Daniel sent us this one — he's been experimenting with meditation on and off for years, and as someone with ADHD he finds the traditional sit-down-and-focus-on-your-breath approach pretty difficult. But here's the interesting part: he's noticed that when he's doing repetitive mundane tasks, he sometimes slips into this really peaceful state spontaneously. No inner voice nagging him about breathing patterns, no pressure to achieve calmness of thought. He's wondering if this state has a name, and whether any meditative traditions have specifically worked with practices that bridge deliberate meditation and everyday tasks.
This is one of those questions where the answer is both "yes, absolutely" and "it depends which tradition you're talking to." The state he's describing isn't some fringe phenomenon — it's central to multiple major contemplative traditions, they just use different language for it.
My brother's been washing dishes for enlightenment and nobody told me.
I mean, unironically, yes. Thich Nhat Hanh wrote an entire passage about washing dishes that's become one of the most quoted pieces of mindfulness literature in the West. His exact line was "wash the dishes to wash the dishes" — not to get them done, not to move on to the next thing. The idea being that the dish itself, the warm water, the sensation of your hands — that is the meditation. He wasn't being poetic for the sake of it. He was describing a specific practice.
"Wash the dishes to wash the dishes." That's either profound or the world's most efficient way to get out of doing the dishes by reframing procrastination as spiritual practice.
That tension is actually where a lot of the interesting questions live. Because the thing Daniel's describing — entering a peaceful state through repetitive activity, without the meta-cognitive overhead of "am I meditating correctly right now" — maps onto what some traditions call "informal practice" versus "formal practice." Formal practice is sitting on the cushion, timer running, specific technique. Informal practice is bringing that same quality of attention to everyday activities. And here's the part that doesn't get said enough: for some people, especially people with attentional differences, informal practice isn't a supplement to formal practice. It might be a more accessible entry point.
That's a pretty significant reframe. Most meditation apps and courses treat the sitting practice as the real thing and the everyday mindfulness as the bonus round.
And the research on ADHD and meditation bears this out. A 2024 -analysis in the Journal of Attention Disorders looked at mindfulness-based interventions for adults with ADHD. The finding was that mindfulness training did produce significant improvements in attention and emotional regulation, but the effect sizes were larger when the intervention included what they called "informal mindfulness components" — practicing during everyday activities, not just formal sitting meditation.
The -analysis is basically saying the dish-washing monks were onto something.
The dish-washing monks and also, interestingly, a lot of Zen practitioners who would probably be annoyed at being reduced to "dish-washing monks.
I'm sure they'd mindfully accept it.
Let me give you some specific terminology, because Daniel asked if this state has a name. In Zen Buddhism, there's a practice called shikantaza, which literally translates to "just sitting." It's associated with the Soto school, particularly through Dogen, the thirteenth-century Japanese monk who founded it. Shikantaza is not concentration on a single object and it's not an attempt to empty the mind. It's more like being fully present without grasping at thoughts or pushing them away. Dogen described it as "thinking of not-thinking" — which sounds like a koan but is actually a technical description.
"Thinking of not-thinking." I can see why they spent centuries arguing about what that means.
But here's the connection to Daniel's experience: shikantaza is sometimes described as a state of "effortless effort" or "practice without gaining ideas." You're not trying to achieve a particular mental state — you're just present. And Dogen extended this beyond the cushion. He wrote about how cooking, cleaning, walking — all of it could be practice. He didn't see a hard boundary between formal meditation and daily activity. There's a famous phrase from his work: "practice and enlightenment are one.
Daniel's spontaneous peaceful state during repetitive tasks — in the Soto Zen framework, that's not a glitch in his meditation practice. That might actually be the practice.
And I think that's a genuinely liberating idea for someone who's been struggling with the "sit still and focus on your breath" model. The model itself might be the problem, not the person.
Although I do wonder — if you tell someone with ADHD that their spontaneous zoning-out during laundry is actually advanced Zen practice, are you giving them a useful framework or just validating avoidance?
That's the right question to ask. The state Daniel's describing — peaceful, disengaged from the task, mind wandering but not anxiously — sounds more like what psychologists call "flow-adjacent" or possibly a mild dissociative state, which isn't necessarily the same thing as mindful awareness. In mindfulness, the quality of attention is supposed to be sharp and present, not dull or checked-out.
