The original algorithm
Last Updated on: March 3, 2026
You set your goals for the day, made a nice hot coffee, and got started on your tasks. Some time passes and you realise you are replaying a conversation from yesterday, and your coffee has gone cold. No notification triggered it. Your own mind did that.
Your mind knows how to distract you better than any social network. It knows your wants, your desires, and exactly what pushes your buttons.
It’s easy to lament the rise of the big tech algorithms that are stealing your attention and profiting from it. And yet, you can still be in control. If it wasn’t for TikTok, something else would be taking you away from your goals if you allow it.
The truth is that you are always in control, and this problem is nothing new. Meditation evolved thousands of years ago as a way of keeping your mind focused, in the present, and intentional.
When you practice meditation you are training your mind to notice distraction and choose where you put your focus. Your mind is incredibly clever at distracting you with thoughts of the future (“Am I prepared for this meeting?”), the past (“Why did I skip the gym this morning?”) or even the present (“Am I meditating right?”).
It is the original algorithm, perfectly designed just for you. It has been running and growing your whole life, trained on fear, craving, and insecurity. No tech company could ever compete with that.
This is where the meditation cushion comes in. Imagine you sit to meditate, you follow your breath, and your mind drifts to an appointment today. You feel your body tense slightly and then you see it. You don’t fix it. You just name it “thinking” and come back to the breath. You repeat that every time your mind wanders. There is nothing more to it; give yourself a moment to see it, and that is all.
And just like on the cushion, the remedy works in daily life too. Think of the unconscious patterns of unlocking your phone, finding an app, scrolling the feed, opening the comments… all of this is done in a semi-conscious daze. When you catch yourself, you don’t really know how you got there, but that brief moment of realisation is an opportunity to stop.
That is the key – to catch yourself. You must simply notice what you are doing. Shine a light on it, pause for a moment, and the spell will be broken. All of a sudden you get to decide again – do you want to continue opening this app, or should you put down your phone?
Your phone is just one example. The same pattern plays out when you lose an evening to gossip, when you fall down a rabbit hole of the latest news cycle, when you binge another episode you didn’t really want to watch, or when you find yourself in the middle of an argument you didn’t mean to start.
The trigger can be different but the remedy is always the same.
Notice, and notice again.
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