This is part of an ongoing wellness series, you can find the full collection of articles here.
Noticing, Naming And Moving On
A few years ago, we went through a stretch of puppy training in our house. One of the most important commands when training a puppy is “leave it.” Not as a punishment. As a safety cue. A way to interrupt something that looks compelling in the moment but won’t end well – electrical cords, random sidewalk snacks.
Puppies don’t yet have a sense of what’s dangerous or unhelpful. They go toward what grabs their attention. The job of training is helping them learn when to disengage — sometimes a matter of safety and survival.
Around the same time, a familiar conversation kept coming up in the Learning Nook community: what do we do with obsessive, looping, or unhelpful thoughts? The kind that often don’t feel like their optional. The ones that grab your attention and your mind just won’t let go.
Recently, after giving a talk, I noticed myself sliding into a familiar spiral – replaying what I’d said imperfectly, imagining how it might have landed, cataloguing all the ways I could have done it better. And, without really planning to, I told myself: leave it.
Not harsh. Not shaming. Firm, caring, and done.
That moment captured something I’ve come to rely on over the years — a version of mindfulness that works while moving through my life. Not sitting still. Not clearing the mind. Just noticing, naming, and gently tagging what is happening. And yes, sometimes instructing my mind to move along — to go chew on something else.
I think of it as “mindfulness on the go.” It’s the only kind of mindfulness that has worked for me. It’s also been one of the most helpful tools I’ve found for navigating my mental health.
Table of Contents
Why Traditional Mindfulness Is Hard for Neurodivergent Minds
Mindfulness is becoming increasingly difficult for everyone. We live in an attention economy where people are using their best tools to capture your attention — often in short, dopamine-inducing bursts.
So at baseline, it’s hard to settle our minds. And then for many neurodivergent people, especially ADHDers, mindfulness — or more accurately, the way it’s often taught — can be particularly difficult.
When I first heard the word mindfulness, an image came to mind of someone sitting still and emptying their thoughts. I had no interest in pursuing that. This is often how mindfulness is talked about or presented as a form of self-care.
So much of what we’re offered assumes that stillness is regulating. That turning inward will create calm. That if we just sit long enough and focus on the breath, things will settle.
But for many of us, stillness does the opposite.
When the body stops moving, the mind doesn’t necessarily quiet — in fact, it often speeds up and gets louder. If we aren’t getting arousal and stimulation through the body, the mind will happily step in and make up the difference. For many of us, traditional mindfulness practices don’t provide calm or presence; instead, we’re met with restlessness and rumination.
There’s also the attention piece. Many neurodivergent minds don’t move in straight lines. Our minds diverge: attention jumps, loops, fixates, wanders. When mindfulness is framed as sustained focus on a single object, it can feel like another place where we’re failing — where we’re doing wellness “wrong.” And that sense of doing it wrong can actually exacerbate stress, the very thing we’re often turning to mindfulness to ease.
Over time, mindfulness can become associated with effort, frustration, or self-criticism. Which is ironic, given that the whole point is supposed to be care.
What “Mindfulness on the Go” Actually Means
I had a lot of resistance to the idea of mindfulness until I was training to become a psychologist and learned more portable, active approaches. Mindfulness that I didn’t have to stop and do as a separate activity, but something woven into ordinary moments of my day.
When I talk about mindfulness on the go, I’m not talking about getting yourself into a certain state, or adding one more five-minute practice to the to-do list.I’m talking about brief moments of awareness that show up while you’re already living your life.
Mindfulness on the go doesn’t require sitting still. It doesn’t require clearing your mind. It doesn’t require long stretches of focus.
It’s not really an activity to do – it’s a way of being with yourself. It’s shifting into your observing self, even if only for a second. It’s noticing what’s happening while it’s happening. Naming it. And then deciding what, if anything, you want to do next.
Sometimes that’s as simple as: “oh, my mind is ruminating right now. Okay, mind. I see what you’re up to.”
