Health Journal Online

Tag: Mental Health

  • The Wellness Trap: What Mindfulness Can’t Fix

    The Wellness Trap: What Mindfulness Can’t Fix

    If you’re a human living in 2026, you likely have a laundry list of things you’d like to have fixed. Your list might look something like: affordable housing, the global economy, cost of groceries, your headache, your backache, an aging body, the cost of gas, the price of groceries, global warming, and maybe something to deal with occasional self-doubt or chronic busyness. 

    And that’s just the top of the list. 

    In our collective overwhelm and longing to find peace or respite from the current landscape we find ourselves in, anywhere but “here” feels good, even if for a moment. 

    Some of us have turned to spirituality, looking for answers. Some of us have tried distracting ourselves with activities and to-do lists. And for others, we’ve taken an even deeper dive into wellness practices, supplements, and workout programs that promise us ways that we can “be well.”  

    In our collective overwhelm and longing to find peace or respite from the current landscape we find ourselves in, anywhere but “here” feels good, even if for a moment. 

    Enter Mindfulness. 

    When Practice Becomes a Commodity

    For decades, teachers like Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Joseph Goldstein helped introduce Insight Meditation (Vipassana) to Western audiences. They made a contemplative practice that had existed for centuries more accessible to people searching for a different relationship to stress, suffering, and the mind itself. 

    Over time, mindfulness moved beyond meditation centers and into schools, workplaces, therapist offices, and hospitals—and later, the larger wellness industry as a whole.

    In essence, mindfulness has become the new “superfood.”

    Somewhere along the way, however, mindfulness became more than a practice. It became a prefix. Today, when we encounter words like mindful eating, mindful communications, mindful parenting, mindful productivity—the adjective itself lends an air of credibility to what follows. 

    In essence, mindfulness has become the new “superfood.” The label itself is imbued with authority over what follows it, encouraging us to believe that simply adding the word “mindful” to an activity somehow lends it to being the wiser, more educated, or healthier choice in the room, when the reality is much more nuanced. 

    Have We Lost the Plot?

    In my quest to find some answers, I picked up a copy of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living. Kabat-Zinn is credited with translating mindfulness into a clinical context known today as MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction), where practitioners in healthcare and hospitals have incorporated these practices. 

    The title comes from a line in Zorba the Greek, where the “full catastrophe” refers to the messiness of life (stress, work, uncertainty, insecurity, love, joy, illness, loss) and all that comes with it. The book’s basic premise is that we cannot control what happens to us in this life, but we can change our relationship to what happens. 

    Mindfulness, when applied to myriad life situations, has a helpful outcome: it helps regulate our emotions, cultivate self-awareness, and support our mental well-being.

    The issue has never been, Does mindfulness help?—but rather what we now expect it to help with.

    And yet, as mindfulness has grown more popular, so too have our expectations of it. In some cases, the word “mindful” has become a linguistic indicator for wellness all by itself. 

    The issue has never been, Does mindfulness help?—but rather what we now expect it to help with.

    Labels Come with a Price

    Part of mindfulness’s appeal is that it offers something many of us desperately need: a way to meet our lives with more balance, greater awareness, and less reactivity. 

    But as more people have recognized this desperate need, and perhaps tried more than a few things that haven’t worked to meet it, mindfulness has begun carrying responsibilities far beyond its original scope. 

    We want the feeling of relief more than the skill of being with discomfort that might not have any easy answers. 

    In some instances, expectations around mindfulness can morph into what some contemplative teachers might describe as a form of spiritual bypassing, where, more often than not, people look to the practice itself to be the solution instead of being part of a much larger process that involves our participation. In other words, we want the feeling of relief more than the skill of being with discomfort that might not have any easy answers. 

    Marketing has played a large part in helping so many of us become more aware of mindfulness, but to what end? We may attend more mindfulness workshops or participate in corporate mindfulness retreats, but I think we should consider whether we’re asking mindfulness to carry the weight of responsibilities that fall outside of the practice. 

    Mindfulness was never meant to fix the “full catastrophe” of living, but rather to give us the tools to meet ourselves where we are.

    Confusing the Path for the Destination

    The wellness trap begins when we mistake any one practice or form of healing for the solution itself. Mindfulness was never meant to fix the “full catastrophe” of living, but rather to give us the tools to meet ourselves where we are.

