Mindfulness is useless in a pandemic

By Catherine Nixey

I’d been looking forward to the meal for weeks. I already knew what I was going to eat: the rosemary crostini starter, then the lamb with courgette fries. Or maybe the cod. I planned to arrive early and sit in the window at the cool marble counter and watch London go by. In the warm bustle of the restaurant, the condensation would mist the pane. As a treat, I would order myself a glass of white wine while I waited for my friend.

It won’t surprise you to hear that the meal never happened. Coronavirus cases started rising exponentially and eating out felt less like indulgence and more like lunacy. Then it became illegal to eat together at all. Soon it became illegal even to eat at a restaurant by yourself. Then everything shut.

The cost of these lost lunches has been totted up many times: the trains not taken, the taxis not flagged down, the desserts not eaten, the waiters not tipped. Then there is the emotional toll, too. Spirits are flagging, the lonely are getting lonelier, the world is wilting. Covid has already disrupted so much of how we live. It has altered something else, as well – time itself.

Not so long ago, we had merely months and years. Things happened in November or in December, last year or this. Some events are so big that they divide the world into before and after, into the present and an increasingly alien past. Wars do this, and the pandemic has, too. Coronavirus has cut a trench through time.

The very recent past is suddenly another country. Now, amateur archaeologists of our own existence, we sort through our possessions and stumble on small relics from “then”, that strange place we used to live: a bus pass, a lipstick, a smart watch, a pair of shoes with the heels worn down, work clothes that, after just six months in stretchy active-wear, feel as stiff and preposterous as whalebone.

News of vaccines fills us with hope. But the timing, the take-up, the roll-out to ordinary souls remain unresolved. The actual future still lies drearily in front of us, with the prospect of further lockdowns, overcrowded hospitals and ever greater financial losses. Days stretch on, each much the same as the last. One week blends into the next.

Amid these cancellations something else has also been lost. It won’t appear on any spreadsheet because it is not quantifiable. But it matters. So much of life, big and small, is about fleeting moments filled with hope. The prospect of an exciting Friday evening or Saturday afternoon used to make a dismal Tuesday morning bearable. So, too, did browsing online for your future self: the top that you’d always feel good in, the bag that would take both your laptop and book.

Soon it became illegal even to eat at a restaurant by yourself. And then everything shut

Hope hung everywhere in the old world, hovering in our peripheral vision – on the billboard that made us ponder our next holiday or reminded us to dig out dark glasses and sun cream; among the spices in the supermarket that conjured a conversation over curry with friends, chatting about things that didn’t feel like life and death.

Many moments of happiness are about anticipation, the joy of the imagined future – and distracting ourselves from the tedious, exhausting or difficult present. Yet even our small consumer choices or our musings about what to do this weekend now bring us back to the big, overpowering reality of the pandemic. We cannot escape it. Our daydreams have come crashing back to earth: 2020 is the year that the future was cancelled.

In recent decades the present has become rather more fashionable than the future. Living in the moment, being present in our present, is the desired mind-state of our age. There’s nothing new about the idea, of course – it forms the basis of Buddhism and there are elements of it in many religions. Long ago Horace commanded us to “carpe diem” and Seneca exhorted that the present is all we have: “All the rest of existence is not living but merely time.”

Hope hung everywhere in the old world, hovering in our peripheral vision

Over the past ten years the once-niche idea of “mindfulness” has gone mainstream. It has become an aspiration, an advertising opportunity and an overused adjective. You can practise not only mindful meditation but mindful breathing, mindful eating, mindful drinking, mindful walking, mindful parenting, even mindful birth. (As if childbirth were something that you might miss if you weren’t paying close enough attention.)

It isn’t always clear quite what mindfulness is. Despite its promise of mental clarity, its own origins are decidedly foggy. It seems to be a translation of a Buddhist term, sati, which itself is tricky to define – its meaning lies somewhere between memory and consciousness. The English version is neither a very good translation nor a particularly helpful word. The longer you think about it, the stranger the word “mindful” seems: that puzzling “-ful” feels odd when talking about emptying your thoughts. (And is its opposite “mindlessness”?)

If the definition of mindfulness is elusive, the practice is even more so. Its aim is to empty your mind by using your mind; to liberate it by restraining it. It is a puzzling and paradoxical thing, the mental equivalent of climbing up a ladder and removing it at the same time.