There's a difference between "I'm peacefully watching my thoughts drift by while folding laundry" and "I've folded seventeen towels and have no memory of the last ten minutes.
And that second one — the automatic pilot mode — is actually what mindfulness traditions are trying to interrupt, not cultivate. The key variable is whether there's awareness present. If Daniel is aware that he's peaceful, aware of the sensations, the rhythm, the texture of the activity — that's mindfulness. If he surfaces twenty minutes later and realizes he was in some kind of trance, that's different.
How would someone even tell the difference in the moment? "Am I mindfully present or am I just zoned out?" feels like exactly the kind of -cognitive spiral that kills the state you're trying to observe.
This is where the practice element actually matters. The ability to know the difference — to recognize the quality of your own attention — is a skill that develops over time. The Buddhist psychological model has a term for this: sampajanna in Pali, usually translated as "clear comprehension" or "situational awareness." It's considered a distinct mental factor from sati, which is mindfulness or bare attention. Sati notices what's happening. Sampajanna understands the context and quality of what's happening. You need both.
Sati is the raw data stream, sampajanna is the metadata.
That's a clean way to put it. And in the traditional framework, you develop both together through practice. The reason a seasoned meditator can tell whether they're mindfully present or just spaced out is that they've trained sampajanna alongside sati.
Which brings us back to Daniel's question about traditions that specifically bridge deliberate meditation and everyday tasks. The Zen approach seems like one answer. Are there others?
And they approach this from different angles, which is useful because different frameworks will click for different people. First, there's the Theravada tradition, particularly in the lineage of Mahasi Sayadaw, the Burmese monk who developed a highly influential vipassana method in the mid-twentieth century. In that tradition, they explicitly teach that mindfulness should be maintained during all activities — walking, eating, reaching for things, opening doors. They have a specific technique called "noting," where you mentally label experiences as they arise. " The idea is to maintain continuity of awareness between formal sitting sessions.
That sounds exhausting. I'd be noting "noting, noting" within about forty seconds and then I'd need to note that I was noting the noting, and then I'd need to lie down.
You're not wrong that it can become recursive and effortful. But the point of the noting practice isn't to maintain it perfectly — it's to develop the habit of recognizing what the mind is doing. And here's the relevant part for Daniel: in the Mahasi tradition, walking meditation is considered equally important to sitting meditation. It's not a break from practice. It is practice. They alternate sitting and walking periods, typically forty-five minutes of each.
The bridge Daniel's looking for exists, but it's structured and intentional — not exactly the spontaneous state he's describing.
Most traditions that have formalized the bridge between meditation and daily activity still emphasize that you build the capacity through deliberate practice first, then it starts to show up spontaneously in daily life. It's rare for a tradition to say "just do the dishes and you'll become enlightened.
Although Thich Nhat Hanh comes pretty close.
He does, and he's worth spending a moment on because his approach is probably the most accessible for someone in Daniel's position. Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Zen master who developed a style of teaching that was deliberately simple and practical. His core instruction was basically: pay attention to what you're doing, and do it with kindness. His book "The Miracle of Mindfulness" opens with a chapter about washing dishes, and he tells a story about a friend who watched him washing dishes slowly and carefully. The friend said something like "you wash dishes as if you were arranging altar flowers." And Thich Nhat Hanh's response was essentially: yes, because the dishes are as real and as worthy of attention as anything else.
There's something almost defiant in that. Refusing to hierarchize experience — the altar and the dish soap are the same category of thing.
That's exactly the philosophical move he's making. And it's not just Zen — there's a current of this in Christian contemplative tradition too. Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century Carmelite lay brother, wrote a book called "The Practice of the Presence of God." His whole practice was maintaining awareness of divine presence while doing kitchen work. He was a cook and a sandal repairer. He described being as present with God while scrubbing pots as he was during formal prayer. The book is still in print, and it's basically a manual for what Daniel's describing.
A seventeenth-century French monk who found his deepest spiritual practice in kitchen drudgery. That's comforting, actually.
