Mindfulness can involve discomfort — and knowing when to stop matters

I used to think mindfulness was about finding calm. A quiet mind. A still body. Some version of peace that would settle over me like a warm blanket if I just practiced enough.

That’s not how it started for me. Not even close.

When I was in my mid-twenties, working a warehouse job in Melbourne shifting TVs, mindfulness wasn’t peaceful. It was brutal. I’d sit on a crate during my break, phone in hand, reading about Buddhism while my back ached and my mind raced with the same questions on loop: What am I doing here? When does this get better? Why isn’t my Graduate Diploma of Psychological Studies worth anything in the real world?

I wasn’t meditating my way to serenity. I was just trying to survive my own head.

For me, mindfulness began with tolerable restlessness rather than calm. That does not make all distress an invitation to stay. Panic, dissociation, traumatic memories, worsening depression or anxiety, or difficulty functioning are reasons to stop or shorten a practice and seek qualified support. This is not treatment advice.

Psychologists use the term distress tolerance for a person’s perceived or actual ability to withstand difficult emotional states. A Peking University study found that measured distress tolerance statistically mediated associations between mindfulness and depression or anxiety in cross-sectional and daily-diary data. That is one line of evidence, not proof that discomfort during unsupervised meditation is therapeutic or that anyone should persist when symptoms worsen.

That finding didn’t surprise me when I read it. It described something I’d already lived.

Because in that warehouse, I wasn’t achieving enlightenment. I was just learning, slowly, painfully, to stop running from the fact that my life didn’t look the way I thought it should. To sit with the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be, without numbing out with distraction or drowning in self-pity.

That’s staying. And staying is the hardest part.

People come to mindfulness for many reasons, including stress. Paying attention can make some thoughts or feelings more noticeable, but it does not inevitably reveal hidden anxiety or sadness, and meditation can have adverse effects for some people.

Mindfulness is not guaranteed to feel peaceful. It can also be reasonable to look away, ground yourself in the room, or stop when inward attention becomes destabilising.

I remember the first time I tried to sit with my own restlessness during a meditation session. I lasted maybe ninety seconds before I grabbed my phone. The second time, two minutes. The third, I made it to five. Not because I found stillness in those five minutes, but because I stopped expecting to.

For me, the useful shift was learning that mild restlessness did not require an immediate reaction. That personal lesson should not become a rule to feel everything or ignore warning signs.

When I eventually left Australia, I thought I was making a bold, decisive life change. And in some ways I was. But I also carried everything with me: the restlessness, the self-doubt, the habit of reaching for the next thing instead of being with the current thing.

Saigon didn’t fix that. It exposed it.

There’s a specific kind of overwhelm that comes with living in a city of nine million people where the traffic never stops and the noise is constant. I remember early morning runs through District 1, sweat pouring off me in the tropical heat, motorbikes buzzing past, the air thick with exhaust and the smell of pho from sidewalk kitchens. Everything in me wanted to retreat to air conditioning and silence.

But something shifted during those runs. Instead of resisting the chaos, I started just… being in it. Not loving it, not hating it, just staying. Feeling the heat without wishing it away. Hearing the horns without tensing. Letting the discomfort be there without making it a problem.

That was one personal experience of staying with manageable discomfort. It is not a general rule: pain, danger, overheating, panic, dissociation, or worsening symptoms can all be valid signals to stop.

Buddhism has a concept for this, though it took me years to connect the philosophy to my own experience. The Second Noble Truth points to craving and aversion as the root of suffering. Not pain itself, but the desperate push to get more of what feels good and less of what feels bad. The constant reaching and recoiling.

Mindfulness practice may help some people notice a small gap between a feeling and a reaction: the urge to check a phone, the impulse to snap, or the pull toward worry. That outcome is not automatic.

A brief pause can sometimes change what happens next, but it may not feel useful and it does not guarantee later relief. The cited study does not show that repeatedly sitting with distress will make a difficult experience lose its power over weeks or months.

I see this in my meditation practice now, which varies wildly. Some days I sit for thirty minutes. Some days, five. When my daughter was a newborn, some days I sat for exactly the length of time between her falling asleep and waking up again, which could be forty-five seconds. The length doesn’t matter as much as the act of sitting down in the first place, of choosing to face whatever’s in my head instead of running the playlist of distractions that’s always available.

The truth is, she taught me more about staying than any book or retreat. Babies don’t care about your need for peace and quiet. They need you present, right now, in the mess and the noise and the 3am chaos. You can’t intellectualize your way out of a crying infant. You can only be there.

A simple description of mindfulness is noticing what is happening now without immediately judging it. That can include noticing when an exit, a break, or outside support is the wise response.

The wellness industry often sells mindfulness as a blissful destination. In the Buddhist tradition I have studied, it is closer to a way of attending to experience. But wise attention is not the same as compulsory exposure to every difficult internal state.

Turning toward experience can be difficult. With ordinary discomfort, a brief and voluntary pause may be useful. Grief, trauma symptoms, severe anxiety, or depression may call for support rather than an instruction to stay alone with the feeling.

I still struggle with this. I still catch myself reaching for my phone when an uncomfortable thought surfaces. I still notice the urge to plan my way out of uncertainty instead of sitting in it. The difference isn’t that the urges have stopped. It’s that I recognize them faster and give in to them a little less often.

One possible sign of practice is noticing a reaction a little sooner. It is not the only measure of progress, and the effect is not guaranteed to accumulate in a straight line.

When I sit in a café now, drinking my black coffee, watching the street life pour past, I sometimes remember that warehouse in Melbourne. The version of me sitting on a crate, reading about impermanence on a cracked phone screen, trying to make sense of a life that didn’t make sense yet. He wasn’t peaceful. He wasn’t wise. He was just staying.

For me, staying with mild restlessness for a short time was useful. The broader lesson is not that staying is always right; it is that attention can include both patience and discernment. Sometimes mindfulness means remaining for one more breath. Sometimes it means stopping, opening your eyes, moving, or asking for help.

An optional 2-minute practice

If the feeling is mild and you feel safe, pause the next time you notice an automatic urge to scroll. Keep your eyes open if that feels steadier, notice your feet on the floor, and name what is present: perhaps boredom or restlessness.

You can stop at any point. Do not use this exercise to sit through panic, dissociation, traumatic memories, worsening depression or anxiety, or a situation that is actually unsafe. Two minutes is a convenient prompt, not a clinically established dose.

Common traps

• Believing that “real” mindfulness must feel peaceful. Mild restlessness or boredom can occur, but significant distress is not proof that the practice is working.
• Using mindfulness either to suppress difficult emotions or to force prolonged exposure to them. Neither extreme is required.
• Measuring progress by how calm you feel instead of how quickly you notice when you’re not calm.
• Treating every urge to stop as avoidance. Stopping or changing technique can be an appropriate response to pain, danger, or worsening symptoms.

A simple takeaway

• Mindfulness does not have to feel peaceful, and it does not require staying through harmful distress.
• One study found that measured distress tolerance statistically mediated associations between mindfulness and depression or anxiety; that is narrower than a universal mechanism.
• Noticing a reaction sooner can be one personal sign of practice, not a guaranteed measure of progress.
• With mild discomfort, noticing an urge before acting can be useful; with significant distress or danger, acting on the urge to stop may be wise.
• The optional two-minute exercise is a reflection prompt, not a treatment or guaranteed lesson.