Mindlessness: Definition, Theory & Examples

By Nathalie Boutros, Ph.D.
Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.

Learn what mindlessness is, some reasons why you may become mindless, and some ways that you may be able to become less mindless and more mindful.

Mindlessness: Definition, Theory & Examples

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Have you ever sat down with a bag of chips or cookies, started munching, and before you knew it, the whole bag was gone? Have you ever pulled out your phone to check your email, only to find yourself scrolling through Instagram ten minutes later? Have you been halfway through a chapter and realized that you don’t remember anything you’ve read? Have you ever met someone new and then immediately forgotten his or her name?

All of these incidents are examples of mindlessness - of existing and moving through your life without conscious awareness of yourself or of what is going on around you. It happens to us all. We all go into autopilot at one time or another and it's not always a terrible thing. But, spending too much time mentally checked out from the here and now may cause you to miss out on new opportunities as well as on the wonderful moments of simple joy in everyday life. In this article, we’ll review mindlessness from a few different theoretical perspectives. We’ll also talk a little about the opposite of mindlessness, mindfulness. We’ll review some common examples of mindlessness and we’ll talk about how you can become less mindless and more mindful in your own life.

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What Is Mindlessness? (A Definition)

Mindlessness is a state of unawareness, of going through the motions without being consciously aware of your surroundings or your inner states. It can be described as being on autopilot or responding robotically, without conscious awareness of what you are doing, thinking, or feeling. It can be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to identify when you are in a mindless state - almost by definition you are not aware when you are mindless. As soon as you become aware of your mindlessness, you are no longer mindless.

Generally, mindlessness is considered an undesirable mental state to be in. Being unaware of the present moment, or being focused on something other than what you are doing may increase anxiety and depression while decreasing creativity and problem-solving (Brown & Ryan, 2003). Mindlessness is often understood and defined as a state of being in contrast to mindfulness, which is associated with greater overall well-being and better physical and mental health.

Opposite of Mindlessness: Mindfulness

Mindfulness has been defined differently by different traditions, from Eastern, spiritual traditions, to Western medical traditions (Kabat-Zinn, 1982). Most definitions of mindfulness include awareness of what is happening in the present moment, both in the outer world, as well as in your mind and body. Mindfulness practice includes living in and focusing on what is happening in the present moment, without filtering your experiences through analysis or judgment.

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Mindlessness in Psychology

Mindlessness is often defined as the opposite of mindfulness. For example, noticing changes, feelings, and sensations in your body, emotions, and the world around you is considered mindful, while not noticing them is considered mindless. Some research psychologists have defined mindfulness as a construct made up of five dimensions (Baer et al. 2006).

Awareness - The ability to focus on what you are doing, thinking, or feeling without becoming distracted.
Non-reactivity - Being able to recognize when mental or emotional states are irrational, stressful, or harmful and being able to psychologically disengage from these harmful states.
Non-judgement - The ability to be emotionally aware without labeling your emotional experience as good or bad. Being able to acknowledge and practice acceptance of your cognitive experiences without judgment or self-criticism.
Describing - The ability to observe experiences as they occur. Being able to actively, and cognitively recognize your experiences in passing, and then move forward without dwelling.
Observing - The ability to pay attention to a variety of sensory experiences in the present moment - sights, sounds, smells, etc. This includes sensitivity to internal phenomena like bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotions.

Mindlessness, according to these accounts, is being unable to articulate and describe things that you notice, being distractible or unable to focus, and being unable to accept yourself and the world. Generally, being more mindful and less mindless is associated with better mental health including less neuroticism, and higher emotional intelligence.

Mindlessness According to Ellen Langer

Jon Kabat-Zinn introduced concepts of mindfulness from Eastern spiritual traditions into Western medical traditions in the late 1970s. At about the same time, Harvard Psychology researcher Ellen Langer was developing an understanding of mindfulness rooted within a Western, cognitive psychology tradition. According to Langer, mindfulness is actively noticing and engaging with the environment. Mindfulness is achieved by staying engaged, alert, focused, and attentive. Key to her understanding of mindfulness is cognitive flexibility - being ready to abandon ways of thinking when they don’t seem to work and being ready to adopt new ways of thinking. Mindfulness is defined as being open to new experiences, possibilities, and information even when they are unlike or even in contrast to your past experience (Haigh et al., 2011).

Mindlessness according to Ellen Langer is an undesirable state of mind that is defined in contrast to the more desirable state of mindfulness (Langer, 2000). Mindfulness is a flexible state of mind characterized by active engagement in the present. In contrast, mindlessness is characterized by an almost automatic way of being, acting as if you are a robot programmed to respond in a particular way, rather than a person with the ability to notice new things and come to new conclusions. In a mindless state you may automatically do the things that you have been told to do or that you have done in the past, without regard to whether it is the most appropriate course of action in the present.