Sometimes it’s: “this is a familiar mind-story playing right now.”
And sometimes it’s gentle, but firm: “leave it!”
For me, this has become a loose system for tagging what my mind is doing. Instead of getting dragged around by my thoughts all day, I pause and notice. I name what’s happening. Sometimes I intervene and mindfully say, leave it — let’s go over here (cue a distracting or regulating activity). Sometimes I fall right back into the rumination, but now I’ve given myself an anchoring story for what’s happening.
Other times I get curious about the thought — or the narrative underneath it. Sometimes I simply tag it and move along. Sometimes I’m just naming the emotion or affect that’s present.
This kind of mindfulness moves with me throughout the day. It’s flexible. Portable. A little scrappy. And forgiving when I miss things.
How Mindfulness on the Go Helps Interrupt Rumination
One of the biggest ways mindfulness on the go helps me is by interrupting spirals earlier and helping me unhook from unhelpful scripts, rather than believing everything my mind tells me.
When a thought shows up and immediately feels compelling, my body often treats it like something that deserves my full attention: something I need to solve, fix or resolve. That’s where things start to snag.
Cognitive Fusion (In Plain Language)
- This is a thought.
- It feels important.
- I might be seeing the world through a particular lens right now… does it serve me?
Practical Examples of Mindfulness On The Go
All of this might sound abstract. So let me make it concrete. What follows are a few of the mindfulness-on-the-go practices I actually use when my mind starts looping.
1. Creating Space From Painful Thoughts
One way I think about mindfulness on the go is learning how to create just a bit of space between myself and a painful thought.
When a thought first shows up, I’m often initially fused with the thought: I’m a failure. I messed that up. I shouldn’t have said that. When I’m fused with a thought like this, it doesn’t feel like something my mind is offering — it feels like who I am.
One way I practice mindfulness on the go is by unhooking from the thought and creating a bit of space. Sometimes that is as simple as mentally adding a few words:
- I’m having the thought that… (insert painful thought like “I’m a failure”)
- I’m noticing that I’m having the thought that… (insert painful thought)
Those tiny shifts remind me that what I’m experiencing is mental material — something my mind is generating — creating a bit of space from the painful thought. I’m not arguing with the thought or trying to make it go away. I’m just recognizing it as a thought.
This doesn’t erase or invalidate the thought as painful, but it’s often enough to loosen its grip on me.
2. Naming Scripts, Not Just Thoughts
The above exercise walks through how to name individual thoughts. Over time, I’ve found it also helpful to name the script underneath the thoughts. This is especially helpful when I’m caught in a whirlwind of thoughts, not just one painful one.
Scripts are what happen when individual thoughts cluster together into a familiar story my mind knows well. A single self-critical thought can quickly turn into a whole narrative about being not good enough, letting people down, or needing to fix myself.
When I notice that happening, I’ll pause to name it:
- Ah, the “incompetent” script is running.
- This is the “bad mom” script playing right now.
- This is the “bad person” story again.
The goal isn’t to make the script or story disappear. It’s to invite in my observing self — the part of me that can notice what’s happening without getting swallowed whole by it. Naming scripts gives me language to organize what’s happening inside, turning emotional noise into something I can name, see, and relate to with a bit more gentleness.
3. Mindful Naming as Self-Attunement
These exercises — like saying “I’m noticing I’m having the thought…” — can feel a bit hacky. And when done that way, to try to make painful things go away, I’m not sure how helpful they are.
The attitude we bring to the exercise matters as much as how we do it. I think of this form of mindfulness as a form of radical self-attunement.
There’s something deeply settling about being named accurately.
When we’re children, an attuned caregiver ideally helps us make sense of our inner world — you’re sad because that mattered to you, you’re frustrated because this feels unfair. Many of us didn’t consistently receive that kind of attunement growing up.