    Yes, mindfulness practice can help improve things like attention, focus, communication—which can have the effect of making work places better and more efficient. But when did mindfulness become responsible for making workplaces healthier? Or more productive? When did it become responsible for helping us have better leaders or helping us address burnout? None of these are inherently bad uses of mindfulness, of course; but when we attribute the success or failure of such endeavors to a practice like mindfulness, we fail to see the process accurately. 

    Mindfulness is a tool for cultivation, not the solution itself. Put another way: mindfulness is one way of relating to experience of any kind. This, however, is very different from being a solution for eliminating the experiences we don’t want.

    Coming Back to the Foundation

    So, what does mindfulness really offer? And why do we keep expecting mindfulness to “fix” whatever feels out of alignment in our lives? 

    Jon Kabat-Zinn has repeatedly emphasized that mindfulness is not simply a technique but “a way of being in wise relationship to experience as you find it.” That distinction matters. 

    Jon Kabat-Zinn has repeatedly emphasized that mindfulness is not simply a technique but “a way of being in wise relationship to experience as you find it.” That distinction matters. 

    Most of us avoid unpleasant emotions, conversations, and uncertainty whenever we can. This is a deeply human tendency. We fall into the Wellness Trap when we start looking for something or someone to make that unpleasant feeling go away for us. We “outsource” our agency when we assign those unwanted experiences to be dealt with by our meditation app, retreat, self-help book, or supplement. 

    We live in a time where so many offers for relief are available to us. Our trap isn’t what to use; it is expecting whatever we engage with (however it comes) to do the work that belongs to each of us. 

    When we mistake a practice as a “cure-all,” we are effectively giving away our agency to be part of the solution to what ails us. 

    Buddhist teachings make the argument that while we cannot prevent pain and suffering, we do have some influence over our circumstances. What this means for most of us, as Kabat-Zinn suggests, is that life is the catastrophe: joy, fear, illness, love, uncertainty, all of it. 

    Mindfulness invites us to learn how to live with those experiences. The goal is to help us be present with our discomfort instead of avoiding it altogether. 

    Cultivating a mindfulness practice is not a substitute for healthcare, community, rest, boundaries, meaningful work, or structural change.

    The wellness trap emerges when mindfulness is expected to carry more than it was ever designed to hold. Cultivating a mindfulness practice is not a substitute for healthcare, community, rest, boundaries, meaningful work, or structural change. It shines a light on things that we need to see more clearly, helps us understand where limits are and why they look the way they do. 

    And hopefully, it helps us each see that our issues (as we identify them in each of our lives) are less about our capacity to endure and more about the causes and conditions of our circumstances than anything else. Perhaps most importantly, mindfulness can help us discern the difference between what needs our compassionate acceptance and what needs our compassionate acceptance combined with thoughtful action.



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  • Reprogramming The Panic: Choosing Conscious Response Over Avoidance

    Reprogramming The Panic: Choosing Conscious Response Over Avoidance

    Our nervous systems are made to keep us safe from danger—but what happens when they’re responding to threats that no longer exist? Writer Catherine Swett explores how we can meet these disruptive moments with sovereignty over avoidance, and over time teach our nervous system how to respond to discomfort and anxious moments.

    The Trap of Avoidance

    People often say, “I have anxiety. I cannot do crowds.” For a long time, I believed that was my whole story. But looking back, it was not just anxiety. It was avoidance. Every time I avoided, I quietly reinforced the fear.

    Anxiety is not a monster outside of me. It is my body and brain sounding alarms. The problem is the software is outdated. It is coded from times when my body truly could not escape real threats.

    Anxiety is not a monster outside of me. It is my body and brain sounding alarms. Heart racing, tunnel vision, fight or flight, doing exactly what it was designed to do: protect me from danger. The problem is the software is outdated. It is coded from times when my body truly could not escape real threats.

    Reprogramming in Real Time

    Of course, this does not mean every internal alarm is false. Sometimes our bodies are alerting us to genuine danger, and those protective instincts deserve our attention. The real work is learning to discern when to trust the alarm and when to question it.

    When I walk into a crowd—a situation that might feel overwhelming, but that is actually not dangerous for me—and I feel panic rise, I have two choices. I can avoid it and confirm the fear, or I can walk through it and teach my body something new. I choose the latter. Each time I navigate what my nervous system warns is unsafe, I show it that I am safe.