In a mindless state, you may be stuck in a single, rigid perspective. You may be oblivious to alternative points of view or understandings. Your behavior may be rule and routine governed rather than sensitive and responsive to the peculiarities of each new situation. Mindlessness is problematic according to Langer because it stunts creativity and may prevent you from discovering novel, effective solutions to problems.

In the long-form interview below, Ellen Langer describes her understanding of mindfulness and mindlessness in detail.

Video: The Science of Mindfulness | Josh Summers & Ellen Langer

Mindlessness According to Thomas Joiner

Thomas Joiner is a research psychologist at Florida State Univesity who primarily works in the area of suicide prevention. In 2017, Joiner wrote a book critiquing the culture that surrounds mindfulness, meditation, yoga, and other similar wellness and wellbeing concepts that purport to be grounded in spirituality. This book, titled “Mindlessness: The Corruption of Mindfulness in a Culture of Narcissism” critiques the ways that many Eastern spiritual practices are rebranded and practiced in the west.

Joiner claims that Western practitioners often espouse a shallow, self-absorbed, narcissistic, and selfish distortion of mindfulness. In particular, Joiner claims that the focus on self-acceptance and self-love can easily descend into extreme narcissism and self-centeredness. According to Joiner, Eastern practices of mindfulness and meditation also have the potential to lead to narcissism, entitlement, and arrogance. However other parts of the culture and the practice may limit the descent into extreme self-centeredness. Within Buddhist mindfulness, there is a focus on collectivism and service to the group, which may prevent a descent into extreme narcissism.

Joiner does distinguish authentic from false mindfulness. Authentic mindfulness is a non-judgemental moment-to-moment awareness of everything. This includes the external world, and other people as well as your internal world. Authentic mindfulness involves seeing yourself as a small part of a large universe. When you are authentically mindful, you have an awareness of things outside of yourself including other people and the environment. In contrast, false mindfulness overemphasizes self-awareness—or the world internal to yourself - there is a heavy focus on your physical sensations, thoughts, and feelings. The external world may be ignored. There is a heavy emphasis on self-love and self-regard. Authentic mindfulness in contrast involves unifying yourself with all of humanity, all of life, and all of reality.

Mindlessness Theory

Research psychologists have repeatedly reported that performance decreases over time in tasks that require sustained attention (Langner et al., 2010). For example, imagine that you are looking through a Where’s Waldo book. You may be able to find Waldo within two minutes on the first page. By the time you get to the last page, you may take much longer to find Waldo. There are two popular explanations for this common finding. One possible explanation is mental fatigue - you may get increasingly mentally tired as you perform the task for longer, leading to performance deterioration.

In contrast, to mental fatigue theories, mindlessness theory (Manly, et al., 1999) contends that performance deterioration over time is due to understimulation. Repetitive tasks may cause people to stop paying attention and they may perform the task in an increasingly mindless way. The monotony of the situation may cause people to disengage from conscious awareness of the task, leading to decreased performance.

In other words, mindlessness theory contends that if you are performing a repetitive task, you may become bored with the task, your mind may wander away from the task, and your performance may decline. By the time you get to the last page of the Where’s Waldo book, part of you may be thinking about lunch, planning out your evening, or maybe even thinking about the movie you watched last week.

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Examples of Mindlessness

Mindless eating
Generally, people tend to not be aware of the reasons why they are eating. Most eating happens not because you are hungry or have nutritional needs, but because of external cues like the time on the clock, the people you are with, the environment you are in, the presentation of the food, or what your plate looks like. You may have heard or read diet advice suggesting the use of smaller plates to help in weight loss. Many research studies have found that people generally tend to eat more food from bigger plates (Hollands et al., 2015). The “Small plates movement” specifically advises trading in standard 12-inch plates for smaller 10-inch plates. How much you eat may largely be driven by external cues that you mindlessly follow, like how big your plate is, rather than by internal satiation cues.

A particularly compelling laboratory study illustrates just how mindless many of us can be in our eating habits. People in the study were given bowls of soup. These were not ordinary bowls but bowls that automatically and imperceptibly refilled via tubing hidden underneath the table. These people ate nearly twice as much soup as the people who were eating soup from normal, non-refilling bowls (Wansink et al., 2005). Moreover, the people eating from automatically refilling bowls didn’t report feeling any fuller despite eating nearly twice as much soup. People may generally eat mindlessly, driven by external cues like how much food is left on the plate, rather than because of feelings of hunger. Brian Wansink, the principal investigator who designed this study describes it in the short video below.

