Mindfulness for Sceptics: What if it isn't B*llocks?
- Tracey Langrill
- 6 days ago
- 9 min read
A surprisingly practical way to manage stress, overthinking and emotional overload
For a long time, I'll admit that I thought mindfulness was absolutely not for me and scoffed at it as woo-woo b*llocks (sorry!). I had a vague idea that it involved sitting still, breathing in a meaningful way and somehow persuading your mind to stop producing thoughts, which seemed both unlikely and, if I’m honest, slightly irritating. I’m not entirely sure where that scepticism came from: perhaps my military background had something to do with it; perhaps there is a bit of a Gen X instinct in me that is suspicious of anything that sounds too earnest or vaguely mystical. More likely, I simply had the same misconceptions that a lot of people have. My mind is busy; I think about things, plan things, replay conversations, anticipate problems, remember things I should have done and occasionally conduct entire exchanges in my head with people who are not actually there. The idea that I might simply sit down and become beautifully present had never seemed especially realistic.
From sceptic to something more curious
My view didn’t change in one sudden conversion. Mindfulness kept cropping up during my training as a counsellor and, over time, I found myself becoming less dismissive of it; some of the ideas began to make psychological sense to me, particularly the distinction between what is actually happening and the enormous amount of commentary our minds can add to it. By the time I completed a mindfulness teacher training course, drawing particularly on the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and Mark Williams, I wasn’t being introduced to mindfulness for the first time: the course felt more like the culmination of a gradual shift in how I understood it. What had once seemed rather woolly had become much more practical and considerably more interesting.
Ancient roots, modern psychology
It would be slightly dishonest to scrub away history in an attempt to make mindfulness more palatable to sceptics. The forms of mindfulness that have found their way into western psychology and healthcare owe a great deal to Buddhist contemplative traditions, although meditation itself is certainly not exclusive to Buddhism. From the late 1970s onwards, Jon Kabat-Zinn was instrumental in bringing these practices into a secular healthcare setting through Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR, initially working with people experiencing chronic pain and stress.
None of that is intended to suggest that mindfulness somehow became more valid once western psychology and medicine got hold of it, nor am I dismissing the experiences of people who meditate within Buddhist traditions, other spiritual traditions, or simply because meditation in its own right is important to them. Those ways of practising have their own history, depth and value; the secular, psychologically informed version is simply the doorway through which mindfulness began to make sense to me.
In fact, I rather like the fact that mindfulness has ancient contemplative roots and has subsequently been subjected to modern scientific scrutiny. The two things are not mutually exclusive: a practice does not become unscientific simply because people were doing it long before anybody could put them in an MRI scanner. The useful question, particularly for someone as sceptical as I was, is what happens when we actually study it.
Mindfulness has now been studied extensively. The evidence does not show that it fixes everything, and there are plenty of extravagant claims that go well beyond what the research can support; however, structured approaches such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) have a substantial evidence base, including research into stress, anxiety, psychological distress and recurrent depression. MBCT, developed by Mark Williams, John Teasdale and Zindel Segal, has become an established psychological approach, particularly in helping some people with recurrent depression reduce their risk of relapse.
The neuroscience is fascinating too, although this is an area where I think a bit of restraint is important. Brain-imaging research has found associations between mindfulness practice and systems involved in attention, emotional regulation, self-referential thinking and our ability to notice and shift where our attention has gone. There is also research into possible changes in communication between networks in the brain, and into neuroplasticity more broadly: the brain’s capacity to change in response to repeated experience and practice.
You will sometimes see this translated into much grander claims that mindfulness quite literally “rewires your brain”, usually accompanied by a brightly coloured brain scan and the suggestion that eight weeks of meditation will substantially remodel your grey matter. The actual science is more complicated. There are intriguing findings, including studies reporting structural and functional differences associated with meditation, but the research is variable and there are still questions about exactly what changes, for whom, and how much can confidently be attributed to mindfulness itself. I actually prefer the less sensational version; mindfulness doesn’t need exaggerated neuroscience to justify itself.
Your mind is not supposed to go blank
One of the things I'd misunderstood most was the idea that mindfulness somehow involves stopping thought. It doesn’t: the aim is not to empty your mind, achieve a particular state or become a calmer, more serene version of yourself. If you sit down to practise mindfulness and discover that your brain has spent the last three minutes thinking about an email, a conversation from last week and whether there's any milk in the fridge, that isn't evidence that you're bad at it; it's simply evidence that you have a mind, and minds wander, remember, predict, rehearse, worry and make connections whether or not we've asked them to. That's OK.
What mindfulness asks us to do is much less dramatic, but potentially much more useful: to notice what's happening while it is happening, including what our mind is doing. Otherwise, we can be carried along without quite realising that this is what has happened. That sounds almost too simple to be interesting until you begin to notice just how much of your day you spend with your mind somewhere other than where you actually are.
Only one of us is really on the walk
I notice this particularly when I’m walking Merlin and Lyra, my dogs. They can spend several minutes completely absorbed by one apparently extraordinary patch of grass. Though I might be physically with them, I find that I'm often mentally somewhere else, thinking about what I need to do later, something I forgot yesterday or a conversation I haven’t even had yet. Neither of us is doing anything wrong, and I’m not suggesting that the route to psychological wellbeing is to become more Labrador, tempting though that theory sometimes is, but only one of us is 'properly' on the walk.