    This is not “just anxiety.” It is real-time nervous system reprogramming. I had to walk through crowds until I proved to my system that I was no longer its prisoner.

    There is a line most people are never taught to notice. Avoidance often comes from fear, the kind where you spend your life running and the thing you fear keeps chasing you.

    Recognizing the Line Between Fear and Choice

    There is a line most people are never taught to notice. Avoidance often comes from fear, the kind where you spend your life running and the thing you fear keeps chasing you. That eventually catches up.

    But there is another place. A place where you understand yourself. You recognize the environments, dynamics, and stimuli that activate your nervous system in unsafe ways. And you also know this: if you need to walk through it, you can. You are capable. You are conscious. You are not trapped.

    You do not need to constantly expose yourself to triggers to prove resilience.

    The difference is that you do not need to constantly expose yourself to triggers to prove resilience. Once you face the root of what makes something destabilizing, you gain the ability to choose if and when that exposure belongs in your life. That is not avoidance. That is conscious choice.

    Lessons from Monks: Discipline, Not Detachment

    I have thought about this in the context of monks. I used to assume they were peaceful because they were detached, above it all. That was ignorance. Monks feel, think, and experience frustration, desire, and disturbance, just like anyone else.

    Healing is not about becoming untriggerable. It is not about enduring everything life throws at you. It is about understanding yourself deeply enough to respond consciously.

    The difference is what they choose to subject themselves to. They do not abstain out of fear. They abstain with discipline, because they understand their minds. Peace is not passive. It is actively protected. That protection requires internal work, not constant exposure.

    Healing is Sovereignty

    Healing is not about becoming untriggerable. It is not about enduring everything life throws at you. It is about understanding yourself deeply enough to respond consciously. Thoughts rise. Reactions flare. Old patterns knock, and that is okay.

    A life of avoidance with no self-work is fear in disguise.

    A life of avoidance with no self-work is fear in disguise. A life of conscious choice, rooted in understanding, is sovereignty. By locating your perception, observing your nervous system, and noticing patterns in real time, you gain the ability to respond instead of react.

    Growth Looks Like This

    We know that healing is not linear. There will be ups and downs, and that’s normal. But in general, here are grounding statements that reflect the growth process:

    • I do not rush to correct my feelings
    • I delay decisions until my nervous system settles
    • I let context and awareness arrive before action

    By treating perception and reactivity as interfaces, not flaws, urgency becomes information instead of command.

    By treating perception and reactivity as interfaces, not flaws, urgency becomes information instead of command. Intensity becomes data instead of danger. Insight alone does not stop the spiral, but noticing the system in motion gives me room to respond instead of react.

    By seeing perception this way, I can engage with reality as it is. I can separate the present from the echoes of the past and act with awareness instead of just reacting.



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  • Play, SoulPancake, and Building Your Anti-Depressant Brain

    Play, SoulPancake, and Building Your Anti-Depressant Brain

    When it comes to happiness, says Elisha Goldstein, there’s a simple but important tool we often forget about: play. 

    For years now, I’ve been studying what helps create more resilience and happiness within us. I’ve looked at my own life, the life of my clients and students, and the psychological and neuroscience research. What I’ve found is that within each and every one of us are a core set of natural anti-depressants. When we intentionally tap into these resources, it shifts our brain activity in ways that can lend itself to shaping an anti-depressant brain. One of the natural anti-depressants that I’ve come to find that helps break a bad mood and create positive neural activity is Play!

    In Uncovering Happiness: Overcoming Depression with Mindfulness and Self-Compassion I describe play as “a flexible state of mind in which you are presently engaged in some freely chosen and potentially purposeless activity that you find interesting, enjoyable, and satisfying.”

    Here’s a great video that shows adults playing and the results. Take a look and see what you notice.

    When adults were put in an enriched environment where the cues elicited play, they became more engaged, open, and most seemed to be genuinely enjoying themselves.

    Research from Marion Diamond out of UC Berkeley shows that rats who had a more enriched environment with toys and playmates showed growth in their cerebral cortex. This is the part of the brain that’s involved with cognitive processing and those rats actually ran mazes quicker than others who had less enriched environments. This type of research has been repeated over and over again with similar results. (Note: Rats that had a depleting environment absent of toys and playmates showed a reduction in the thickness of their cerebral cortex).

    The reality is engaging play reduces stress, promotes creativity, productivity, openness, and revitalizes our sense of aliveness. It is literally a natural anti-depressant.

