psychotip
Create accountLog in
Back to the resources
MindfulnessFor everyone50 min read

Mindfulness: the eight-week programme

What mindfulness actually does — and what it does not —, the adverse effects rarely mentioned, and a graded eight-week programme to establish a practice without giving up your life to it.

In short

This programme is for an adult who has heard about mindfulness meditation, has perhaps tried an app for ten days, and would like to know what actually stands up in all of it. It explains the mechanism, sets out the state of the evidence honestly — including where it is weak and where the practice can do harm — then offers eight weeks of graded training, one skill per week.

Topic
Mindfulness
Who it's for
For everyone
Languages
FR · EN · DE · IT · ES · ZH · AR

Français · English · Deutsch · Italiano · Español · 中文 · العربية

The programme

This programme supports care, it does not replace it. Mindfulness meditation has demonstrated effects on some conditions and no demonstrated effect on many others; it also produces real adverse effects in a minority of practitioners. Section 7 sets these out before you begin, and names the situations in which you should not start alone. If you are in a severe depressive episode, in a psychotic state, or having suicidal thoughts, this text is not the right answer: contact your doctor or your local emergency services today. Allow forty minutes to read, and eight weeks to practise.

1. Before you start

You are in the shower and you are already in the 2 p.m. meeting. You drive for twenty minutes and remember nothing of the journey. You have dinner with someone you love while replaying, for the sixth time, a sentence you heard at work yesterday. In the evening, exhausted, you wonder where the day went.

And if you have already tried to meditate, you probably concluded that you could not do it: you sat down, your mind went everywhere, and you inferred that this was not for you.

The rest is for members

Create your access to read this programme in full, along with every other resource.

See the plansI already have an account
mindfulnessmeditationMBSRMBCTruminationattention

You might also like

GriefChildren and teenagers

Supporting a bereaved child or adolescent

What a child understands about death at each age, the exact words for telling them, and the factor that best predicts how they will fare — it is not the one people assume, and it depends on you.

45 min readMembers only
Anxiety

Social anxiety: the eight-step programme

The problem is not that you are awkward: it is that your attention turns inwards at exactly the moment it needs to be outside. The mechanism, and the treatment with the best results in the whole anxiety literature.

45 min readMembers only
Grief

Grief: understanding it, getting through it, and knowing when to ask for help

The five stages do not exist, not falling apart is not coldness, and most people do not need therapy — but around one in ten stays stuck, and for them there is a treatment with demonstrated efficacy.

45 min readMembers only