Mindfulness on the go, especially naming thoughts and scripts, has become a way of offering that recognition to myself. I’m not doing some “hack” to make it go away, it’s a way of turning toward the pain and saying, “hey I see you, and you make sense.” Mindful naming — not to correct or fix what’s happening, but to acknowledge it. To say, I see you. I know what’s going on here can provide a powerful form of self-attunement.
In that way, mindfulness stops being about control and more about relational attunement, which can in and of itself be a reparative experience for many of us.
At its core, mindfulness is about bringing awareness to what’s happening in the present moment in a non-judgmental, non-evaluative way. Not fixing. Not improving. Just noticing.
I’ve come to think of mindfulness less as something you do and more as an attitude — a way of being with yourself. It’s not another task to complete or habit to perfect. It’s how you meet your inner experience as it unfolds.
So the third practice – is naming, whatever is in front of you, with attunement and care.
4. Sensory and Body-Based Mindfulness
Sometimes, the most accessible way into the present isn’t through thoughts at all, but through the body and the senses.
Here are a few ways this shows up for me:
Tuning into sensation
Sensory awareness can be an easy doorway into the present. Feeling the warmth of water on my hands while washing dishes. Noticing the pressure of my feet on the floor. Letting one small physical sensation come into focus.
Pausing to breathe
Occasionally I’ll stop what I’m doing and take a few slow breaths, noticing the sensation of air moving in and out. Not to calm myself down necessarily — just to arrive back in my body.
Engaging the senses
Sometimes I’ll pick one sense and give it my attention for a few seconds. Weight on my body. Colors around me. A smell I hadn’t noticed before. Sensory input can anchor me when thoughts feel loud (for this it’s helpful to focus on positive sensations).
Mindful eating, even briefly
This might be as small as fully tasting one bite of food — noticing flavor, texture, temperature. I don’t need to eat the whole meal this way for it to count. One intentional moment is enough.
Mindful movement
Mindful movement involves noticing the sensations movement creates, I do this most often with pleasant movement like stretches or rhythmic movements, like stimming or swaying.
Why These Small Practices Matter
If some of this sounds almost too simple, that’s fair. I was skeptical too. Naming thoughts and sensations didn’t feel like it should make much of a difference — and for a long time, I wasn’t convinced it did. What helped me trust these practices more was seeing how consistently naming alone can support regulation.
There’s good reason these small practices can feel regulating, and some science to support it.
In one study, participants with a fear of spiders were asked to approach a live tarantula. Different groups were given different coping strategies: reframing their thoughts (“this spider can’t harm me”) , distracting themselves, or simply approaching the spider while commenting on their present moment experience. The group that showed the greatest reduction in anxiety was the one that simply named their experience: “I’m feeling anxious.”
They weren’t trying to change how they felt or convince themselves everything was fine. They were simply acknowledging what was there.
That act of naming matters. When we label thoughts and emotions, the nervous system has something to orient around. When experience stays vague or unnamed, the system often remains on high alert, scanning for threat. Clarity, even partial clarity, can help the body to settle.
This may help explain why difficulty identifying emotions, or alexithymia, is often linked with higher anxiety. When the brain doesn’t quite know what’s happening internally, it fills in the gaps with uncertainty — and uncertainty keeps the nervous system on high alert.
Which brings us back to mindfulness on the go.
Naming what’s happening — this is anxiety, this is rumination, this is a familiar script — isn’t a quick fix to our pain. It’s about making our inner world more legible. And that legibility, even in small doses, can be deeply regulating.
A Gentler Way to Practice Mindfulness
When adapted, mindfulness can be powerfully supportive for restless, looping brains. Sometimes we’re simply tagging narratives and thoughts as they come and go. And other times the most compassionate thing we can do is notice when our mind has latched onto something unhelpful and gently guide it elsewhere. Learning when to trust my mind and when to tell it to “leave it” helps me stay (mostly) above water these days.
Not everything that grabs our attention deserves it. Sometimes, it’s enough to say:
Leave it — and keep moving.
Follow-Up Resources
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