    The question for us is how can we create more enriching environments?

    One answer lies in understanding how our brain responds to cues. Most of the time our brain is automatically making decisions beneath our consciousness and the cues in our environments are influencing those decisions. If we’re often alone and there’s a lack or nourishing things and people in our environment it’s more likely to lead to depression and anxiety. On the other hand, if our environments are more engaging and we have access to more playmates it creates more resiliency. So we have to consider: Do the environments we currently live in, at home and at work, elicit cues of play?

    If so, it’s a good practice to be conscious of those cues. If not, how can you create more cues in your environment that elicit a more playful neural response?

    Encourage play at home and at work

    Many companies are starting to create more enriching environments because the research is clear that it leads to happier, less stressed, more loyal and productive employees. If your workplace doesn’t you can take it into your own hands, create a joke board, or take mini-breaks where you intentionally watch a short video like the one above or hang out with nourishing people as a source of connection.

    At home you can consider what play means to you? This is usually something that you have been thinking of doing that your mind said was unimportant. Maybe you want to pick up the camera more, reconnect with old friends, read a pleasurable book, or take a 2-hour date with yourself weekly and do something out of your routine that feeds you. That’s how I got started.

    In our culture we see this as a luxury because we prize working over playing and our minds often say that “playing is unproductive.” This is one the biggest lies our brain tells us. The research is clear, those that integrate play into their lives are more likely to run the mazes faster and more efficiently.

    There are other tricks to uncovering a more playful life and even to finding playmates, but the first step is looking to your cues and starting to create more enriching playful environments. Then we need to actively create this for ourselves even in the face of the voices in our heads that say “I don’t deserve it” or “There are more important things to do.” In Uncovering Happiness, I call these “Negative Unconscious Thoughts” or NUTs as we often feel nuts when they’re around.

    The message here is:

    Being mindful of play and engaging it in your life can act as a natural anti-depressant, creating positive neural shifts that when practiced and repeated can contribute to an anti-depressant brain.

    Take a moment and share, what does play mean to you? How do you bring it into your life? Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

    Adapted from Mindfulness & Psychotherapy 



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  • When the Therapy Room Becomes Another Closed Door: Why Traditional Western Mental Health Care Fails Survivors of Torture and State Violence 

    When the Therapy Room Becomes Another Closed Door: Why Traditional Western Mental Health Care Fails Survivors of Torture and State Violence 

    A woman sits in a therapist’s office in a Western city. She fled her country after surviving months of detention, interrogation, and torture at the hands of a government that wanted to silence her. She made it out. She is, by every external measure, safe now. 

    The therapist is kind. Educated. Well-meaning. They ask her to rate her anxiety on a scale of one to ten. They suggest breathing exercises. They offer a worksheet on cognitive distortions. 

    She never comes back. 

    Each time, I feel the same quiet grief—not for the therapist’s failure of compassion, but for the field’s failure of imagination. 

    I have heard this story, in different forms, with different detail, more times than I can count. And each time, I feel the same quiet grief—not for the therapist’s failure of compassion, but for the field’s failure of imagination. 

    Traditional Western therapy was not designed for her. And until we are honest about that, we will keep losing people who have already survived the unsurvivable, not to their trauma, but to our inadequacy. 

    Examining Our Assumptions About Safety & Healing

    Western psychotherapy and mental health care rests on a set of foundational assumptions so embedded in the model that most practitioners never think to question them. 

    Western psychotherapy rests on a set of foundational assumptions so embedded in the model that most practitioners never think to question them.

    It assumes that healing is an internal process, something that happens inside one person, in a private room, between two people who meet weekly for fifty minutes. It assumes language is the primary vehicle for processing trauma. There is an understanding that emotions can and should be named, examined, and reframed. In this framework, safety is a feeling, one that can be cultivated through technique. 

    For survivors of torture and state violence, almost every one of these assumptions fails. 

    When a person has been systematically targeted by a government, imprisoned, interrogated, beaten, humiliated, sexually assaulted, subjected to mock execution, and stripped of their humanity, the wound is not primarily psychological in the Western sense. It reaches deeper than that. 

    The perpetrator was not an individual. It was a system, one that in many cases is still in power, still persecuting those left behind, still present in the world that survivors now have to live in and explain themselves within. 

