Mindfulness is not a relaxation technique. It is a practice that can lead to a deeper awareness of what is happening to you and how you are responding to it. Its aim is not to calm the nervous system but to notice experience as it happens.

For some people, practices involving stillness and sustained attention reliably feel awful.

This is not paradoxical, and feeling like this does not mean you need to persist with them. If heightened alertness has become your familiar route to feeling safe, then reducing external demand or stimulation can be disregulating. You may feel more activated in order to feel more stable.

Mindfulness also removes you from the effects of external structure. Your attention is no longer occupied in doing something. Internal sensations, thoughts, and affects that are usually managed through activity or distraction become more noticeable. Anxiety increases not because mindfulness is being done incorrectly, but because it exposes material that has not yet been integrated.

Mindfulness often intensifies interoception. Awareness of breathing, muscle tone, or visceral sensation can be activating if you have grown used to bodily states signalling danger, pain, or loss of control. Imagine a very frightened child trying to keep as still as possible, trying to make no noise, even to avoid being heard breathing, and you may be able to imagine where this response comes from.

None of this means mindfulness does not work, nor does it mean you should persist with it. Instead, you need to find the best possible ways of slowing down and feeling stable through engagement, movement, rhythm, structure, and relationship. If somebody tells you that you need to stop doing things because you are avoiding feeling what is happening to you, or thinking about it, they may have a point. But a certain level of dissociation is actually desirable unless you lead a life without unreasonable demands.

If you want to live a better life, begin by working out what makes you feel safe without exhausting you. Listening to the sound of the wind in the trees or the rain on the pavement may feel very different from focusing on your breath. How you do these things matters. Staying with a sound you are focusing on, without getting lost in a story generated by it, creates a context in which the body can slowly relax. This is different from the undecided switching off that can happen when you zone out.

Focusing outside yourself in this way achieves a limited but important kind of control. You are doing something you have chosen to do. The context changes. Your attention is no longer directed at something you experience as threatening.

Practices of sustained inward attention in which you distance yourself from the world’s distractions are not for everybody. Unfortunately, they have come to be widely regarded as necessary. They are not. Believing they are is a repugnant kind of moralising we could all do with less of.