couple of deeper breaths at your own pace. And whenever you’re ready, open your eyes and rejoin this conversation.
Not Just Nice, But Essential
One thing that consistently stands out about Neff’s extensive research is this counterintuitive find: without self-compassion, it’s actually harder to change, heal, and grow. And that includes our creative endeavors.
We tend to think that being hard on ourselves will motivate us to do better—but it in reality, the opposite is true. Relentless self-criticism diminishes not only our enjoyment of the creative process, but also our ability to see into new possibilities. That fear of “not getting it right” stunts our creativity.
When we take the time to slow down, pay attention to our sense of “not-enough” in creative process, and offer that fear a little extra care, we’re actually holding the door open wider to fresh ideas, inspiration, and creative courage.
Take a restorative moment to release tension and feel deeply into gratitude for your hard-working body.
Taking a moment to pause with the intention to simply allow our bodies to rest in awareness can bring about a great sense of restoration and renewal to the heart. Our bodies are so overworked and often ignored. This guided awareness practice will allow us to feel a sense of gratitude for our body, in all of its beauty and mystery.
A 12-Minute Meditation to Rest Your Body in Gratitude
Read and practice the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.
Starting off, find the posture that feels comfortable for you in this moment. There are many different postures that we can choose from. Check in with your body to sense into what posture is best for me right now?
Take a few moments to feel what it means to be alive in your body right now. With attention resting lightly on the body, just notice: How is my body expressing its aliveness in this moment? Maybe that’s with lots of sensation, maybe the body just feels relaxed and at ease, or maybe there’s energy moving through some of our bodies. Whatever is true for your body right now, allow this aliveness to be what you sense into in this moment. This is my body and I’m grateful for my body.
Now, allow your attention to lightly rest on the sensations associated with the body touching whatever is supporting it. Maybe it’s the floor or a cushion, or a bed or couch. Allowing your attention to lightly rest, feel the liveness of the body touching and being supported by whatever is under you. This is my body resting, supported by what’s under me at this moment and I’m grateful for this body and for this support and this moment to rest. Resting just like a newborn rests in the arms of a parent or caregiver. Allow your body to rest, letting the support, the stability, and the comfort of having something holding you really infuse your body and your awareness. In this moment, I’m being held and supported and this support is stable, and unconditional, and I am grateful. Continue to feel the connection and the support of whatever is holding you in this moment, remaining connected to that experience.
We’re going to begin to invite our bodies to rest in the feeling of the space around the body. So, we’re really just allowing our attention to rest on the skin of the body. And with each exhale, let your attention begin to relax and expand out beyond the skin, just going out a few inches around the skin, resting in this space. Rather than focusing entirely on the physicality of the body, now we’re inviting the energy in the body—the tingling, the sensations—to actually rest in the space around us. You might use your imagination a little bit to imagine that, with every exhalation, you begin to sense your body being held by the vastness of the space surrounding the body.
It may be helpful to start with your back, inviting the back to rest. Just let go into the space behind you. And shifting to one side of the body, feeling that side, feeling the skin, and then inviting that side of the body to just let go. To relax into the space around that side of the body. And then going to the front of the body: feeling the skin, the body sensations, and the aliveness, and just allowing the front of the body to be held and to rest into the space in front. And lastly, arriving at the other side of the body, sensing the skin of the body, then letting your attention relax into the space around that side of the body.
For a few moments, as you’re breathing in and out naturally, allow your attention to rest as the body is resting, in the space around the body. The body can let go now. Breathing in, feeling the body held in our awareness. Breathing out, we’re grateful for the space around the body. It allows the body to relax.
As we bring this practice to a close, the invitation is for you to place a hand on your heart, feeling a sense of gratitude and appreciation for the body, the space around the body, and this moment of resting. And remember that gratitude for the body is a way that we can always reconnect with this sense of rest, presence, and ease.
Our breathing often becomes shallow, tense, or restricted during the day, and we don’t even notice it. Try this Light, Slow, Deep breathing technique to soften, relax, and expand again.
Thanks to our autonomic nervous system, life-sustaining processes like our heartbeat, digestion, and breathing all happen without us even having to pay attention. But our environments, stress levels, and other factors can definitely affect the health and efficiency of these processes.
For example, sitting hunched at our desks and staring at screens often means that our breathing gets shallow and irregular—which of course affects things like focus, energy, cognition, and attention.
This week, Shamash Alidina leads a guided breathing exercise called Light, Slow, Deep (or LSD), designed to re-set the breath in a way that opens the chest, relaxes tension, and calms the nervous system.