    When Betrayal Revisits In a Place That Was Supposed to Be Safe

    For most survivors of state violence, the deepest wound is the destruction of trust—in institutions, in strangers, and in the world’s basic safety. That wound begins in their home countries, where the very governments meant to protect them become the source of persecution, imprisonment, torture, and terror. But for some survivors, the trauma does not end when they escape.

    I have worked with individuals who survived the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Taliban, and other repressive regimes, believing that if they could just reach the United States, they would finally be safe. They believed they had made it to a country built on democracy, due process, and human rights—a place where the rules would finally be different.

    Instead, some found themselves behind another locked door.

    For survivors who have already endured torture, the greatest injury is often not simply being harmed again—it is realizing that the place they believed would protect them became another source of fear.

    Survivors have described being held in detention under conditions they experienced as profoundly traumatizing. Several reported physical abuse, psychological abuse, prolonged isolation, humiliation, threats, and treatment that echoed the very tactics they had fled.

    What made this experience uniquely devastating was not only the suffering itself, but the betrayal. They expected cruelty from authoritarian regimes. They never expected to experience abuse in the country they believed represented freedom, justice, and the rule of law.

    Many have asked me, “If this can happen here, then where is safe?”

    For survivors who have already endured torture, the greatest injury is often not simply being harmed again—it is realizing that the place they believed would protect them became another source of fear. That second betrayal can fracture whatever fragile trust remained, leaving them feeling that nowhere in the world is truly safe.

    Offering An Anchor in Mental Health Care that Holds

    When someone survives torture by a government, they don’t just feel anxious or depressed. They lose their fundamental sense that the world is safe, that they matter, that life has meaning, that justice is real. They have been told, implicitly and explicitly, by their governments, their communities, and sometimes even their own minds, that their suffering did not matter. It shatters the ground a person stands on. No breathing exercise addresses that reality. No cognitive reframe touches it. 

    For this reason, I place greater emphasis on rebuilding trust, restoring agency, bearing witness, and creating relational safety before introducing any technique that requires sustained inward attention.

    I recognize that trauma-sensitive mindfulness has been helpful for some survivors. However, in my own clinical work with survivors of torture and state violence, I generally do not use mindfulness-based interventions that ask clients to focus inward on their bodies or remain in prolonged silence.

    People who have survived the unsurvivable are not waiting to be saved. They are waiting to be believed.

    Here’s why: Many of the people I work with learned that paying attention to their bodies meant anticipating pain. Their bodies are not experienced as places of safety, but as places where unimaginable violence occurred. Directing attention inward can evoke flashbacks, panic, dissociation, or overwhelming physiological arousal. Likewise, prolonged silence and stillness may closely resemble solitary confinement, detention, or interrogation, making these practices feel threatening rather than regulating.

    For many survivors, healing begins not with looking inward, but with discovering that another human being can remain present without causing harm.

    People who have survived the unsurvivable are not waiting to be saved. They are waiting to be believed, to have someone sit with them in their reality—not to fix it, not to reframe it, not to rush them toward resilience, but to say, simply and firmly: What happened to you was real. I believe you. And there is still a future that belongs to you. 

    Through my work with former political prisoners and survivors of torture, I had to unlearn many of the protocols and tools I was trained in. When we ask survivors to sit still, to maintain eye contact, to articulate what they are feeling in precise language, we are often asking them to do things that their bodies experience as threat. The clinical setting itself—enclosed, formal, power-imbalanced—can unconsciously mirror the very environments in which they were harmed. 

    Often the very vocabulary of Western mental health care—PTSD, trauma, triggers, self-care—often does not translate. Not just linguistically, but conceptually. Many of my clients do not identify as traumatized. They identify as survivors, as resisters, as people who did what they had to do. 

    In Western therapy, language is everything. Talk therapy is built on the premise that speaking about suffering is healing. But for many survivors I work with—Iranians, Afghans, people from communities with no cultural tradition of discussing psychological pain with a stranger—language is already a site of violence. They were interrogated. Their words were used against them. They learned, in the most brutal way possible, that speaking carries risk. And then we ask them to come into a room and speak.

    Beyond this, the very vocabulary of Western mental health care—like PTSD, trauma, triggers, self-care—often does not translate. Not just linguistically, but conceptually. Many of my clients do not identify as traumatized. They identify as survivors, as resisters, as people who did what they had to do. Pathologizing their experience, organizing it around a diagnosis, can feel like another form of erasure, another institution telling them who they are. 

