We all know we ought not to doomscroll, or to make snarky comments, or to snack mindlessly, or to endlessly replay in our minds that conversation where we felt misunderstood or slighted. And this ”ought” is not imposed from the outside. It’s not that we’ll be judged by someone. It’s just that if we want to be happy, if we want to get things done, if we want to experience joy and enthusiasm and meaning and fun, we’d better not do those things. Not too much, anyway.

We even know how to not do them. It’s not rocket science in the first place, and there are plenty of genuinely effective methods out there just one Google search away. But sometimes… we do those things anyway. As entrepreneur Derek Sivers famously put it (I’m told), if information was the answer, we’d all be billionaires with 6-pack abs.

(In the interest of transparency, let me just state that the practice I describe in this post hasn’t made me a billionaire with 6-pack abs. But give it time.)

To stop doing something that is holding us back, we need to be vigilant. To not miss opportunities to do things that move us forward, we need to be vigilant. We know what benefits us and what harms us, and all that remains is to actually do the former and not do the latter.

There is a Pāli word for this vigilance, this diligence. It’s appamāda, translated as ‘heedfulness’. (Appamāda is the negation of pamāda, meaning ‘heedlessness’ or ‘negligence’.) The Buddha was famously bullish on appamāda, calling it the quality that encompasses all skillful qualities. In fact, according to the Pāli canon, his last words to his followers were "appamādena sampādetha" – bring your task to completion through heedfulness.

It would be nice if we could just decide to be heedful. But knowing myself, it’s clear to me that if I pledged right now to be heedful every waking hour of the rest of my life, it would simply not happen. I would be enthusiastic about it for a couple of hours, and then, come evening, I would start to forget. Tomorrow morning I would see a reminder on my calendar and feel another rush of excitement – but only for a short while. And a week from now, everything would be back to the way it was.

But there is something I can do. I can be heedful for twenty minutes, or forty-five. I can train that muscle.

And that is what I am doing: heedfulness workouts.

A heedfulness workout is a simple thing: I just decide I’m going to be heedful for some fixed amount of time. Sometimes I set a timer for 20 minutes or so; more often, I simply decide to practice to the top or bottom of the hour, or something similarly salient. Usually it’s no less than 10 minutes and no more than an hour and a half.

During the workout I pay attention to what I’m doing and how I’m doing it and to the myriad small choices I’m making like what to work on next after finishing some task. When I notice there’s a choice to make, I try to take the most beneficial option, not the most salient or tempting one. And that’s pretty much all there is to it.

I realize that this description is a bit scant on the details, so I’m going to give some examples of the kinds of things that may happen in a heedfulness workout. But I want to emphasize that it’s not a list of things you need to do or boxes you need to tick. The particulars aren’t the point. The point is noticing when you are about to make a choice – implicitly or explicitly – and trying to choose the best option with the information you have.

Here are some of the kinds of things I might notice during a heedfulness workout and what I might think and do in response.

• Observation: I’m writing an article, and I’m having difficulty formulating my thoughts. I feel an urge to switch to a different browser tab and read something entertaining instead.
  Response: Okay, there’s this urge, but let’s not follow it right now. Let’s just type something correct-ish and fix it later.
• Observation: My shoulders are tense.
  Response: Let them relax.
• Observation: I’m about to go for a walk, but I feel a bit peckish. Should I eat something before I go?
  Response: Great! If I get hungry during the walk, I get to practice not being bothered by it.

I reiterate that the point of the practice is not to make those exact same observations and respond in exactly the same way. What comes up, and how you should respond to it, depends on your state and your circumstances.

Sometimes positive emotions arise during the practice: excitement or exhilaration born of an expansive feeling of freedom – the freedom to do things that matter to me, to do what moves things forward. At other times, I don’t feel anything particularly remarkable.

And sure enough, training the heedfulness muscle is having an effect outside of the workouts. Curiously, in my case, it’s not so much a feeling of being able to exert more force against unhelpful impulses (although that’s probably happening too) but more like… things loosening up. The mind being less rigid and slightly less controlled by habitual patterns.

Sometimes, outside of a workout, I reach for my phone for stimulation, catch myself, and stop. Other times, the conscious thought arises, “Hey, I could be heedful about this situation.” And then there are times when I reach for the thought deliberately: “Let me try sprinkling a little heedfulness on this.”  The image is of a salt shaker filled with savoury goodness.

And that little sprinkling of heedfulness can turn an unpalatable situation into a delectable one.