How to be more present (when your mind is always elsewhere)

If your body is in one place while your mind is somewhere else entirely, replaying a conversation or rehearsing tomorrow, you are in good company, and you are also in the exact situation that learning how to be more present is meant to address. Presence is not a mystical state. It is the ordinary, trainable skill of putting your attention on what is actually happening, and noticing when it has wandered off.

Your mind wanders about half the time

How often is the mind elsewhere? More than most people guess. In a much-cited study, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert used a phone app to ping thousands of people at random moments and ask what they were doing, what they were thinking about, and how they felt. People’s minds were not on their current activity for about 47 per cent of their waking hours.^[1]

Nearly half of life, spent somewhere other than where we are.

And it tends to make us less happy

The same study found something more pointed. People reported being less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were focused on the present, and this held true even when they were wandering towards pleasant topics.^[1] The act of leaving the present, in itself, was associated with lower mood. As the researchers put it, a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

This does not mean you should never daydream; mind-wandering also feeds creativity and planning. But it suggests that the chronic, automatic drift away from our own lives carries a cost, and that being able to come back matters.

Why it is harder than ever

Presence has always taken a little effort. What is new is that we have removed all the practice. Mindfulness, in the everyday sense described by the psychologists Kirk Warren Brown and Richard Ryan, is simply receptive attention to what is happening now, and people who have more of it tend to report greater well-being.^[2] But that attention is a capacity, and capacities need use.

The phone is a permanent exit from the present. Any dull or uncomfortable moment can now be escaped instantly with a screen, so we almost never stay in one. The teacher Jon Kabat-Zinn titled his book on the subject Wherever You Go, There You Are, a reminder that you cannot actually escape your own experience, only distract yourself from it.^[3] The more we distract, the less practised we become at simply being here.

How to come back

Being present is not about forcing your mind to go blank. It is about noticing you have left, and returning, gently, again and again.

• Anchor in the senses. What can you see, hear, feel right now? The body is always in the present even when the mind is not, so the senses are a reliable way back.
• Do one ordinary thing without a screen. A walk, a meal, a coffee, fully, with nothing else running. You cannot be present to a moment you are simultaneously escaping.
• Expect to drift, and forgive it. The mind will wander within seconds. That is not failure. Noticing the drift and returning is the entire exercise, and the returning is the rep.
• Practise a little, daily. Even a few minutes of following your breath builds the muscle of noticing-and-returning that you then carry into the rest of the day.

The thread running through all of this is the same one this studio keeps pulling: the empty, ordinary, un-distracted moment is not dead time to be escaped. It is the only place your actual life is happening. Learning to stay in it is the quiet skill behind How to Be Bored Again.