    Perhaps the most undervalued skill in this work is simply the capacity to hear what happened and not look away.

    So What Does Actually Work? 

    For most survivors of state violence, the deepest wound is the destruction of trust—in institutions, in strangers, in the world’s basic safety. Healing begins not in a therapy room but in the slow, careful rebuilding of community: peer support, cultural spaces, shared ritual, the experience of being among people who won’t inflict pain, and where trust can start to be rebuilt. 

    Every culture has its own frameworks for understanding suffering and restoration. For my Iranian clients, poetry, Hafez, Rumi, the great Persian literary tradition, carries healing power that no DSM category can touch. For my Afghan clients, community prayer, collective mourning, the presence of elder women—these are not supplementary to treatment. They are treatment. Our role as practitioners is to make room for them, not to replace them. 

    Sustained, unflinching witness is profoundly healing, because it is the precise opposite of what the perpetrators wanted. They wanted silence. They wanted the world to look away. When we do not, we become part of the survivor’s resistance. 

    Perhaps the most undervalued skill in mental health care work is simply the capacity to hear what happened and not look away. Not to analyze or reframe. Not to move too quickly toward hope. To stay in the truth of what is being shared. This act of sustained, unflinching witness is profoundly healing, because it is the precise opposite of what the perpetrators wanted. They wanted silence. They wanted the world to look away. When we do not, we become part of the survivor’s resistance. 

    The mental health field is not malicious. Most practitioners who fall short with this population do so because they were never taught otherwise. Our training programs, our diagnostic frameworks—they were built for a different kind of suffering, in a different kind of world.



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  • A 12 Minute Meditation to Unhook from Negativity and Savor Joy

    A 12 Minute Meditation to Unhook from Negativity and Savor Joy

    Perhaps it seems strange to be investigating what we consider to be a positive emotion, but I think we often miss joy. We don’t actually pay a lot of attention to it; we can often let it slip by without much notice. The good news is, there are practices to cultivate it. And these practices can help us attend to and support joy in our felt experience. It’s actually a pretty important emotion.

    Joy aids us in waking up to our lives. And it’s a factor in supporting concentration. So if you’re someone who feels distracted much of the time, have difficulty focusing or paying attention, cultivating and attending to joy is a great way to deepen your concentration.

    First, let’s explore what joy is. For me, it can be pleasurable to experience, but it’s essentially different from pleasure. I experience joy as a really internal occurrence. It can be sparked by something external, but it’s also something I can very much cultivate internally. One of the great ways to do that is to consider the things in my life that I’m grateful for. Another way is to savor—really stop and savor—what’s beautiful and good and working in my life.

    This is a profoundly important ability because as humans we operate with a negativity bias. In and of itself, that bias makes a lot of sense: we tend to focus our minds on what is wrong or threatening or what could harm us so that we might be better protected through the vagaries of life. But if we allow that negativity bias to run rampant, we risk missing out on what’s beautiful and joyful and nourishing in our lives. Not to mention, we grow less and less equipped to actually cultivate such beauty and joy and nourishment ourselves. So training ourselves to receive and enjoy what’s good is no frivolous pursuit. Learning to savor joyful moments helps us unhook from negativity and open to new possibility.

    So let’s practice. And again, as we’ve done with all of our practices with emotions, we’ll mostly attend to the physical sensations of joy. And maybe we’ll see it grow as we pay attention to it. While we’re at it, we’ll also try to notice how focusing on joy can help strengthen our concentration. The great thing is, if you give the mind something pleasant and joyful to pay attention to, it will want to go there. Maybe you’ll decide to begin each mindfulness practice with joy cultivation. (Talk about a great motivator for sitting down for a few minutes). You may also want to employ this approach in your everyday life.

    A 12 Minute Meditation to Unhook from Negativity and Savor Joy

    Watch the video:

    Listen to the practice:

    Read and practice the guided meditation script below, pausing after each paragraph. Or listen to the audio practice.

    1. Let’s take our seat wherever we happen to be. As always, you’re welcome to lie down if you’re in a place where you can do that. Let’s take a few deeper breaths. Just settle in here: lengthen your inhale and your exhale. During these opening breaths, simply scan your mind and body and notice how you’re feeling. Let’s use the breath to bring some balance in this moment. If you’re feeling tired or drowsy, just take in a little bit more air, emphasize the inhale. If you’re feeling agitated or restless, emphasize the exhale—really extend it. And then allow your breath to come to its natural rhythm. Feel your contact with the chair, your feet on the ground. Find that support and contact with the earth.