Why let such finicky problems get in the way? After all, the present seems to be the gift that keeps on giving. In recent years many clever companies have found a way to empty our wallets along with our minds. You can now buy “gratitude” and “well-being” journals, and “positive year-planners”. In 2015 adult colouring books became a surprise hit: some 12m volumes were sold in America alone, according to Nielsen Bookscan. These days there are mindful guides to everything from anger to recruitment. There are even mindfulness advent calendars (who needs chocolate when you can feed your soul?). Like selling sand to the Sahara, these all pitch to us the ability to live in the “now”.

It may be profitable but it flies in the face of thousands of years of evolution. Animals are hardwired to react to the future, says Sir Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist at Oxford University and City University of Hong Kong. Expectation is integral to survival and is seen in even the most underwhelming creatures. Consider the sea slug. Touch one and it will withdraw. Keep touching it and it will soon become fed up, in as much as a sea slug can, and stop withdrawing. This is habituation, says Sir Colin, and it’s a “form of prediction about the future”.

Many clever companies have found a way to empty our wallets along with our minds

Babies, slightly more sophisticated than sea slugs, also do this. A game like peepo makes them laugh, but playing it also helps them learn that when something disappears behind an object, it will reappear. As the baby becomes habituated, the laughter fades. In a small way babies are learning to predict and anticipate the future.

You can see similar responses throughout the animal kingdom. Give a chimp a raisin and its reward neurons fire. Teach a chimp that pressing a button will bring a raisin, and the chimp’s brain starts to react to the button as if that were the reward. “The process of getting the reward itself becomes rewarding,” says Sir Colin. The future is invading the present in a measurable physiological way. “It is well documented that the paraphernalia of drug taking,” says Sir Colin, “the syringes, the crinkled foil – those things themselves become desirable.” Planning is key to our physical survival. It’s also central to our emotional wellbeing.

One dull autumn day earlier this year an aeroplane taxied along the tarmac at Hong Kong airport. The mood aboard was one of excitement. As a flight attendant started to walk to the back of the plane, there was a burst of applause. Unexpectedly, the attendant also applauded. Welcome, she said, to your flycation. A strange word. She went on: “Flight time will be about one hour and 15 minutes.” Cameras clicked as she spoke, and there was more clapping.

The pandemic has reminded us that the joy we take in planning is as valid as the event itself

The flight was going to the clouds and back. The individuals on board had bought tickets, been through airport security, queued and put up with the usual discomforts of waiting in an airport, only to land back on the same runway. The destination wasn’t the point: passengers had paid to experience the excitement of travel, the muscle memory of anticipation.

Daydreaming, or mind-wandering, as the wonks call it, is part of universal human experience. In 2008 one Harvard study found that people spent nearly half of their waking hours mind-wandering – often about good things. Imagining a positive outcome is a popular technique to build resilience and confidence in everything from sport to job interviews. Teachers may tell pupils off for daydreaming in lessons but studies show a link between daydreaming and creative thought.

When the future does arrive it is usually a let-down: an underwhelming meal, a rainy beach holiday, a weekend full of chores. That’s not the point. It’s our dreams that feed us. We are hardwired to anticipate the future and, with all due respect to the philosophers, to thrill to it.

Whether your pleasure was once drinking in the pub or going on mini-breaks, cooking dinner for friends or going to the cinema, the joy they gave was almost certainly partly about the expectation: putting a date into your diary, packing your bag or hitting “order now” on a crucial missing item. As with the chimp, this pleasure was not illusory but real. The pandemic has reminded us that the joy we take in planning is as valid as the event itself.

When the present is crushing – when lives and economies are being ruined – our imagination offers us a welcome escape

Philosophers and Silicon Valley mindfulness gurus are advocates for the present partly because they tend to have rather a nice one (Seneca was one of the richest men in Rome and regularly threw dinner parties for 1,000 guests). For most people, daily life is more dreary. Would it be so very bad to be absent when stacking the dishwasher, to imagine yourself swimming in the sea off Croatia instead?

When the present is crushing – when lives and economies are being ruined – our imagination offers us a welcome escape. The mind, as Milton put it, is its own place: it can make a hell of heaven, or a heaven of hell. Perhaps we should let it.■

ILLUSTRATIONS: ANNA+ELENA=BALBUSSO