Let me pull on another thread here, because there's a concept from psychology that maps onto Daniel's experience in a way that's distinct from the religious frameworks. It's called "automaticity" — the ability to perform a task without conscious attention because the procedural memory has been so well-learned. When you're doing something repetitive and well-practiced, the brain's default mode network becomes more active. That's the network associated with mind-wandering, self-referential thought, and what psychologists call "autobiographical planning.
When I'm spacing out during a repetitive task, my brain isn't idle — it's actually doing a specific kind of processing.
And the default mode network isn't the enemy. There's been a tendency in some meditation literature to treat DMN activity as something to be suppressed, but that's an oversimplification. The DMN is involved in creative problem-solving, integrating memories, and what researchers call "mental time travel" — imagining future scenarios. The peaceful state Daniel describes might involve a kind of balanced DMN activity where the mind is active but not anxious, wandering but not ruminating.
That's a useful distinction — wandering versus ruminating. One is exploratory, the other is stuck in a loop.
ADHD adds another layer here. People with ADHD often show atypical DMN connectivity patterns. There's research suggesting that the DMN in ADHD brains doesn't deactivate as reliably when task-positive networks need to engage — which is part of why sustained attention on externally-imposed tasks can be difficult. But the flip side is that the ADHD brain may be particularly good at making creative associations during DMN-dominant states.
The same neurological quirk that makes it hard to sit still and focus on breath might make it easier to access useful mind-wandering states during repetitive activity.
That's the hypothesis. I want to be careful here because the neuroscience is still evolving and I'm not a neurologist — I'm a retired pediatrician who reads a lot. But the pattern in the literature suggests that what looks like a deficit in one context can be an advantage in another. The challenge is that most meditation instruction is designed for neurotypical brains and doesn't account for these differences.
Which brings us to a practical question: if someone with ADHD wants to work with this spontaneous peaceful state rather than against it, what do they actually do? Is there a practice, or is it just "notice when it happens and enjoy it"?
I think there's a middle path, and it draws from several of the traditions we've mentioned. First, you recognize that the repetitive-task peaceful state is already a form of practice — not a failed attempt at "real" meditation. That reframe alone can reduce the guilt and frustration that often accompanies meditation attempts for people with ADHD.
The guilt of "I should be meditating properly" is probably doing more harm than any missed meditation session.
There's actually research on that. A 2023 study in Mindfulness journal looked at what they called "meditation-related adverse effects" and found that feelings of inadequacy and self-criticism about meditation practice were among the most commonly reported negative experiences. People were stressing themselves out about not being calm enough.
The meditation anxiety spiral. Beautifully self-defeating.
Step one is dropping the "formal meditation is the real practice" assumption. Step two is actually working with the repetitive-task state intentionally. This is where you can borrow from the Mahasi tradition without adopting the full noting framework. The idea is to occasionally check in during the activity — not constantly, not effortfully, but just enough to know that you're present. "Oh, I'm folding laundry. I can feel the fabric. My mind is quiet. This is nice." That's it. A moment of recognition.
You're not trying to sustain continuous attention. You're just touching base with awareness periodically.
And for someone with ADHD, that intermittent check-in model is often much more sustainable than the continuous-focus model. It works with the attentional style rather than against it. There's a teacher named Jeff Warren who writes about this — he has ADHD himself and teaches meditation. He talks about "meditation for people who can't meditate" and emphasizes that brief moments of recognition, repeated many times, are just as valid as sustained concentration.
The distributed practice model.
That's a good way to think about it. And the third piece is something that comes from the Zen tradition but has been adapted in contemporary approaches: treating the activity itself as the object of meditation, not as a distraction from the breath or some other "proper" object. If folding laundry reliably produces a peaceful state, then folding laundry is your practice. The laundry is the meditation object.
This feels like it should be more controversial than it is. "The laundry is the meditation object" — some traditional teachers would probably have thoughts about that.
And some would say it's exactly what they've been teaching for centuries. The disagreement is really about whether everyday activities can be a primary practice or only a supplement to formal sitting. But here's the thing — if formal sitting meditation is consistently frustrating and produces more avoidance than benefit, then insisting on it as the "real" practice is counterproductive. You're not helping someone by telling them the only valid door is the one they can't get through.
The accessibility argument. Meet people where they are, not where the tradition says they should be.