Most of us live like this far more than we realise: we drive familiar routes and remember very little of the journey, eat while looking at a screen, half-listen to somebody while preparing what we want to say next, or sit somewhere lovely on holiday while mentally dealing with a problem waiting for us at home. Thinking about the past and future is useful, of course; without it we would be hopeless at learning, planning or making decisions. The difficulty comes when we become so absorbed in our thinking that we stop noticing the difference between the thing that is happening and the story our mind is telling us about it.
A thought such as they’re annoyed with me can very quickly become something we experience as true; so can I’m going to mess this up, I shouldn’t feel like this, something is wrong, or I need to sort this out now. Once the thought has taken hold, the body often joins in with tension, anxiety, irritation, that familiar tightening in the stomach or chest. Before long, we may be responding to something our mind has produced as though it were something that has actually happened, without ever quite noticing the point at which a thought became a certainty.
Mindfulness doesn't make those thoughts disappear, and I would be wary of any version of it that promised to. What it can do is help us notice them a little earlier; there can be a meaningful difference between something bad is going to happen and I’m noticing that my mind is telling me something bad is going to happen. The second version does not magically remove anxiety, nor is it meant to, but it creates a little distance from the thought and can make it easier to see that we do not necessarily have to follow every direction our mind gives us.
Not relaxation, and not giving up
This is also why I think describing mindfulness as a relaxation technique rather misses the point. Sometimes paying attention is relaxing; sometimes it means becoming aware that we are anything but relaxed. We may notice that our shoulders have crept upwards, that we are rushing for no obvious reason, that our jaw is tight or that we have been having the same internal argument for twenty minutes. The value is not in forcing those experiences away, but in seeing them more clearly, because it is difficult to have much choice about how we respond to something when we haven't noticed it's happening.
The word acceptance can create similar problems because it's easy to hear it as resignation, passivity or an instruction to put up with things that ought to change. That isn’t how I understand it. If it starts raining while I’m out, accepting that it is raining does not require me to develop a spiritual appreciation of being soaked; it simply means acknowledging the reality of the rain before deciding whether to find shelter, put up an umbrella or carry on regardless. We do something very similar emotionally: we can be anxious and then become angry with ourselves for being anxious, hurt and then ashamed that we are still hurt, or frightened and then frightened by the fact that we are frightened. Sometimes the struggle with the feeling becomes almost as difficult as the original feeling itself.
What does it actually bring?
For me, perhaps the biggest change is a little more clarity and, at times, a degree of peace. I don’t mean that in the sense of feeling permanently calm or detached from whatever is going on; life still gets busy, irritating, worrying and complicated. What mindfulness can sometimes give me is a clearer view of what is actually happening, what I'm feeling and what my mind is adding to the situation. There is something quietly freeing about realising that I can notice a thought without automatically believing it, or experience an uncomfortable feeling without immediately having to solve it.
I’m also very far from practising this perfectly. In fact, when life gets especially hectic I can be remarkably good at abandoning the very things that would probably help me most; I suspect I’m not alone in that. Mindfulness is not something I have mastered and now perform effortlessly throughout the day. It is much more like something I return to, sometimes consistently and sometimes after noticing that I have spent rather too long living several hours or several days ahead of myself.
Perhaps that is part of what I like about it. Mindfulness is not another standard to meet or another way to discover that you're doing life incorrectly; it is a practice of noticing, losing the thread, noticing that you have lost it, and beginning again. Over time, that's given me a greater sense of the habits of my own mind and occasionally enough space between an experience and my usual reaction to make a different choice. The relief (or even peace?), when it comes, is not because everything has suddenly become peaceful; it is more often because I'm fighting with the reality of the moment a little less.
That's a long way from the mindfulness I dismissed years ago. I’m still naturally sceptical of grand claims for it, and I don’t think it is a cure-all; but I no longer think a busy mind is evidence that somebody “can’t do mindfulness”. If anything, the people who immediately say, I could never do that; my brain never stops, may be describing the very thing that makes mindfulness worth exploring.
If you’re curious - some further reading
Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World — Mark Williams and Danny Penman. This is probably where I would point somebody who is interested enough to try mindfulness but doesn’t particularly want to become a “meditation person”. It is accessible, grounded in the MBCT tradition and, importantly, gives you something practical to do rather than simply telling you that being more mindful would be good for you.
Full Catastrophe Living — Jon Kabat-Zinn. This is the substantial one: Kabat-Zinn’s exploration of the MBSR approach and of using mindfulness in the midst of stress, pain, illness and the ordinary difficulties of being human. It is not a quick read, but it gives a much fuller sense of where modern mindfulness-based approaches came from and why the practice is about engaging with life as it actually is, rather than trying to float above the difficult bits.
Wherever You Go, There You Are — Jon Kabat-Zinn. Much lighter than Full Catastrophe Living and less of a programme; this is an exploration of what mindfulness can mean in ordinary life. I like it because Kabat-Zinn takes the subject seriously without making it inaccessible, and because it gives a richer sense of mindfulness than the rather thin “wellbeing technique” it can sometimes become when taken out of context.
Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence — Rick Hanson. This isn’t strictly a mindfulness book, but it sits alongside it very comfortably. Hanson writes particularly well about our tendency to skim past positive experiences while hanging on tenaciously to threats, mistakes and disappointments; his ideas about deliberately noticing and absorbing what is good are thought-provoking, practical and a useful introduction to the wider idea that repeated patterns of attention and experience matter to the brain.
