Mindfulness is a muscle

Meditation = the brain’s most underrated software update

13 October 2025

When I was about 15, I stumbled across The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and it changed my world. The book is based around one principle =

The present moment is all you ever have.

What?? I thought, you don’t need to spend your life replaying your past or fast-forwarding into the future? You can just exist right now?

For a teenager who overthought everything, it was a revolutionary idea, and one that’s helped me ever since. At least on the days I don’t forget about it.

Flipping back through that book now, years later, I don’t agree with everything Tolle says. His words are a bit supernatural and wishy-washy for my all-grown-up sceptical self. But even if you don’t consider yourself spiritual, beneath the layers of mysticism is a message even more important than when it was published.

Because in 2025, our attention is being hijacked from all directions. In the “attention economy”, every app, email notification, and algorithm competes for our focus. Something called continuous partial attention is now normal to us – we're constantly scanning, rarely fully there.

While modern distractions have overwhelmed our brain’s attention systems, there’s still hope. According to neuroscientist Amishi Jha, even just 12 minutes of daily mindfulness practice can start rewiring our brains.

The ROI of doing nothing

The health benefits of meditation are ridiculously well documented.

After just 6-8 weeks of daily practice, people reliably report lower anxiety and negative mood, better attention and memory, less reactivity under pressure, and even measurable rewiring of brain circuits linked to stress, focus, and emotional control. The brain reshapes itself around what you practise, and it just so happens that meditation trains the circuits most people neglect.

Stick with it for years, and those benefits compound. Mindfulness stops being something you do and becomes something you are. Long-term meditators show greater emotional stability, less reactivity, more compassion, and brains that resist wear and tear. Their baselines shift, leading to permanent changes.

Meditation is free, available any time, and undeniably good for you. Imagine if we learnt it in schools!

Sneaking mindfulness into your life

Preaching about these skills every week, dishing out this advice, it might look like I’m trying to convince you I’ve mastered it all. Far from it! These letters are as much a reminder to myself as they are to you.

I’ve tried several times to make meditation a daily habit – just 10 minutes a day, guided tapes, iPhone apps – but it’s never really stuck. I’m certainly no expert. In fact, if you want to make mindfulness a daily practice, I recommend checking this much more practical guide I found while reading up on it.

Nevertheless, over the years a few rules of thumb have helped me wrap my head around the slippery ideas of mindfulness/presence/awareness…

🔦 Spotlight vs floodlight attention – There are two kinds of attention. Most of us live with the spotlight constantly on: narrow, focused, effortful. It’s the kind of attention teachers demand when they say, “Pay attention!” and it’s what leads to that flitting continuous partial attention I mentioned earlier. But there’s also floodlight attention: wide, effortless, aware of everything. This is what you use when you drive while talking to a friend or move through a crowd without bumping into anyone. Our culture is so fixated on the spotlight that we forget the floodlight, yet both are essential. Mindfulness is about balancing the two.

🫂 Make friends with the present moment – Most of the time, we’re trying to escape the now, either replaying the past or rehearsing the future. We waste so much energy resisting what is. Stress is often caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there’. So, instead, treat the current moment as if you chose it exactly as it is. This small mental shift – saying “YES” to the facts of reality – gets rid of that resistance and creates instant calm.

🧘 Forget about “sessions” – Meditation isn't just a to-do list item you tick off to then get on with the rest of your day. True mindfulness comes from the small moments throughout the day: feeling your breath, noticing tension in your body, catching a thought before it snowballs. Those micro-moments add up quickly (no 20-min sitdowns necessary).

💪 Mindfulness is a muscle – The purpose isn’t to sit cross-legged and feel serene, but to practise quieting the noise on demand. You’re training your nervous system to return to calm when life inevitably throws chaos your way. The real test happens mid-argument, on a crowded train, or when you open your calendar and immediately need a lie-down. If you’ve already trained that mental muscle, you'll be able to return to stillness faster.

x3 simple exercises

There’s no single right way to be more mindful. Here are three that work for me…

A. Let the cars pass you by

This metaphor really helped to clarify what I should be doing during meditation. Picture each thought & feeling as a car passing you on the motorway, as you stand safely at the side of the road. Your job isn’t to jump in front of each car or chase after them in an effort to stop the traffic (aka quieten your mind). Instead, let the cars drive past you as a relaxed observer, just noticing without labels or judgement.

B. Full-body scan

When your head gets too noisy, shift your focus to the body. Your thoughts live in imagination, but your body is here, now. Move your attention slowly from head to toe, noticing sensations – tension, warmth, heaviness – without judging or changing them. This exercise works because it grounds you back in what’s really real.

C. Candle staring

This is an old yogic exercise for training focus called trataka. Sit in a dim room, place a candle at eye level, and stare softly at the flame. Breathe naturally, keeping your attention anchored to the flicker of the flame. When your eyes get tired, you can close them and visualise the flame behind your eyelids.

In a way, attention is all we’ve got, and meditation is one of the best antidotes we have to get it back. Each of the above is a different doorway to awareness, and there are plenty more. Try whichever works for you!

Wishing you moments of profound presence. Namaste ॐ

PS. What I’ve been reading: behaviours to unlearn from school and trying to disrupt the brain’s natural threat-scanning mode.