That's not just a modern therapeutic accommodation. There's actually a traditional Buddhist concept that supports this. It's called upaya, which translates to "skillful means." The idea is that the dharma should be adapted to the capacities and circumstances of the person receiving them. Different people need different entry points. The Buddha himself was described as tailoring his teachings to his audience. So the idea that someone with a different attentional profile might benefit from a different approach to practice — that's not a corruption of the tradition. It's arguably more faithful to the tradition's own principles than insisting on a one-size-fits-all method.
Upaya as the theological justification for "you do you, but mindfully.
I'd phrase it more carefully than that, but the underlying principle is sound. And I want to mention one more framework that I think Daniel would find useful, because it gives language to exactly what he's describing. In some contemporary mindfulness literature, there's a distinction between "focused attention" practices and "open monitoring" practices. Focused attention is what it sounds like — you pick an object, usually the breath, and you sustain attention on it. When the mind wanders, you bring it back. That's the default mode of most meditation apps.
Which is also the mode that's hardest for a lot of people with ADHD.
Open monitoring is different. Instead of focusing on a single object, you maintain an open, receptive awareness of whatever arises — thoughts, sensations, sounds, emotions. You're not trying to control the contents of awareness. You're just noticing what's there. This is closer to what Daniel's describing during repetitive tasks. The mind is open, not tightly focused, but there's awareness present.
The research on this? Do these two modes actually show up differently in the brain?
Neuroimaging studies have found that focused attention and open monitoring engage different neural networks. Focused attention tends to activate regions involved in sustained attention and cognitive control — the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate. Open monitoring tends to involve more widespread sensory processing and reduced top-down control. It's a different mode of attention entirely.
When Daniel's in his peaceful laundry-folding state, he might be naturally doing open monitoring without having been taught to do it.
That's exactly what it sounds like to me. The repetitive task provides enough structure to keep the mind from spinning off into anxious rumination, but it's not demanding enough to require focused attention. That leaves the mind in a state of receptive awareness. It's actually a pretty ideal setup for open monitoring practice, and it's one that some meditation teachers deliberately engineer.
I'm struck by how much of this conversation has been about taking something Daniel already does naturally and saying "that counts." Which is either deeply validating or suspiciously convenient.
I think it's both, and that's worth being honest about. There's a real risk of what you might call "mindfulness gentrification" — taking any pleasant experience and slapping a meditative label on it to make it sound more impressive. But there's also a genuine recognition across multiple contemplative traditions that formal sitting meditation isn't the only path, and that the qualities of mind cultivated in meditation — presence, non-judgmental awareness, acceptance — can and do arise in other contexts.
The difference between appropriation and recognition probably comes down to intentionality. If you're just enjoying a pleasant zone-out, that's fine, but it's not practice. If you're deliberately cultivating awareness during everyday activities, that's different.
I think Daniel's question suggests he's interested in the deliberate cultivation part. He's noticed a state that arises spontaneously and he's wondering how to work with it intentionally. That's not just seeking validation — that's looking for a practice.
Let's get concrete. If someone wants to develop this — to work with the spontaneous peaceful state during repetitive tasks and make it more intentional without ruining it with effort — what's the actual instruction? A listener hears this and thinks "yes, that's me, what do I do on Monday?
Here's what I'd suggest, drawing from the traditions we've discussed. Pick one repetitive daily activity — dishes, folding laundry, sweeping, whatever reliably produces that peaceful state. Commit to doing it with full attention once a day. Not every time. When you start, take three intentional breaths first — not as the meditation, just as a signal to yourself that this time is different. Then do the activity at a slightly slower pace than usual. Not dramatically slow, just unhurried. When you notice the peaceful state arising, let it be there without trying to hold onto it. When your mind wanders off into planning or worrying, that's fine — just notice and return to the sensations of the activity. That's it. Five to ten minutes.
The three breaths as a ritual marker — that's clever. It creates a boundary without requiring a whole formal sitting session.
It's borrowed from a lot of traditions. Zen practitioners often begin any activity with a brief moment of stillness and a bow. The three breaths serve the same function — they mark the transition from automatic to intentional. And here's the key instruction that I think is easy to miss: the goal is not to stay perfectly present the whole time. The goal is to notice when you've drifted and gently return. Each return is a rep. Each return is the practice. If you drift fifty times and return fifty times, that's fifty reps of the exact skill you're trying to build.