    2. Now let’s bring to mind some recent joyful moments from our lives. Alternatively, you could reflect on some of the things you’re grateful for in your life. What’s working these days? You’re alive, so something must be working … Maybe it’s simply that you found this 30-day challenge and you’ve done some practices—you’ve found the time to take care of yourself in this way. Or maybe you’ve been seeing some benefits in your life. Perhaps there’s a relationship you’re enjoying; you’re feeling loved and connected. This could be with a person, or it could be that you have a puppy or a cat in your life. Or maybe you’ve been to a place that’s stirred joy in you: some place in nature, perhaps near a lake, surrounded by trees, a spot where you could gaze upon a vista you love. Choose one or a few moments to focus on and really get the joy going. What brings you joy? Maybe it’s recalling movement such as dancing or swimming or another physical activity that stirs joy for you. Perhaps it’s travel, a recent trip. Or maybe it’s learning something new.

    3. Really reflect on receiving the joy of these experiences. Bring your attention into your body. Notice how you experience joy in this moment. Where do you feel it in your body? The chest, the belly, the throat, the face? What do you notice? Is there a temperature to the joy? Is there a flow or movement to the energy of joy in your body? How big is it? As you pay attention to it, can you kind of relax your attention into the joy? Breathe into it. And if there’s a sense that this energy of joy wants to grow, let it. Maybe it expands to other parts of your body—all the way out to your fingertips and your toes. Just notice: is it tingling, vibrating, flowing?

    4. If at any point you lose that felt sense of connection, just recall again the images, people, situations that bring you joy. Then return to feeling into and savouring and maybe even expanding that felt sense and felt energy of joy in your body. Breathe into it.

    5. As we close out this short practice, let’s take a moment to reflect on and notice the people, places, situations that bring us joy. What were the things that really inspired a felt, energetic sense of joy for you? Maybe they surprised you. Maybe they’re things that you don’t do that often. But you could. You could bring more of that into your life. So, how could you do that?

    6. Before we finish, let’s make a simple commitment to do one of those things that brings us joy. Let’s commit to bringing in more of that joy-inducing activity or more of that connection or more time with the people in our lives that bring us joy.

    7. When you’re ready, open your eyes if they were closed. Take a deep breath. Are you orienting yourself to the space around you? Notice how you feel right now.

    As you go back into your day, I invite you to pay more attention to what’s joyful in your life. Then, commit to drawing more of that in, and to cultivating it further.

    About The Author

    Jessica Morey

    Jessica Morey is a meditation teacher and coach. She has been practicing meditation for almost 3 decades. She is also the co-founder and former executive director of Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, a nonprofit organization bringing in-depth mindfulness and compassion training to youth.



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  • Addiction, Recovery, and How Mindfulness Can Support Emotional Sobriety

    Addiction, Recovery, and How Mindfulness Can Support Emotional Sobriety

    As someone who has been sober for 26 years, and in my work as a recovery coach, I’ve come to understand there is more to recovery and wellness than being substance- free. While it may begin there, what is equally, if not more important, is our emotional sobriety.

    When I first heard the term emotional sobriety, it sounded like an unattainable, distant experience reserved for Buddhist monks. Heroines of mine like Tara Brach and Pema Chödrön seemed like they might have it nailed, but it felt well out of reach for someone like me. It wasn’t until I went through a particularly emotionally challenging time —one that ultimately became a portal—that I truly came to understand its significance and have since been able to share this important facet of recovery with my clients.

    When I first heard the term emotional sobriety, it sounded like an unattainable, distant experience reserved for Buddhist monks.

    One day my son announced he was moving from New York City to Los Angeles. On the surface his decision seemed exciting and full of promise, but he didn’t have a job or a place to live; he was going to figure it out once he got there. The ongoing uncertainty around his well-being pitched me over the edge. I was an anxious, nervous wreck. For weeks, I checked my phone to see if he had texted me, and scrolled through Instagram and Facebook, furtively scanning for little snippets of his life, trying to confirm if he was okay.

    His life had been my favorite TV show, and I couldn’t get my fix. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, couldn’t stop worrying, and I felt emotionally hijacked.

