Mindfulness Beyond the Buzzword: Why This Matters Now

This month, I published an article in Executive Functions Magazine titled Mindfulness Beyond the Buzzword: Healing Attention in a Hyperstimulated World. In it, I explore how mindfulness has been watered down into a trend word, when in reality it’s a practice that can radically shift the way we relate to stress, trauma, and our own nervous systems.

We are living in a time of noise, fear, and extremes. Charlie Kirk’s sudden death, Tyler Robinson’s unraveling loneliness, the endless debates between left and right, the release of the Epstein files, the cruelty and posturing on social media—all of it pulls us into judgment, rage, and reactivity. Everyone seems to be shouting, few are listening, and most of us are exhausted.

Mindfulness, if we understand it beyond the buzzword, isn’t about pretending this noise doesn’t exist. It’s about noticing what it stirs in us—rage, grief, despair, confusion—without immediately reacting from those places. When we fail to notice, we build fortresses of ego and certainty, projecting outward the very things we don’t want to face inside. That’s how hypocrisy spreads, how compassion gets hollowed into performance, and how lies become louder than truth.

The question I keep returning to is: How do we stay human in the middle of dehumanizing noise?

That’s where trauma-informed mindfulness can help. Not to erase the noise, but to meet it from a different place inside. 

Bringing It Back to the World We’re In

Mindfulness won’t stop political cruelty, prevent another tragedy, or erase the injustice of forgotten women and children. But it can change how we show up in the midst of it all.

There’s a Zen saying: “If you want to change the world, start with yourself.” It may feel like you’re doing nothing by simply sitting and noticing your breath, your body, or your thoughts. But these small acts of awareness create ripples. Just like the butterfly effect, where something as subtle as the flap of a wing can set off a chain of events, our micro-choices of attention ripple outward into how we speak, listen, vote, and act in the world.

And this isn’t just poetic imagery — research backs it up. A study published in SAGE Open found that during periods when large groups gathered to practice Transcendental Meditation in the U.S. (2007–2010), the national homicide rate fell by more than 20%, with violent crime dropping in major cities as well. Another well-known experiment in Washington, D.C. saw a significant reduction in homicides, rapes, and assaults during weeks when about 4,000 people meditated together. A 2019 review in Aggression and Violent Behavior reached a similar conclusion: mindfulness-based interventions measurably reduced aggression and violent behavior across multiple contexts.

The point isn’t that meditation is a magic fix, but that collective calm and awareness can shift the atmosphere we all live in. Change doesn’t only happen through grand gestures; it begins in the invisible space of our nervous systems, our impulses, our fortresses. When we choose to notice instead of react, we open a different possibility—not just for ourselves, but for the larger world we share.

If we can pause long enough to see our own rage, grief, and judgment without collapsing into them, we can begin to respond instead of react. We can stop dehumanizing even those who frighten us or enrage us, without excusing their harm. We can resist the noise without becoming the noise.

That doesn’t mean silence. It means clarity. 

Mindfulness, practiced honestly, keeps us from losing ourselves in the lies. And if we can hold onto that, maybe we have a chance at building something different than the fortresses we keep repeating.