Video: Mindlessness & The "Bottomless Soup Bowl" Experiment

Mindless smartphone use
Many of us know that smartphones and other digital devices can make us mindless. You hear a notification or feel a vibration, check to see what it was, and before you know it you’ve spent half an hour scrolling through social media. Research studies support this observation - when people pull out their phones for a specific purpose, they often get sucked into unintended and mindless smartphone use (Oulasvirta et al., 2012). Increasingly, we are aware that smartphones make us mindless and there are many movements and campaigns to reduce smartphone addiction including “digital detoxes”, “digital minimalism”, “digital fasts” and “digital diets”.

What Causes Mindlessness?

Being aware takes mental effort and cognitive resources. Being mindful and avoiding mindlessness may require you to remain aware of, and regulate your decisions, evaluations, personal states, environments, options, and choices. Limited cognitive resources can quickly be used up (Baumesiter et al., 1998). Many of us may have experienced being able to make mindful choices in the morning - choosing oatmeal instead of a donut for breakfast, being alert and attentive in the 8am lecture or meeting, and being present and engaged for the first conversation of the day, only to find that the energy to keep this up throughout the day just isn’t there. By the end of the day, you may say yes to the third piece of cake, may doodle on your notebook at the four o’clock meeting, and may nod along without listening to the conversation on the ride home. Mindfulness is cognitively difficult and mindlessness may simply be easier, especially if you are tired.

An interesting study illustrates that cognitive effort may make people more mindless. People in a laboratory setting were given either an easy task of remembering a two-digit number or a difficult task of remembering a seven-digit number. They were then asked to choose a snack - either a tempting but unhealthy piece of chocolate cake, or a less tempting but healthier fruit salad (Shiv & Fedorikhin, 1999). People performing the more difficult task were far more likely to select the chocolate cake, presumably because their mental resources were already occupied and overworked with the more difficult task. They didn’t have the mental resources to make the more mindful choice. People make more mindless choices when their cognitive capacity is already overtaxed.

Mindlessness Treatment

Learning how to practice mindfulness may help you avoid mindlessness. Mindful meditation practices may help you develop an awareness of your mind - of whether it is present or wandering. People with experience in mindful meditation may even develop the ability to choose to be in either a mindful or a mindless state (Fletcher et al., 2010).

Mindfulness meditation involves an intentional focus on the present moment, where the practitioner consciously keeps his or her attention on the here and now. When the mind wanders, the practitioner is encouraged to non-judgmentally acknowledge the thought and then turn his or her attention back to the present. Experience in mIndfulness meditation may encourage the development of a distinct mode of thinking wherein thoughts, feelings, and body sensations are non-judgmentally observed and accepted as transient events rather than as integral parts of the self (Farb et al., 2007). This way of thinking could be an antidote to mindlessness. The attentional training component of mindfulness may create an awareness of internal and external states and may strengthen a person’s ability to regulate his or her attention (Papies et al., 2012).

You may be able to counteract mindlessness by cultivating mindfulness in any number of ways including meditation, yoga, tai chi, and some forms of psychological therapy (Baer et al., 2004). Although all of these practices have different approaches, they do have some commonalities. Notably, they all encourage conscious and deliberate control of attention. Often, the practitioner is asked to focus on simple activities like breathing or body movements and to notice when his or her attention wanders.

Practitioners are encouraged to note bodily sensations. They are encouraged to refrain from self-criticism, evaluation, judgment, and attempts to change their thoughts or feelings. Instead, practitioners are encouraged to note their feelings and thoughts and to let them pass. Such training may lead to metacognitive insight which may then help in avoiding mindlessness.

In the Ellen Langer understanding of mindlessness, specific techniques for increasing mindfulness may include (Carson and Langer, 2006):

Actively looking for novelty in your environment - Actively noticing new things in your environment or actively noticing new features of things previously taken for granted. When we believe that we are encountering something new, we tend to approach it more mindfully than if we believe we already know what we are facing.
Thinking of yourself as a work in progress - Replacing rigid thinking patterns with thinking patterns focusing on possibility may create mindsets open to personal change and acceptance. Replace your “is” and “am” statements with “might be” and “could be” statements.
Thinking about puzzles and paradoxes - Actively thinking about things that may be ambiguous or difficult to understand may increase your ability to tolerate ambiguity and may decrease anxiety associated with uncertainty. Paradoxes may include conflicting feelings such as both loving and hating your job.
Looking for humor - Humor relies on seeing new and unexpected sides to a situation and may in this way encourage mindfulness.
Considering situations from multiple perspectives - Look at each situation from the perspective of other people. Remember that no one is the villain in their own story.
Considering alternative understandings of problematic parts of yourself - You may be able to reframe problems as opportunities or shortcomings as assets. An ordeal may be an adventure. Impulsivity may be spontaneity. A boring day may be an opportunity for reflection.
Keeping a catalog of joyful moments that you can reference when you need it - This can be in a notebook, an electronic list, or even just a mental list of happy memories and thoughts. Increasing your positive mental state, even if only mildly by just remembering something positive, may increase your mental flexibility and creative problem-solving abilities, allowing you to be more mindful.
Starting a mindfulness journal - Write down significant events of your day. Periodically, you can review the events in your journal, and try to notice new things and perspectives. Practicing mindfully viewing events and situations in retrospect may help to put you in a mindful frame of mind which may then help you avoid mindlessness in your daily life.

