Alternatives to Meditation for People Who Can't Sit Still

Ten minutes on a cushion, eyes shut, and by minute two you are rewriting an email in your head. If that is you, there are good alternatives to meditation. Most of them work through the body first: you move, breathe in a set pattern, put cold water on your face or give your senses one loud thing to attend to. None of them ask you to sit still and empty your mind.

Why sitting still is hard for so many people

In 2010, Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert used an iPhone app to ping 2,250 volunteers at random moments and ask what they were doing and what they were thinking about. People's minds were somewhere other than the task in front of them 46.9% of the time. Their paper in Science carried the line "A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind."

Classic mindfulness meditation asks you to notice that wandering and return to the breath, over and over. Some people love it. Plenty of others, including many who type "alternatives to meditation for ADHD" into Google, find a quiet room gives the mind more room to wander. What they want is something with a stronger signal than their own breathing.

Alternatives to meditation with research behind them

Breathe in a cyclic sigh

This is the one with the cleanest head-to-head comparison. In a 2023 study in Cell Reports Medicine, Melis Yilmaz Balban, David Spiegel, Andrew Huberman and colleagues at Stanford gave 108 adults one five-minute exercise a day for 28 days. One group did mindfulness meditation. The others did one of three breathing patterns. Cyclic sighing (two inhales through the nose, the second one topping up the lungs, then a long slow exhale through the mouth) produced a bigger daily rise in positive mood than mindfulness meditation, and a bigger drop in breathing rate. The mood effect grew the more days people practised.

Walk

Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz at Stanford published a set of experiments in 2014 in which people walked or sat before creative thinking tests. In one experiment creative output rose by an average of 60% when people walked. Some of the walkers were on a treadmill facing a blank wall, so the effect came from the walking itself and not the scenery.

Walk somewhere green

Scenery does add something, though. Gregory Bratman and colleagues at Stanford had volunteers take a 90-minute walk either through a natural area or along a busy road (PNAS, 2015). After the nature walk, people reported less rumination (the same thought looping) and brain scans showed lower activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex, an area linked to rumination. The city walkers showed no such change. If you have a lot of looping thoughts, our piece on how to stop overthinking goes further into it.

Cold water on your face

When your face meets cold water, mammals (people included) trigger what physiologists call the dive reflex, and the heart slows. In some marine mammals the drop is about 90%. In people it is smaller. A 1978 study by Dexter Speck and David Bruce, reported in Scientific American, measured drops of 10% or more. A sink of cold water and a short face dip fits between two meetings.

Write for 15 minutes

Psychologist James Pennebaker's expressive writing method has people write about what is on their mind for 15 to 20 minutes per session over four consecutive days. You write without stopping and without editing.

Do one thing at a time

Single-tasking is meditation with your eyes open. Wash the dishes and only wash the dishes. Feel the water temperature, the weight of the plate, the smell of the soap. Ryan Gauthier, who practises at Henry Ford Health's Center for Integrative Medicine, suggests this kind of everyday attention for people who cannot sit, along with swimming, cycling, cooking and playing music. "Any activity where you lose yourself in the practice of it" counts, in his words.

What these alternatives have in common

Every one of them gives your attention a strong physical anchor. A long exhale. Feet hitting the ground. Cold on the skin. A pen that cannot stop. The mind follows the loudest signal in the room, and these practices make the present moment louder than the thought loop.

A cold splash is over in seconds, while breath-watching can take a whole session to settle. Our own pick follows the same idea.

One spray of chilcuague, like meditation for people who can't meditate

Dragon Breath is a mouth spray of chilcuague (Heliopsis longipes), a golden root from the Sierra Gorda mountains of Central Mexico. Mexican communities have chewed the root and used it as a spice for generations, and ethnobotanists including Cilia-López and colleagues have recorded those uses. The root carries affinin (also called spilanthol), measured at 6.9 to 8.5 mg per gram of root.

One spray takes about 10 seconds. First an earthy, slightly peppery taste for a second, then a bright electric buzz spreads across your tongue and mouth. Your mouth floods with saliva. Then a clean, fresh feeling lingers. For those seconds there is nothing to think about except what is happening in your mouth. Attention snaps to the present, and you come out of it switched on and present.

How to use it as a ritual

It works as a ritual the way the other practices do. One spray before you open your laptop. One between meetings, in place of scrolling. One before a run or a hard conversation. One customer, filmed on their first spray, said "Oh wow, the saliva flow." Another, in a reaction video moments after one spray, said "Definitely energized."

1. Spray once into your mouth.
2. Close your mouth and keep your attention on the buzz as it spreads, for about 10 seconds.
3. Let the saliva come. Swallow when you are ready.

Start with one spray. Once you know the feeling, you can go up to five. A 50 ml bottle holds 250+ sprays and fits in a pocket, so it comes with you to the desk, the car and the gym. Loose root sits open to air and light. The extract stays sealed inside Miron violet glass, which keeps light and air off it, so the last spray tastes like the first. The root is wild-harvested from growth zones the Mara team selects with the help of local elders, then dual-extracted in organic solutions.

For more on the plant itself, read our full guide to chilcuague, the golden root.

Dragon Breath considerations

If you're pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or allergic to plants in the daisy family, ask your doctor before using it.

Questions people ask

What can I do instead of meditation?

Try cyclic sighing for five minutes, a walk, a cold water face splash, 15 minutes of nonstop writing or one task done with full attention.

Is breathwork better than mindfulness meditation?

In the 2023 Stanford study by Balban and colleagues, five minutes a day of cyclic sighing produced a bigger rise in positive mood than five minutes of mindfulness meditation over 28 days. Both groups improved.

What are alternatives to meditation for ADHD?

Short practices with a strong physical signal top most lists: a walk, a cold splash or a sensory ritual. Dragon Breath gives about 10 seconds of buzz across the tongue and mouth that is hard to ignore.

How long does the Dragon Breath buzz last?

The bright buzz is strongest for the first several seconds, then the mouth waters and a clean, fresh feeling lingers after it.