Most of us breathe backwards: too hard, too fast, and too much. We grip the breath without realizing it. LSD breathing is an invitation to do the opposite.
Light means breathing with softness, a gentleness, as if the breath is barely disturbing the air around you.
Slow means extending each breath, giving your nervous system time to settle like a pendulum that’s swinging wildly gradually finding its still point.
Deep means breathing low in your lower abdomen, not in your chest, but down where the lungs are roomiest and most efficient.
Together, these three qualities activate your parasympathetic nervous system—the calm, rest-and-digest part of you that so often gets crowded out by the noise of the day. Think of it like turning down volume on a radio that’s been playing too loud. You’re not switching it off, you’re just bringing it to a gentler, more natural level.
A Light, Slow, Deep (LSD) Breathing Meditation
Read and practice the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.
Begin by finding a comfortable position. You could be on a chair, cross legged on the floor, lying down. You could even be standing and just gently moving. Whatever allows your body to feel supported and at ease.
The breath pattern we’ll use today is simple. Inhale for four counts, a gentle pause, and then exhale for six counts. A slightly longer exhale is key. Longer exhalations directly stimulate the vagus nerve, signaling to the whole system that you’re safe. So you don’t need to force anything, you just allow.
Let’s begin. Take one natural breath first. No need to change anything yet.
Now place one hand on your lower abdomen, just below your navel. This is your anchor and as you inhale you’re aiming to feel that hand rise like a tide coming in. As you exhale, the hand falls, the tide going out.
Keep going with that easy breath. Inhaling softly through the nose, feeling the lower abdomen expand. In two, three, four, pause. And exhale slowly. Two, three, four, five, six. And then pause. In, two, three, four, and out two, three, four, five, six
Inhale light and steady like warming mists rising from still water. Exhale, the breath dissolving. Body softening.
If there is any tendency to grip or control as you’re breathing right now, see if you can loosen your hold on the breath by just a few percent. Inhaling, the lower abdomen is rising. Your chest is barely moving, your shoulders are down.
Remember to keep exhaling longer than the inhale. All the way to the end. As you inhale, receive the breath rather than taking it in. Exhale and release. Not pushing, just allowing the air to naturally leave.
Now let the breath find its own natural rhythm. Your job is to simply notice it now as the witness, not as the controller. If thoughts arise, and they will, treat them like clouds passing through the still sky. The sky doesn’t chase the clouds, it doesn’t argue with them, it simply holds them. Allows them to be there, and they pass.
Feel how each complete breath cycle leaves you a little more still, a littlemore at ease. Like sediment settling slowly to the bottom of a glass of water. The water doesn’t try to clear itself, it just rests. And some clarity naturally comes. Breathing in, slow, light, low. Exhaling slowly. There’s nothing to achieve and nowhere to get to. The breath is simply happening—as it has, without effort, your whole life, long before any thought about it.
One way to breathe lightly is to breathe quietly. See if you can breathe so quietly that you can hardly hear your own breath. As you do this, you may sense a tiny amount of air hunger, a tiny urge to breathe more. And that’s quite natural. In fact, that’s a good sign. You’re rebalancing your oxygen and carbon dioxide in your body. More oxygen is getting into your cells and into your brain when you breathe lightly.
When you don’t force yourself too much, you may be able to notice a bit more saliva in your mouth, a bit more warmth in your hands and feet perhaps. This is the sign of the relaxation response engaging, a sign that you’re going in the right direction.
As we move towards the end of the practice, start noticing the quality of your mind right now. Is it quieter than when we started? Is it more spacious? LSD breathing doesn’t create this stillness, it reveals it. The stillness was always there underneath the movement. The breath simply clears the way. Inhaling light, slow, deep. And exhale, releasing any last effort.
Remember you can return to this breath at any point in your day—on the train, at your desk, before a difficult conversation. Doesn’t need any special equipment. Just a few moments.
When you’re ready, slowly allow your eyes to open if they’ve been closed. Take the outside world back into you, and carry this quality into your day. Well done, you’ve given yourself 12 minutes of genuine rest. Thank you for joining me.
Psychologist and mindfulness teacher Dr. Elisha Goldstein has spent decades helping people find their way back to themselves. He’s come to see that lasting change rarely comes from dramatic overhaul, but rather through the smallest possible pivots. His new book, Tiny Shifts, introduces a four-step method for interrupting the emotional loops that keep us stuck, and making real change in the ordinary moments of everyday life. Mindful editor-in-chief Siri Myhrom sat down with Dr. Goldstein to talk about the neuroscience behind the method, why our bodies know things our minds don’t, and what to do when the problems feel too big for a tiny shift.
