Can You Train Your Attention? What Mindfulness Really Changes

By Cam, MBSR-trained mindfulness teacher in Berlin

I'm doing a training course on AI at the moment, and there are days when I disappear into it. There's a deadline, there's a problem I want to solve, and solving it mostly makes me want to explore three more. It feels like focus. Honestly, it feels quite good.

Then the day ends, and I notice my jaw. It's clenched in a way that isn't normal for me. My body is still switched on, as if the work hadn't stopped just because I closed the laptop.

What strikes me isn't that I was under pressure. It's that I didn't notice. For hours, my attention was very much somewhere. It just wasn't anywhere near my own body, or the pressure, or the fact that I was being pulled along by the next thing, and the next. (I've written before about the difference between being busy and being stressed, and why we often notice stress later than we'd like.)

So when people ask me whether mindfulness can train your attention, I'm tempted to ask back: which part of attention do you mean?

Wandering off is half the practice. Coming back is the other half.

The question behind the question

Most people asking it mean something like: can I concentrate for longer? Can I get through this report without checking my phone eleven times?

That's a reasonable thing to want. And mindfulness is often sold as exactly that, a kind of gym for focus. Sit, breathe, get sharper.

I think that's partly true and mostly beside the point. My jaw story isn't a failure of concentration. I was concentrating fine. What was missing was something else: noticing where my attention had gone, and what it was doing to me while it was there.

That second thing turns out to be what meditation practice trains most directly.

What actually happens when you "focus on the breath"

If you've ever sat with your breath for a few minutes, you know roughly how it goes. You're with the breath. Then you're answering an email in your head. Then you're halfway through a conversation that happened yesterday. Then, at some point: oh. Where did I go?

And you come back.

The researcher Wendy Hasenkamp and her colleagues described this as a cycle with four moments: focusing, mind wandering, noticing that you've wandered, and shifting attention back. In their brain-imaging work with experienced meditators, these moments seemed to line up with different brain networks, and the moment of noticing looked like a distinct event of its own, not just the end of wandering.

It's a small study, and I wouldn't build a theory of the brain on it. But as a map of what practice actually involves, I find it very useful. It shows that the wandering isn't an interruption of the exercise. It's half of the exercise.

Every time you notice and come back, that's the repetition. If meditation is a gym, that's the push-up.

"My mind wanders all the time"

At the start of a course, I hear some version of this from a lot of people: "I get frustrated. My mind keeps wandering, and sometimes it's gone for ages before I notice."

That's completely understandable. Most of us arrive with an unspoken assumption that meditating means not thinking, or at least thinking less. So every wandering mind feels like evidence that we're doing it wrong, or that we're "not the meditating type."

But the practice was never to stop thinking. It's to notice when thinking has taken over. Long stretches away aren't proof that it isn't working. They're just where you're starting from. (More on that in why meditation can feel uncomfortable.)

The frustration is interesting in itself, because it's often the first thing that shows up in the moment of noticing. You come back, and instead of simply coming back, you arrive with a short lecture to yourself. Noticing the lecture is part of the training too.

Mindfulness and attention: what does the research actually say?

This is a topic where claims run ahead of the evidence quite quickly, so I want to be careful.

What we know (relatively strong evidence)

A large 2023 meta-analysis pooled 111 randomised controlled trials with around 9,500 participants. After mindfulness training, it found small-to-moderate improvements in several specific areas: sustained attention, executive attention (roughly, directing and holding attention where you intend), working memory accuracy, and the ability to hold back an automatic response or switch between tasks.

That's genuinely encouraging. It's also more modest than the headlines. The effects were smaller when mindfulness was compared with another active programme rather than with doing nothing. Several things didn't improve at all: processing speed, episodic memory, verbal fluency, and how fast people responded on executive tasks. And effects were stronger when courses were taught face to face than when they were self-guided.

So "mindfulness makes you smarter" is a much bigger claim than the research supports. "Practising mindfulness seems to modestly improve some specific aspects of attention" is a lot closer.

What looks promising (interesting, but small or specific)

• At UC Santa Barbara, 48 students took either two weeks of mindfulness classes or a nutrition class. The mindfulness group mind-wandered less during testing and did better on a working memory task and a GRE reading test. Interesting, but it's one small study with students.

• Amishi Jha and colleagues followed Marines through a stressful pre-deployment period. Those who practised more kept their working memory steady. Those who practised little declined, much like the group with no training. Practice time was self-reported, though, so we can't be sure the practice caused the difference.

• People on one- to three-month meditation retreats got better at catching their own lapses of attention during a reading task. But a retreat isn't a Tuesday in the office, and some of the effects had faded when people were tested years later.

What we don't know yet

• Whether getting better at a lab task means getting better with your inbox, your meetings or your conversations. Most studies measure the lab task. This is the question I find most interesting, and the honest answer is that we don't fully know.

• How much practice it takes, for whom, and how long the effects last. You'll see "12 minutes a day" quoted. It's a reasonable starting point from one research group, not a law of nature.