    Noticing When Your Past Shows Up In Your Present

    As the saying goes: When it’s hysterical, it’s historical. When I took a deeper dive in therapy, I began to understand why his departure had hit me so hard. It mirrored something much older. When I was in college, my mother abruptly moved to Switzerland. No long goodbye, no gradual adjustment — she was simply gone. Decades later, my nervous system didn’t know the difference between then and now.

    My body was grieving an old loss through a new one. I knew enough to attend Al-Anon meetings to try to unhook emotionally, but my peace of mind remained elusive.

    My body was grieving an old loss through a new one. I knew enough to attend Al-Anon meetings to try to unhook emotionally, but my peace of mind remained elusive.

    The shift came when I learned to meditate. As a novice, I was first encouraged to turn my attention to my breath, and to notice the moment, the pause, between my in-breath and my out-breath.

    As I practiced that awareness, an insight bubbled to the surface. My breath, the singular most subtle physical experience, was my life force. This quiet activity that happened without my making it happen—it was the defining characteristic between life and death. I felt a reverence for my breath that I had never had before. Slowly but surely, I developed the ability to observe how my mind, like a cricket, jumped from thought to worry to thought—and eventually, it began to settle.

    For many, substances helped to numb their feelings and had been a type of escape hatch. So when we put substances down, and come into a more intimate relationship with ourselves, being still and quieting our minds might not feel safe. We no longer have something to shut off the noise or dampen the fears.

    Over time, I felt at peace—I felt emotionally sober. I wasn’t scrambling for something outside of myself to ease my discomfort.

    Making the Mind a Quieter Place

    In my work with people who struggle with substance use disorders and/or eating disorders, many clients share with me that they continue to struggle with quieting their minds. For many, substances helped to numb their feelings and had been a type of escape hatch.

    So when we put substances down, and come into a more intimate relationship with ourselves, being still and quieting our minds might not feel safe. We no longer have something to shut off the noise or dampen the fears.

    In my coaching sessions, we discuss the concept of emotional sobriety, and I offer a variety of entry points, like: 

    • Breath work or a body scan
    • The “notice and name” technique
    • Practicing recruiting a sense of stability from the room and immediate surroundings
    • A short, guided meditation
    • Journaling for twenty minutes

    In all these small practices, I am gently guiding them to reconnect with themselves through curiosity rather than judgment. Given there is no single path to stillness, we find one that fits, and we go at the client’s pace.

    Being emotionally un-sober can look like checking out, endless distraction, mindless scrolling. Mindfulness practices help us, over time, to understand that we can be with our uncomfortable emotions without lurching for that escape hatch.

    What I’ve come to understand is that insight and self-awareness are essential, but even with the best intentions we can still get emotionally hijacked, triggered in an instant—and suddenly the urge to escape those uncomfortable feelings feels overwhelming.

    And while we might not reach for the substance or the activity that brought us to recovery in the first place—which is in itself, of course, a marvelous accomplishment—we might reach for other, perhaps more innocuous activities that serve a similar purpose. Being emotionally un-sober can look like checking out, endless distraction, mindless scrolling. Mindfulness practices help us, over time, to understand that we can be with our uncomfortable emotions without lurching for that escape hatch.

    What mindfulness and meditation offer, and what my clients tell me again and again, is a way to reset the emotional thermostat, regardless of what’s happening around them.

    A pause between the in-breath and the out-breath. A moment of choice where there used to be none.

    That is emotional sobriety.

    Stephanie Hazard is a certified peer recovery specialist (CPRS) as well as a certified Carolyn Costin Institute eating disorder recovery coach (CCIEDC). Her debut book, Making Sobriety Stick: A Recovery Coach’s Guide to Sustainable Change, will be released September 22nd during National Recovery Month, and can be pre-ordered at www.pathtowardrecovery.com.



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  • Are Shame and Guilt Bad—Or Do We Just Need a Different Relationship With Them?

    Are Shame and Guilt Bad—Or Do We Just Need a Different Relationship With Them?

    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.



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  • How To Meditate as an Adult — Even With Noise around you

    How To Meditate as an Adult — Even With Noise around you

    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.



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  • Mindfulness and the Rise of Analog Living

    Mindfulness and the Rise of Analog Living

    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.



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  • Elisha Goldstein on the Power of Tiny Shifts

    Elisha Goldstein on the Power of Tiny Shifts

    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.



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