The heart of the book is the Four R Method: Recognize, Release, Refocus, Reinforce. Where did that come from? Was a method you’ve always had, or did it emerge from a need?
I think the Four R Method evolved over time—out of my personal experience and also my teaching. The first R—Recognize—is foundational. It’s in many of the world’s wisdom traditions, psychology speaks of it, neuroscience speaks of it. This idea of recognizing, labeling, noticing. Awareness is on its own a regulation tool. It’s also the very first opening to anything. It’s the foundation of mindfulness.
We need to rebalance the somatic reaction that’s happening, because that widens the space now between stimulus and response. That moment of awareness on its own is typically not enough. We need a wider space.
That first R is really about stepping outside of the emotional loops that are patterned and conditioned within us—often unconscious, whether that’s anxiety, overeating, snapping at people, road rage, or just generally feeling overwhelmed. These loops happen because there’s so much repetition over years of our lives. We just don’t notice we’re in them. How many people, since 2007, have been programmed to fall into the gentle scroll—typically as some form of soothing, with boredom or dis-ease or restlessness underneath? To wake up to that has been foundational for me.
But what typically wasn’t there—and what’s not taught systematically—is what I learned later as a psychologist: the somatic piece. That moment of awareness gives us a little wedge. But we can lose that wedge pretty quickly. What we need to do is rebalance the somatic reaction that’s happening. That’s what widens the space between stimulus and response. We don’t just need to step into the space—we typically need to widen it.
Can you say more about what Release actually means? I think when people hear “letting go,” they imagine it means not feeling the hard thing anymore.
So that’s a good question, what you’re pointing to here, because release is not about getting rid of the feeling. If you think about tiny shift, it’s like an emotional pivot. We’re just trying to pivot. It’s not about the outcome so much. Think of it more like a verb.
It’s not whether the emotion is legitimate or illegitimate—it’s here. Release is taking a moment—taking a breath, a slightly longer exhale out, allowing the shoulders to drop, letting the muscles elongate—to feel a little more softness in my body around the activation.
I’ll give you an example—a hypothetical moment that has happened many times. My teenage kids had agreed to clean up after themselves after their midnight snacks, and I came downstairs one morning to dishes everywhere. I notice myself really frustrated. Shoulders up, hands tense, face kind of scrunched, heart rate up. I’m about to storm into their room and let them know.
And release is more about taking a moment to soften around that feeling. It’s not to get rid of the feeling, because the anger is actually justified. They crossed a boundary; there was an agreement. That anger is a healthy feeling. It’s not whether the emotion is legitimate or illegitimate—it’s here.
So I recognize the frustration loop. And release is taking a moment—taking a breath, a slightly longer exhale out, allowing the shoulders to drop, letting the muscles elongate. That activates the parasympathetic nervous system. What’s happening there is that I’m taking that space between stimulus and response and widening it. The anger is still there. But I’m able to feel a little more softness in my body around the activation.
Sometimes, too, I’ll notice a story in my mind that’s not serving me—something rigid, something about what was done to me—and as I take that exhalation out, I might see that story and say the word “release” and allow it to kind of come out. That doesn’t mean it magically disappears. But it does help soften the activation. It helps turn the volume down on the story a little bit. That’s what we’re after. Whether we’re going to use the anger constructively or destructively—that’s the important piece. And the release is what gives us enough space to choose.
There’s a phrase in the book — “embodied cognition” — that gets at knowing through our bodies. Where do you think our disconnection from the body comes from?
I think it’s cultural. Western culture, in particular. You see it from a young age—how we train kids to favor and prize thinking. And our bodies, how we feel, sensations—this type of stuff is implicitly taught as unimportant. So we don’t get a lot of reps with it.
We’re also wired to problem-solve. So if we’re feeling anxious, frustrated, like something’s wrong—we’re going to try and problem-solve that. And the way we problem-solve is we start thinking. We think about all the problems in front of us, or possible problems that aren’t in front of us, or we reach back to our Rolodex of history and think about problems in the past. Meanwhile, we feel more anxious or upset, because that’s the emotion it feeds.
The insight doesn’t translate into change until it drops down into the body. That’s the piece that’s so often missing.
The pause can give us a moment of recognition, but then it’s gone. The insight doesn’t translate into change until it drops down into the body. That’s the piece that’s so often missing.
