Bored of mindfulness? Give mindlessness a try

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jun/12/give-mindlessness-a-try

In my experience, using your consciousness to observe and process every single piece of information that comes at you just makes you want to punch someone. Mindfulness is now so prolific that you can buy books on mindful eating, mindful art or being more mindful at work (mindfulness is popular with managers, apparently, as it’s another way of getting your staff to stay focused on what they’re meant to be doing). When you can download a book called Hot Mess to Mindful Mom, you’ve got to wonder whether the whole mindfulness thing has gone a bit too far.

Thanks to a new book called The Power of Negative Emotion, an alternative has reared its head. And its name is mindlessness.

Mindlessness operates on the basis that your mind and body already know how to take care of themselves. You don’t need to consciously concentrate on your breathing, or what you can smell, because you’ve been unwittingly been doing that since before you were born. To be truly mindless, you need to rely on a combination of snap judgments, uninformed intuition and absent-minded daydreaming. All the things I’m best at, in fact.