Microdosing Mindfulness

Why BMI might be the healthiest thing you can add to your day, and no, it is not Body Mass Index

In 2014, after my mother died, I travelled to Sri Lanka and spent a week in silence near Kandy, at the Nilambe Meditation Centre surrounded by jungle and tea plantations. At four o’clock each morning a large gong sounded, one slow resonant strike that seemed to vibrate inside your ribs. We dressed without speaking and walked barefoot to the hall, a long wooden building open on three sides to the forest. There were twenty of us from every corner of the world, united by grief or exhaustion or curiosity. Hard to tell which.

We sat cross legged in the half dark. No music, no chanting, only the slow waking of the world: a frog’s note, the rustle of monkeys, the faint metallic drone of insects that would soon become deafening. The first light spread like breath through the trees.

I remember thinking, so this is what morning sounds like when nothing needs you.

That week, silence was not absence. It was architecture. Every sound became precise: the drip of rain, the scrape of a sandal, the faint movement of someone’s sleeve. The still water that ringed the compound mirrored the sky perfectly. If a leaf fell, it seemed a violation and a gift at once.

I came home changed, or at least rearranged. But I also came home to a life that did not include three hours of silent meditation before breakfast. There were meetings and deadlines and children and the ordinary velocity of a European existence. The stillness I had found in the hills above Kandy began to feel like a holiday, beautiful but increasingly distant, a postcard from a self I could not afford to be.

Which is why, years later, the monk at Plum Village made me smile.

When most people hear the word mindfulness they imagine long silences, heroic cushions, and a faint smell of incense. Preferably somewhere remote. Possibly involving a bell. Definitely involving time they do not have.

When Eli Susman arrived at the famous monastery near Bordeaux founded by Thich Nhat Hanh, often called the father of modern mindfulness, he did what enthusiastic newcomers do. He went big. Three hours of silent meditation. Afterwards he proudly reported this to one of the monks, half expecting a nod of approval or at least a spiritual loyalty badge.

The monk listened kindly and replied with a question: Three hours? How about three breaths?

That moment would later become the origin story of a very modern idea now backed by solid psychology. Mindfulness does not need to be long to work. It needs to be brief and it needs to be repeated.

Welcome to BMI. Brief Mindfulness Interventions. Possibly the only BMI your doctor will not warn you about.

Susman took that monastery moment seriously. During his PhD at UC Berkeley he decided to test it properly. Not philosophically but experimentally. Could something as short as twenty seconds genuinely change how people feel?

The answer, published in Behaviour Research and Therapy in 2024, was a calm but decisive yes.

Participants in Susman’s study were asked to do something almost disarmingly simple. Recall a moment of stress or inadequacy. Place one hand on the heart and one on the belly. Take a breath. Offer yourself a moment of kindness. Total time: about twenty seconds. No chanting required.

The results were immediate. Stress levels dropped. Self compassion rose. People felt better now, not someday.

More interestingly, the real effect appeared over time. Those who repeated this tiny practice daily showed reductions in anxiety and depressive symptoms. Those who did it occasionally did not. Frequency beat duration. Consistency beat intensity.

This is the key insight behind modern BMI research. It is not the length of the silence that helps. It is the regular return to presence.

Psychologists make an important distinction here. Short practices reliably create state mindfulness, a temporary reset. The nervous system calms. Heart rate drops. Emotional regulation improves. That can happen in seconds.

Longer sustained practice over months and years is still required for trait mindfulness: structural changes in attention, personality, and even brain networks. Microdosing mindfulness is not a shortcut to enlightenment. It is a tool for living sanely on a Tuesday.

Neuroscience explains why three breaths can work.

Slow conscious breathing activates the vagus nerve, nudging the body out of fight or flight and into rest and digest. Focusing on a physical anchor like breath or touch dampens activity in the default mode network, the brain system responsible for rumination and mental noise. Behaviourally it acts as a pattern interrupt. It breaks the automatic stress response long enough for wiser parts of the brain to come back online.

In plain language, it stops the spiral.

This is why the kitchen table beats the monastery for most people. Formal meditation asks for time, discipline, and identity. Micropractices ask only for memory. A cue. A pause.

Before opening your laptop. Before replying to that message. While the kettle boils. In the lift. At the traffic light. These moments become punctuation marks in your day.

There is also something quietly liberating about BMI. It removes heroics. No trophies. No streaks. No performative calm. Three breaths leave no room for ego. You either show up or you do not.

Long practice still has its place. Depth still matters. Silence still matters. But access matters too. For many people the biggest barrier to mindfulness is not resistance but mythology. The belief that it must be long, hard, or rare to count.

The monk at Plum Village was not being dismissive. He was being precise.

Presence is not something you earn through endurance. It is something you remember, briefly, again and again.

Three breaths will not change your life.

But they might change the next moment.

And that is exactly where change actually begins.

I think sometimes about that wooden hall open to the forest, the gong still resonating in my chest, the monkeys stirring in the canopy above. The still water. The sound of nothing needing me.

I have not been back. Life intervened, as it does. Twelve years of building a company, raising children, accumulating the ordinary scar tissue of a busy existence. Mindfulness became something I did in stolen moments: three breaths before a difficult meeting, a pause before sending the email I would regret, the discipline of noticing my own pulse when everything around me accelerated.

The monk was right, of course. Three breaths are enough. They have carried me through many years.

But lately I find myself wondering. Now that my sons are grown and the company can run without me at its centre, now that I am entering what the Greeks called the philosophical years, those final decades when one is meant to turn from acquisition to contemplation: perhaps it is time to return. Not to escape life, but to prepare for its ending with the same attention I once brought to its middle.

The Nilambe Buddhist Meditation Centre is still there, I checked. Still surrounded by jungle and still water. Still waking to the gong at four in the morning.

Maybe it is time to go back. To sit in that hall again, older now, with less to prove and more to release. To meditate not on grief this time, but on gratitude. On the shape of a life well lived. On the next and final twenty years.

Three breaths got me here.

Perhaps a week of silence will show me again where to go next.