There’s a study I keep coming back to, by Norman Farb and Zindel Segal at the University of Toronto. Segal is one of the creators of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. They showed emotionally difficult film clips—clips from Terms of Endearment and The Champ—to two groups. One group had gone through mindfulness training and one who hadn’t. Both groups showed the same perceived sadness. But the mindfulness group scored statistically significantly lower on the Beck Depression Inventory.
We’ve got two basic networks in our brains: the narrative network [also called the Default Mode Network], where rumination and worry live; and the present-focus network [also called the Task Positive Network], where problem-solving occurs. And what the brain imaging showed is a kind of seesaw effect: when one network goes up, the other goes down, and vice versa.
When people were paying attention to the sensation of sadness and saying “sadness” in their mind, their narrative network was coming down. They didn’t get caught in the rumination as much. That’s how mindfulness works. And similarly, when we recognize a loop and soften around it in an embodied way, it dials down that narrative default mode network. That’s the neurology behind why this works.
Can you give another example of how this works in your everyday life?
This method is basically how I cured my insomnia, because understanding the neurology of this has helped me trust, to come back to my body any time I have sleep troubles. As an example, my dog recently woke me up in the middle of the night, barking. So I had to go get the dog, and on the way back to bed, I banged my hand on the banister in the dark, and cut my hand. It’s the kind of thing that just wakes your whole body up. By the time I got back to bed, my mind had latched onto a work problem. And I could recognize what was happening: I was in a worry loop. There’s something called the Zeigarnik Effect—the mind keeps trying to close unfinished loops. So I knew that if I just tried to push the thought away, it would keep coming back.
I recommend this to anyone: really deeply listen to a practice with massive repetition, so that you memorize it. Because the higher your emotional activation, the more your thoughts are convincing, the more you kind of go under a spell. If you have some level of mastery, you’ll be able to break that spell—because you can trust the neurology.
What I did instead was recognize the loop, and take a moment to soften the physical tension. My stomach was clenched from the worrying, so I took some deep breaths—not to “activate the parasympathetic nervous system” as a technique, but because my abdomen was tense and I needed to do the opposite. I needed to stretch those muscles. So I took deep breaths, my abdomen expanded, and that was the release.
Then my refocus was: I know the seesaw effect. I know that even though my mind is telling me I need to worry about this, if I come back and attend to something in the present moment—for me the body is the most tangible anchor—I can activate that steady gear and bring the spinning gear down. And because I’ve done a body scan hundreds of times, my body just knows what to do. I don’t need to turn on an audio. I recommend this to anyone: really deeply listen to a practice like that with massive repetition, so that you memorize it. Because the higher your emotional activation, the more your thoughts are convincing, the more you kind of go under a spell. If you have some level of mastery, you’ll be able to break that spell—because you can trust the neurology.
The third R is Refocus. You describe it as “taking the steering wheel.” What does that look like in practice?
Our brain is already reactively asking us questions—and it’s steering. What’s the worst case scenario here? What’s wrong with me? Why don’t my kids love me anymore? Whatever it is, refocus is about consciously redirecting that question-asking capacity. When we ask our brain questions, it searches for answers. So instead of those reactive questions, we ask something like: What’s most important for me to focus on right now? What do I actually need right now that’ll move me in a healthier direction? What’s something I can do that’ll enhance the next five minutes of my life? Something like that will completely change the moment.
Sometimes refocus doesn’t even require a new question. After you’ve recognized and released, you often just have access to wisdom you already had—a phrase from a teacher you love, an intuition about what you need. The emotional loops don’t erase our wisdom. They just block access to it.
And sometimes refocus doesn’t even require a new question. After you’ve recognized and released, you often just have access to wisdom you already had—a phrase from a teacher you love, an intuition about what you need. The emotional loops don’t erase our wisdom. They just block access to it. That’s why so many people say, I’ve done so much work, read so many books, why isn’t it sticking? This is why. When we’re in those emotional loops, we lose access to what we know. The release is what restores that access.
The fourth R—Reinforce—is the one you say that’s most often skipped. Why does it matter?
Yes, it’s the most often missed—and the reason there’s a fourth R at all is because after we have an experience, we need to do something to emotionally tag that moment so we remember it. It might be a meditation or interrupting a moment where you were about to snap at your kid, or you were in traffic hating being in traffic and you loosened your grip on the steering wheel and remembered something Sharon Salzberg said—you are also the traffic—and suddenly felt a whole lot more ease. The reinforce is saying: I need to do something that emotionally tags this moment. That’s a term from neuroscience. To emotionally tag the moment so my brain remembers it. I want to install it in my short-term working memory so that the next time I’m in this context, my brain will automatically bring it up and interrupt the old pattern.