That's a much more ADHD-friendly framing than "maintain unbroken concentration." The return is the rep. I like that.
It's actually faithful to how traditional meditation teachers describe it. The Tibetan teacher Mingyur Rinpoche talks about meditation as "short moments, many times." Not long periods of sustained concentration, but brief moments of recognition repeated throughout the day. That framework is inherently more accessible for someone with attentional variability.
"Short moments, many times." That might be the most useful four words in this entire conversation.
It's a good one. And it connects to something else I want to mention — there's a growing body of research on what's called "brief mindfulness training." A 2025 study in Behavioural Brain Research found that brief, repeated mindfulness exercises produced measurable changes in attention and stress reactivity, comparable in some measures to longer formal practice.
The microdosing model has empirical backing. That's good to know.
It makes intuitive sense. If you're trying to build a habit of mindful awareness in daily life, practicing in short bursts throughout the day is probably more ecologically valid than doing forty-five minutes on a cushion and then being mindless the rest of the time. The transfer of training is more direct.
I want to circle back to something you mentioned earlier — the distinction between focused attention and open monitoring. It seems like Daniel's spontaneous state is closer to open monitoring, but the practice you just described sounds more like focused attention on the activity. Is there a tension there?
The practice I described starts with focused attention on the activity — the sensations of the dishes, the fabric — as a way to stabilize attention. But the goal is to eventually settle into a more open awareness where the activity is happening in the foreground but you're not gripping it tightly. The activity becomes the anchor, but the awareness is spacious rather than narrow. This is actually similar to how shikantaza is often taught — you begin by attending to the breath or the posture, and then you gradually let the attention become more open and receptive.
Focused attention is the training wheels, open monitoring is the ride.
That's a reasonable metaphor, though I'd add that some people may find it easier to start with open monitoring and never need the training wheels. The traditions tend to sequence them in a particular order, but I'm not sure the evidence supports that one sequence is universally better.
Which brings us back to upaya — skillful means. Different entry points for different minds.
And I think the most important thing I can say to someone in Daniel's position is this: the fact that formal sitting meditation has been difficult doesn't mean you're bad at meditation. It might mean you've been using a method that doesn't fit your mind. The spontaneous peaceful state during repetitive tasks isn't a consolation prize — it's information about what works for you. Build on that.
There's something almost obvious about this in retrospect. If someone told you "I've tried running and it hurts my knees, but I've noticed that swimming feels great and puts me in a flow state," you wouldn't tell them to keep running. You'd say "great, swim." But with meditation, there's this weird orthodoxy that sitting and following the breath is the real thing and everything else is a compromise.
Part of that is historical accident. The mindfulness boom in the West was heavily shaped by a few specific teachers and traditions — particularly the insight meditation movement, which emphasized sitting practice. And then the apps standardized that into a product. The result is that a lot of people think meditation equals sitting still and focusing on breath, full stop. But if you look at the actual landscape of contemplative practice globally and historically, it's much more diverse. Walking meditation, chanting, prostrations, work practice, dance, martial arts — all of these have been used as vehicles for cultivating attention and awareness.
The meditation app industrial complex flattened a three-dimensional landscape into a single dimension.
That's a fair critique. And to be clear, the apps have done genuine good in making basic mindfulness instruction accessible to millions of people. But they've also created a narrow definition of what meditation is, and that narrow definition excludes a lot of people who might benefit from other approaches.
Including, potentially, a lot of people with ADHD who've tried Headspace or Calm and concluded that meditation isn't for them.
And the ADHD piece matters here because the prevalence of ADHD in adults is somewhere around four to five percent globally, and a much higher percentage of people have attentional traits that fall short of a clinical diagnosis but still affect how they experience meditation. We're talking about a substantial portion of the population for whom the standard approach might be suboptimal.
I'm curious about one thing. You mentioned earlier that the peaceful state during repetitive tasks might involve the default mode network. Is there any research specifically on DMN activity during these kinds of activities in people with ADHD?