• How much of the effect comes from the practice itself, and how much from the structure, attention and expectation that come with signing up for something.

What I'd stop believing

• "Mindfulness rewires your brain in eight weeks." The largest test of this so far, a 2022 study of over 200 healthy adults randomly assigned to MBSR, a non-mindfulness wellness programme or no training, found no structural brain changes from MBSR compared with the others. That doesn't mean practice never changes the brain. It means the popular eight-week version of the story is ahead of the evidence. What eight weeks can offer is less dramatic, and I'd argue more useful. More on that below.

• "Good meditators don't get distracted." Getting distracted and coming back is the practice.

• "Mindfulness makes you more productive." Possibly, for some people, in some ways. But research on actual work performance is thin, and processing speed didn't move in the big meta-analysis.

Training the return

So, can you train your attention? I think yes: modestly, and in a more interesting way than "longer focus."

When I look at my own practice honestly, the biggest change isn't that I've stopped drifting. I drift all the time. The change is that the more I practise, the more often I notice when I've drifted.

That sounds small. In daily life, it isn't. Each moment of noticing is a small window where I get to choose: keep going, stop, take a breath, unclench the jaw, put the phone down, or pick it up on purpose. Without the noticing, there's no choice to make. There's just the next thing. Over a day, those windows add up to more conscious decisions, and more time actually present for what I'm doing.

It's also why the jaw story is a useful one rather than an embarrassing one. Practice didn't stop me from getting pulled into that work. The pull is real, and part of it is that very human wanting: the sense that one more answer is just around the corner. (The brain's reward system, it turns out, is much more about wanting than about enjoying.) What practice changed is that I noticed at all, even if it was at the end of the day. On a better day, I'd notice at lunch.

That's what I mean by training the return. Not a mind that never leaves, but one that finds its way back a little sooner, a little more often, and with a bit less drama. (If you want to see what this looks like in daily life rather than on the cushion, I wrote about what practice looks like outside meditation.)

A small experiment

If you'd rather test this than take my word for it:

Set a timer for five minutes. Rest your attention on the breath, wherever you feel it most clearly. Each time you notice you've wandered, make a small mark on a piece of paper (or just tap your knee) and come back.

When the timer goes, don't judge the number. Notice it. Notice where you tended to wander to. Notice how you spoke to yourself each time you came back.

Prefer to be guided? Try the 2-minute reset, a free guided practice with a bell and a voice. No sign-up, nothing saved. It's a good way to get a few repetitions of the return in the middle of a working day.

Then, once during your day, ask: where is my attention right now? And did I choose it?

You might find a clenched jaw. You might find nothing much. Either is useful information.

I'm still not entirely sure where the line is between training your attention and simply getting to know it better. Maybe there isn't one.

If you'd like to go further

Early in 2027, I'll be running a three-hour workshop on attention in Berlin: what pulls it, why "doing nothing" is harder than it sounds, and a few small, practical changes to try. If you're interested, get in touch and I'll let you know when dates are set.

And if you'd like to build the practice itself over time, the 8-week MBSR course is where I'd start. It gives you eight weeks of structured space to notice your own patterns, get curious about them, and build a practice that keeps going after the course ends.

FAQ

Can mindfulness improve concentration?

Somewhat. A large 2023 meta-analysis of 111 trials found small-to-moderate improvements in sustained and executive attention after mindfulness training. Effects were smaller against active comparison groups, and not every cognitive measure improved. The most direct skill practice trains is noticing when your attention has wandered and bringing it back.

How long does it take to improve attention with mindfulness?

There's no fixed number. Some studies report changes after two to eight weeks of regular practice, and people who practise more tend to show more benefit. Around 12 minutes a day is sometimes suggested as a starting point, but it's a guide rather than an established dose.

Is it normal for my mind to wander during meditation?

Yes. Wandering isn't a sign that you're doing it wrong. Noticing that you've wandered and coming back is the practice itself, and each return is one repetition.

Is mindfulness the same as meditation?

Not quite. Meditation is one way to train mindfulness: a set time to practise paying attention on purpose. Mindfulness is the quality of attention you bring into ordinary moments, like a meeting, a conversation or a walk.

Does mindfulness improve productivity?

The evidence is thin. Research on mindfulness at work is more consistent for stress and wellbeing than for measurable work performance. What it can help with is noticing where your attention is going, for example between back-to-back meetings, so you have more choice about what to do next.

Sources

• Zainal & Newman (2023). Mindfulness enhances cognitive functioning: a meta-analysis of 111 randomized controlled trials. Health Psychology Review. Link

• Hasenkamp & Barsalou (2012). Effects of meditation experience on functional connectivity of distributed brain networks. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Link

• Mrazek et al. (2013). Mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering. Psychological Science. Link

• Jha et al. (2010). Examining the protective effects of mindfulness training on working memory capacity and affective experience. Emotion.

• Zanesco et al. (2016). Meditation training influences mind wandering and mindless reading. Psychology of Consciousness.

• Kral et al. (2022). Absence of structural brain changes from mindfulness-based stress reduction. Science Advances. Summary