Chapter 17: The Mindfulness Trap

I need to say something that might be unpopular. I think the way most people use mindfulness is a trap. Not because mindfulness doesn't work. But because the popular version of it has become a tool for tolerating a bad situation rather than changing it.

The standard pitch goes like this: your life is hectic, your time is flying, you feel overwhelmed. The solution? Meditate. Be present. Notice your breath. The minutes will feel longer. The rush will ease. The chaos will become manageable.

And there's research that supports this, on the surface. Studies have shown that mindfulness meditation lengthens perceived duration. People who meditate report feeling that time passes more slowly. The mechanism seems to involve increased internally-oriented attention and reduced arousal, which together create a sense of temporal expansion.

But in 2025, a research team led by Dr. Matthew Hopkins at the University of Northampton published a study that complicated this picture significantly. They ran more than 300 participants through multiple experiments, carefully controlling for something that previous research hadn't adequately addressed: task repetition.

Their finding: participants judged durations as longer the second time they completed a task, regardless of whether they had meditated, relaxed, or done nothing at all. The "mindfulness effect" on time perception, in at least some of the earlier research, may have been a practice effect in disguise. People got better at noticing time because they'd done the timing task before, not because meditation had expanded their temporal awareness.

The researchers put it directly: "When it comes to altering time perception, practice effects matter and should not be mistaken for meditation effects."

Now, this doesn't mean meditation is useless. It means the mechanism might be different from what we thought. Meditation might work for time perception not because of the specific technique, the breath counting, the body scanning, the mantras, but because it trains a general capacity for sustained attention. Any practice that increases your ability to stay with a single focus, without distraction, for an extended period might produce the same effect.

This is actually good news. Because it means the benefit isn't locked inside a specific ritual. It means that if meditation doesn't work for you, if it's become another thing on the to-do list that faded after three weeks, there are other paths to the same outcome.

Playing a musical instrument requires sustained attention. So does drawing, woodworking, cooking a complex meal, or having a deep conversation without checking your phone. Reading a novel, properly, without skimming, exercises the same attentional muscle. Even watching a film in a cinema, where the phone is in your pocket and the screen demands your focus for two hours, is a form of attention practice.

What they all share is a period of unbroken engagement with a single focus. That's the active ingredient. The wrapper doesn't matter as much as the content.

But here's where the trap comes in. Mindfulness, as popularly practised, often becomes a tool for coping with a life that's structurally broken. You meditate for ten minutes in the morning so that you can tolerate eight hours of fragmented, draining, bandwidth-destroying work. The meditation becomes a pressure valve that allows the system to keep running without change.

This is treating the symptom while preserving the disease.

If your life is structured in a way that produces chronic time compression, chronic stress, chronic fragmentation, then no amount of morning meditation will produce thick time. You'll have ten minutes of presence followed by fifteen hours of thin time. The ratio isn't viable.

The deeper application of mindfulness, the one that actually changes temporal experience, isn't a practice bolted onto an unchanged life. It's a redesign of the life itself so that presence becomes the default rather than the exception.

This means asking harder questions than "when should I meditate?" It means asking: which parts of my day are structurally incompatible with presence? Which commitments force me into fragmented, surface-level attention? Which patterns repeat week after week, consuming bandwidth without producing anything I value?

These are architecture questions, not mindfulness questions. And they require architectural answers. Not ten minutes of breathing. Structural changes that reduce the sources of fragmentation and increase the conditions for engagement.

I tried meditation seriously for a stretch. I used apps. I sat with my eyes closed. I counted breaths. It was fine. It didn't stick. And I spent longer feeling guilty about not meditating than I ever spent actually meditating.

What did stick was something much less elegant. I started walking without my phone. I started reading real books instead of articles. I started having longer conversations and shorter meetings. I started protecting blocks of uninterrupted time not for meditation but for work that required deep focus.

None of these things are mindfulness in the formal sense. All of them are attention practices. And all of them, when I'm consistent, make my days feel thicker.

The invitation isn't to abandon mindfulness. If meditation works for you, keep doing it. The invitation is to stop treating it as the solution and start treating it as one instance of a broader principle.

The principle is this: sustained, voluntary attention to a single focus thickens time.

How you achieve that attention is up to you. The eight-thousand-dollar meditation retreat and the twenty-minute dog walk might do the same thing, if you leave your phone at home.