What is mindfulness? A down-to-earth guide

If the word "mindfulness" makes you roll your eyes a little, I understand. Maybe you tried an app once and lasted three days. Maybe you sat down to meditate and found yourself shut in a room with every thought you'd been avoiding. Or maybe it just sounds like one more thing to fit in, and one more thing to be bad at.

I've practised for twenty years, and my mind still wanders off halfway through a body scan, usually to something I've got to do later. So let's start there.

What it is

Mindfulness is paying attention to what's happening right now, in your body, your thoughts and feelings, and the world around you, with a bit of curiosity and kindness towards whatever you find.

Your mind will wander. Everyone's does. Noticing that it has wandered, and coming back, is the practice. You'll do it hundreds of times, and every one of them counts.

That sounds simple. If you've spent years on automatic, keeping everyone else's day running, it can feel strange at first. The habit of turning your attention inwards, towards what you need, gets worn down by years of looking outwards.

What the research supports

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, the eight-week programme developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, has been studied for over forty years. Research has linked it with lower stress, anxiety and low mood for many people.

It won't fix your life, and it doesn't suit everyone at every moment. What it can give you is a little more room between something happening and how you respond to it. In my experience, that little bit of room changes a lot.

What it looks like in a full life

The practices that help most are short, body-based and easy to repeat. None of them need a cushion or a spare hour.

• Three breaths before you reply to a message, feeling your feet on the floor.
• A body scan in the evening, noticing where you're holding tension, without forcing yourself to relax.
• A walk where you notice what you can see, hear and smell, and let your to-do list wait.
• A short pause between parts of your day, so work doesn't spill straight into home.

Messy counts

When I started, I was hypercritical and sure I was doing it wrong. I thought there was a right way and a wrong way. The longer I've practised, the more I've found it's like life: messier and more nuanced than that. We're not living in a monastery. We've got jobs, families and other people to deal with.

So be kind to yourself about it. If you bring the same critical voice to mindfulness that you bring to everything else ("I'm rubbish at this, my mind won't stop"), it becomes one more place to give yourself a hard time. Self-compassion, as Kristin Neff describes it, is part of the practice too.

If it didn't work before

If you've tried mindfulness and it didn't stick, that's worth getting curious about. Often it was the format that didn't fit: a long silent sit, a voice on an app that had nothing to do with your actual life, or a setting that felt too spiritual or too clinical.

What makes the difference for a lot of people is practising with someone, and talking about what comes up in real life.