9 'Good' Habits That Are A Total Waste Of Time

8. Mindfulness

It feels as though you can barely move for mindfulness initiatives at the moment. Whether it’s in the form of company-sponsored retreats, meditation apps or your weekly yoga class - everyone and their mum is telling you to clear your mind and focus on your breath these days. It could, however, be doing more harm than good.

Proper mindfulness isn't just a bit of deep breathing, there's a lot of delving that goes on. Many types of meditation are not supposed to be undertaken casually and are supposed to take the meditator on a mental and spiritual journey - with both good and bad bits. The thing is that, if neither you nor you teacher knows what to expect, rooting around in the deepest recesses of your mind can be a dangerous thing. There have been reports of people reawakening traumatic memories, suffering from dissociative fugues and even having total mental breakdowns.

Even if you don't suffer a psychotic break, much of the mindfulness industry is simply a way for companies to extract money from you for telling you to breathe. Much of these "mindfulness lite" programmes don't really do anything, because they don't actually remove the sources of our stress - work, money, et cetera.

We could probably all do with relaxing a bit, but it would be a better idea to focus on nipping stress in the bud, rather than papering over the cracks.