Emotional tagging is acknowledging: Wow, look at what I just did, and how I’m feeling right now. That gives it a little extra emphasis. It’s like hitting the save button on a document you just created. You take a beat with it. Just let the moment land. That’s the reinforce piece.
The way to do that is quite simple. Just acknowledging: Wow, look at what I just did, and how I’m feeling right now. That gives it a little extra emphasis. Or you take a moment and put your hand on your heart and sense the shift—whether it’s relief, ease, warmth, whatever the positive shift is—and you let it land. It’s like hitting the save button on a document you just created. You take a beat with it. Just let the moment land. That’s the reinforce piece. And that’s how we really enhance the process toward more implicit change—not just knowing something, but having it available to us the next time we need it.
As I was reading, I was thinking, too, about our current cultural moment. I live in Minneapolis, and we have had a hell of a year. In the realm of overwhelm, there was both the feeling and the message: We need to be doing something, and it has to be more and more and more, and it’s not enough, and everything’s on fire. How does a concept like “tiny shifts” work when the problems feel so big and so urgent? How can this tiny thing be enough to meet what is asking so much of us?
First of all, just acknowledging that, yeah, Minneapolis has been through the wringer this last year in gigantic ways. A friend of mine who’s been diagnosed with cancer said exactly that to me after I gave him the book, Do you have anything called Big Shifts? Because that’s what I need. And I really felt that.
A friend of mine who’s been diagnosed with cancer said to me after I gave him the book, “Do you have anything called Big Shifts? Because that’s what I need.” And I really felt that.
But here’s what I’d say. In your example—the feeling that I’m not doing enough, there’s so much to do, everything’s on fire, and it’s still not enough—that is an emotional loop. What I’m noticing is that I’m activated. My mind is running stories. My body is tensing. It’s a not-enoughness loop, a save-the-world loop. And a tiny shift is saying: What’s happening within me right now? Because I’m not grounded and balanced in this moment. And that’s what we’re after.
So I recognize the overwhelm loop. I release. I soften around the activation even as all of that is still here. Then I refocus—and in this moment I could go a lot of directions. I might ask: What are some things I’ve been doing in the direction of this that I feel a sense of accomplishment about?—redirecting attention from the lack to what I’ve actually done. Or: What’s one thing I can do that moves in this direction?
The tiny shift isn’t pretending the big thing is small. It’s gathering yourself—recognize, release—so that when you refocus, you’re steering from a more grounded place.
The tiny shift isn’t pretending the big thing is small. It’s gathering yourself—recognize, release—so that when you refocus, you’re steering from a more grounded place. And then if you notice even a little bit of relief or clarity, you reinforce it. Okay. I can do this. This is also part of me. I can walk through this incredibly difficult time with more groundedness. And that might take thirty seconds. Or it might open up the realization that you need to take a half an hour this evening. That’s okay too. Because that’s a need you have, and the method helped you find it.
Following up on that question of What do I need right now?—What if what we need is truly unrealistic or impossible—say, a more loving parent, or for more people to step up, or for more hours in a day? How do you get at what’s underneath all that so you can get to what can actually be addressed?
Often when we’re overwhelmed, we struggle to even name what we need. So we can ask, What do I need right now? And if the honest answer is, I’m confused, I don’t know, I’m just so over it—then the actual need is “clarity.” That’s always a one-to-one: confusion means the need is clarity. So then the question becomes, What’s going to support me in the direction of clarity? Maybe a conversation. Maybe journaling. Maybe space and time—and there’s no getting around that sometimes we just need to take time to reflect. You’re not going to get it without taking time to sit and be with something. We can do that together or we can do that individually, but there is a need, and there’s no getting around taking space for that. So the next layer is: What’s going to support me in creating that space?
Speaking of that, you do have a class coming up. Do you want to talk about?
Yes, we have this great program called the 21-Day Tiny Shift Experience, starting on May 11. I realize that change happens in the everyday moments of our lives, and this is a program of one- to three-minute daily voice notes delivered through WhatsApp—for people who want support in layering this into everyday life. People had incredible results the first time we ran it: more relief, more ease, more calm, real insight—without taking time out of their day, just by weaving in these tiny shifts over three weeks.
And remind us—where can people find your book and learn more?
The book is Tiny Shifts, and there’s a free resource bundle at elishagoldstein.com/tiny-shifts—a quick guide to the method, three shorter meditations, and a needs and feelings inventory.
There’s still time to join the upcoming 21-day Tiny Shifts program, which starts on May 11, 2026. Register here.
