Mindfulness helped me in life, but seemed to disappear during deep work

I got into mindfulness after reading Peak Mind, and I really did notice changes in everyday life.

I became a better listener. I stopped drifting into my phone while talking to my wife. I was more present with my kids. I also started catching myself in meetings when my attention wandered.

Then I tried to bring that same mindfulness into deep, cognitively demanding work. For me, that meant programming, and that is where I got confused.

Because I’m a programmer, I started measuring it instead of just going by feel. First I used a tally counter. Then my smartwatch. Eventually I built a small watch app for myself.

What I tracked were what I called “meta-awareness moments,” meaning moments when I noticed what my mind was doing while it was doing it. I also used periodic vibrations to log whether I felt present or distracted.

What surprised me was that these moments were pretty common during things like walking the dog or washing dishes, but much rarer during programming. I noticed something similar while gaming too.

That really bothered me, because programming is my day job and one of the places where I most wanted mindfulness to show up.

At first I took that as a bad sign. I thought maybe the practice just was not helping where it mattered most.

Now I think the problem was the model I was using.

What I was actually trying to maintain while coding was a kind of explicit reflective awareness: awareness of my thoughts, awareness of my state, almost like being a spectator of my own mind while I worked.

Over time, I started to suspect that this was the wrong thing to look for during programming.

That is when I remembered the idea of flow. Flow, at least as I understand it, is the state of being deeply absorbed in what you are doing. You are focused, immersed, and less self-conscious.

A meta-analysis found that mindfulness and flow are positively related overall, but not identical. It also points to prior work suggesting that, in some cases, reflective awareness may interfere with the absorption side of flow.

That matched my experience. Trying to actively monitor myself while coding felt like asking my brain to do two things at once. Both seemed to draw on the same mental resources. One part of my mind was trying to stay aware of my state, while the other was trying to stay fully inside the problem.

So my current view is not that mindfulness failed. It is that I expected it to show up in the wrong form. Maybe mindfulness helps me clear my mind, stabilize attention, and get into deep focus more easily. Maybe it does not always show up as an explicitly observing state during cognitively demanding work.

That is where I have landed for now, but I’m open to changing my mind. I’d really like to hear how other people see this.

Full post: https://yonatanmedan.github.io/blog/mindfulness-programming-and-the-mistake-i-made/ In the full post I go into the tracking experiment in more detail, what I measured, how my interpretation changed over time, and why I now think I was looking for the wrong sign of mindfulness during programming.

Paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886922003762 This is a meta-analysis on mindfulness and flow. It looks at how strongly they are related overall and points to prior work suggesting that reflective awareness and deep absorption may not always line up perfectly.

Have you noticed a difference between mindfulness in ordinary life and mindfulness during cognitively demanding work?

Do meta-awareness and deep absorption feel compatible to you, or more like different states?