There's some relevant work, though not as much as I'd like. A 2024 paper in NeuroImage: Clinical looked at DMN connectivity during low-demand tasks in adults with ADHD and found that they showed different connectivity patterns compared to neurotypical controls — specifically, less anticorrelation between the DMN and task-positive networks. The interpretation was that the ADHD brain maintains a kind of "open channel" to internally-directed thought even during external tasks. That can be a liability when you need to focus on something demanding, but it might be an asset during repetitive tasks where internal and external attention can coexist comfortably.
The same neural configuration that makes a lecture hall feel like torture might make a laundry room feel like a sanctuary.
That's a poetic way to put it, but the neuroscience roughly supports it. And it connects to something I think is underappreciated in meditation discourse: the importance of finding the right level of stimulation. Meditation isn't about eliminating stimulation — it's about finding a balance where the mind can settle. For some people, silence and stillness is overstimulating in its own way because the mind rushes in to fill the void. A mild, repetitive task provides just enough external structure to occupy the task-positive networks without overwhelming them, leaving the DMN free to do its thing without spiraling into rumination.
Not too much stimulation, not too little.
And the "just right" level is going to be different for different brains. That's why a one-size-fits-all approach to meditation is fundamentally limited.
To pull this together for the question that started this whole conversation — does this state have a name, and are there traditions that bridge deliberate meditation and everyday tasks — the answer seems to be: it has several names depending on the tradition, and yes, multiple traditions have developed practices around exactly this.
The names, just to list them clearly: in Zen, it's related to shikantaza and the broader concept of practice-enlightenment unity. In Theravada, it's captured by the continuity of mindfulness between formal sessions, often supported by noting practice and walking meditation. In Thich Nhat Hanh's tradition, it's simply mindfulness in daily life. In Christian contemplation, Brother Lawrence called it the practice of the presence of God. In contemporary psychology, it maps onto open monitoring and brief mindfulness training. The state itself doesn't have one universal name because different traditions slice the phenomenological pie differently. But the core experience — a peaceful, aware presence during simple activity — is recognized and cultivated across traditions.
For someone who's been struggling with formal sitting meditation, the practical takeaway is: stop treating the spontaneous peaceful state as a consolation prize and start treating it as the practice. Work with it intentionally. Short moments, many times. The return is the rep.
That's it. And I'd add one more thing: be patient with the process of making it intentional. The first few times you try to bring deliberate awareness to an activity that's normally automatic, it can feel awkward or even disrupt the peaceful state. That's normal. The intentionality is a new ingredient, and it takes time for the mind to integrate it without the whole thing feeling forced. Give it a couple of weeks before deciding whether it's working.
There's a paradox there — you're trying to be intentional about something that works precisely because it's not effortful. The trick is to add just enough intention to make it practice without adding so much that you break the spell.
That's the art. It's not something you can get from instructions alone — you have to feel your way into it. Which, now that I say it out loud, is probably why meditation traditions have always emphasized direct experience over conceptual understanding. The map isn't the territory, and the instructions aren't the practice.
The map isn't the territory. Which is itself a concept, so we're still on the map.
Now we're doing the infinite regress thing, which is probably a good sign we should wrap up.
Before we do — one practical note. If someone wants to read more about this, where would you point them?
Thich Nhat Hanh's "The Miracle of Mindfulness" is probably the single best entry point for the everyday-mindfulness-as-primary-practice approach. For the Zen perspective, Shunryu Suzuki's "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" touches on shikantaza and practice in daily life. And for the ADHD-specific angle, Jeff Warren's work is worth seeking out — he's written for various meditation publications and co-authored a book on meditation for different mind types. None of these are obscure texts; they're all widely available.
If you just want to try the practice? Pick a chore. Notice when you drift. That's it.
That's it.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the high medieval period, a manuscript on epiphyte ecology from Tierra del Fuego described a species of mistletoe that germinates exclusively on the bark of a single tree species and spends its first seven years growing no visible structure above the bark line — the entire plant exists as an internal network of filaments inside the host's living tissue before it ever produces a leaf.
Seven years underground, or under-bark, just...
That's the most patient organism I've ever heard of.
This has been My Weird Prompts, produced by the ever-mysterious Hilbert Flumingtop. You can find every episode at myweirdprompts.com, or search for us on Spotify. If you enjoyed this, leave us a review — it helps other people find the show. Until next time, may your laundry folding be peaceful and your meditation apps be optional.