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Mindlessness Quotes

“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

“Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretense.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Feelings, whether of compassion or irritation, should be welcomed, recognized, and treated on an absolutely equal basis; because both are ourselves. The tangerine I am eating is me. The mustard greens I am planting are me. I plant with all my heart and mind. I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath. Nothing should be treated more carefully than anything else. In mindfulness, compassion, irritation, mustard green plant, and teapot are all sacred.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation

“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.” ― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

“The hefty price for accepting information uncritically is that we go through life unaware that what we’ve accepted as impossible may in fact be quite possible.” ― Ellen J. Langer, Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility

“If something is presented as an accepted truth, alternative ways of thinking do not even come up for consideration.” ― Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness

“Boredom can be just another construct of the mind.... There is always something new to notice.” ― Ellen Langer, Emotional Intelligence: Mindfulness

“Most of us move through the day without recognizing the alternatives we have and actively deciding among them. As a result, we give up the feeling of control and mastery that would be ours were we to mindfully create options and then select among them. When we passively move through our day, we set ourselves up to feel like victims. All too often people feel as though they have no choice in situations where others, although no different except in their outlook, actively create their world. It’s a powerful advantage to feel in control, especially in the face of entirely new and different situations, where uncertainty is likely to be greatest. ― Ellen J. Langer, On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity

“Our actions are all too frequently driven rather than undertaken in awareness, driven by those perfectly ordinary thoughts and impulses that run through the mind like a coursing river, if not a waterfall. We get caught up in the torrent and it winds up submerging our lives as it carries us to places we may not wish to go and may not even realize we are headed for.” ― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

“Many of us live like dead people because we live without awareness. We carry our dead bodies with us and circulate throughout the world. We are pulled into the past or we are pulled forward into the future or we are caught by our projects or our despair and anger. We are not truly alive; we are not inhabited by awareness of the miracle of being alive.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death, No Fear

“The next time you feel a sense of dissatisfaction, of something being missing or not quite right, turn inward as an experiment. See if you can capture the energy of that very moment. Instead of picking up a magazine or going to the movies, calling a friend or looking for something to eat or acting up in one way or another, make a place for yourself. Sit down and enter into your breathing, if only for a few minutes. Don't look for anything - neither flowers nor light nor a beautiful view. Don't extol the virtues of anything or condemn the inadequacy of anything. Don't even think to yourself, "I am going inward now." Just sit. Reside at the center of the world. Let things be as they are.” ― Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

“We overeat because there are signals and cues around us that tell us to eat. It’s simply not in our nature to pause after every bite and contemplate whether we’re full. As we eat, we unknowingly—mindlessly—look for signals or cues that we’ve had enough.” ― Brian Wansink, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think

Articles Related to Mindlessness

Want to learn more? Here are some related articles that might be helpful.

Books Related to Mindlessness

Here are some books that may help you learn even more.

Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More than We Think - Brian Wansink
Mindfulness - Ellen J Langer
The Power of Mindful Learning - Ellen J Langer
Mindlessness: The Corruption of Mindfulness in a Culture of Narcissism - Thomas E Joiner
The Miracle of Mindfulness - Thich Nhat Hanh

Final Thoughts on Mindlessness

We all fall into mindless states at one time or another, whether it's because we are tired, overwhelmed, bored, or just because it's easier to work on autopilot sometimes. These moments of mindlessness may not necessarily be problematic if they are short and if we still feel that we are actively present in our own lives. However, excessive mindlessness can cause us to feel that we aren’t actively participating in our lives.

You may feel that you’re not enjoying your food, that you’re spending too much time on your smartphone, and that you’re not enjoying your friends or family enough because you’re never really present. If this is the case mindlessness may have become a problem and it may be time to address the mindlessness, to make a conscious effort to be more present, and be more mindful in your own life. Luckily, the very act of noticing that you are too mindless too often may be the hardest part of your journey towards a more connected, more mindful life.

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References

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Kabat-Zinn, J. (1982). An outpatient program in behavioral medicine for chronic pain patients based on the practice of mindfulness meditation: Theoretical considerations and preliminary results. General hospital psychiatry, 4(1), 33-47.
Langer, E. J. (2000). Mindful learning. Current directions in psychological science, 9(6), 220-223.
Langner, R., Willmes, K., Chatterjee, A., Eickhoff, S. B., & Sturm, W. (2010). Energetic effects of stimulus intensity on prolonged simple reaction-time performance. Psychological research, 74(5), 499-512.
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