Mental Fitness is Replacing Mindfulness—But is That a Problem?

What kinds of stories make you turn the page or stop you from scrolling?

Is it a tip? Did you know You Can Boost Your Mental Fitness for a Healthier Brain?

Or maybe it’s a hack: Five Minutes of Mindfulness Can Improve Your Mental Fitness.

Most of us love learning about how we can do better or be better, but if you’re paying attention, you may have noticed the language the media uses when it comes to talking about mindfulness and the ways we engage with our minds. We are no longer just noticing what’s happening in the mind, we’re “training our attention” or “working on our mental fitness.”

So, why the shift? 

Mindfulness is still at the forefront of conversations about noticing our thoughts and emotions and paying attention on purpose to our mind states.

But when it comes to making mindfulness more relatable, or in some cases more marketable, it seems the language around mindfulness begins to shape-shift into something similar, but slightly different.

What’s actually changing is what these skills and tools promise—or rather, what they’ll help us actually accomplish.

“The time to start working on positive mental health outcomes should not be when a mental health crisis begins,” says Drew Ramsey.

Acting Before a Crisis

Psychiatrist and author of Healing the Modern Brain, Drew Ramsey, explains that caring for our mental health shouldn’t only begin when something has gone wrong.

“The time to start working on positive mental health outcomes should not be when a mental health crisis begins,” he says.

The vocabulary around mental fitness offers an intuitive option: We don’t have to wait for an unwanted diagnosis to practice self-care, just as we don’t need to wait to cultivate more healthy skills that support our minds.

But what are we asking it to do? And do our expectations change the practice or premise of mindfulness itself?

Kelly Ihme, PhD, an assistant professor at the U.S. Army War College, who studies mindfulness and behavioral health, worked with psychologist Maurice Sipos to develop a mindfulness-based course for senior leaders at the college. They purposely reconfigured the curriculum to refer to mindfulness by introducing terms like “mental fitness” and “attentional fitness” out of concern that the traditional terminology could come across as unscientific or quasi-religious.

For example, she describes mindfulness as the “tool used to develop attentional fitness,” comparing the distinction to physical training: “Just like you would do push-ups for your pecs and chest, push-ups aren’t the goal. It’s the musculature.” 

Why “Mental Fitness” Works

The juxtaposition of mindfulness and “fitness” sharing space together seems feasible when we consider what being “fit” actually implies. Most of us know on some level that exercise is not only necessary as a reactive response to a problem, but a proactive action taken to help us be prepared, in-shape, and ready for what may arise in the future.

If we are training, we typically are cultivating endurance, strength, increasing flexibility, or helping our bodies stay resilient in our day-to-day. 

Mindfulness is to the mind what physical fitness is to the body.

We could apply this same logic to “mental fitness” and the mind. Mindfulness is to the mind what physical fitness is to the body. We are plugging in tools that encourage our development of necessary qualities to foster over time. 

Using Language that Lands

It would make sense, then, for mindfulness to take a practical leap into spaces where mental fitness would rank as a top priority. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Walt Piatt has intentionally shifted the way he speaks about mindfulness to his soldiers.

He describes mindfulness this way: “I use the term ‘zero the mind’ like ‘zero your weapon.’” In military parlance, zeroing your weapon is the process of adjusting sights or scope so that where you aim matches where the bullet hits at a specific distance. It’s easy to see how this metaphor helps bridge the gap Piatt anticipated when asking soldiers to embrace a concept that he felt would be useful in military culture.

The way we use language can help determine whether we embrace or reject the very concept we are attempting to introduce.  

The way we use language can help determine whether we embrace or reject the very concept we are attempting to introduce. The goal has never been to eliminate mindfulness, but to help those new to the modality understand its usefulness in a space that might otherwise dismiss it. 

And unlike “mindfulness,” which can still sound vague, spiritual, or culturally loaded to some audiences, mental fitness immediately suggests something practical.

You may be asking yourself if the by-products of mental fitness are capacities we also cultivate with our mindfulness practice? A large meta-analysis of 111 randomized controlled trials involving more than 9,500 participants found that mindfulness-based interventions produced small-to-moderate improvements across several areas of cognitive functioning, including executive and sustained attention, working memory, inhibition and cognitive flexibility.

Paying attention, recognizing when attention has wandered, redirecting it, and becoming more aware of our habitual responses are skills we practice—and potentially strengthen—through mindfulness.

Perhaps what mental fitness gives us, then, isn’t an entirely new set of tools. It gives us a different way of talking about the capacities those tools may help us develop. Same tools. Different expectations for outcomes.

Are Fitness and Mindfulness the Same?

Is there really a difference between mental fitness and mindfulness?

This is where expectation comes into play. For most of us, cultivating a mindfulness practice involves a lot of observing. We are constantly noticing what the mind is doing during practice, the thoughts we are thinking, the feelings we are having while we sit, both about the practice itself and the quality of our thoughts. The information that comes from observing is critical  in understanding what’s occurring for us, both in our body and in our mind, at any given moment. Letting go of the narrative that often occurs after observing what arises in our meditation is really where nuance exists. If we are to notice what we notice without judgment, then we are utilizing the tools that develop as a result of our mindfulness practice.

“Fitness” isn’t a neutral word.

Our challenge exists in the expectation we put on the outcome of these practices. Mental fitness implies we might be moving toward a specific goal as a result of what we observe in our mindfulness practice. Having an end goal makes the process feel more tangible.

So, what happens when we focus on terminology? “Fitness” isn’t a neutral word. If something claims to make you better or more prepared as a result of doing it, you may start to question if you are reaping the rewards of your efforts. 

Researcher James Meaden looked at the role of metaphor and the mind. He examines the way we speak about the mind, and suggests this can shape the way we engage with it.  In a 2026 paper examining mindfulness and media, he highlights phrases like  “optimize your focus,” “master your emotions,” and “organize your thoughts” as examples of language that illustrate our internal experience as something to manage.

Yes/And

Language alone does not make this idea problematic, but it does put a great deal of emphasis on outcome. If mindfulness is being used as a tool to achieve a goal, like resilience, strength, or better performance, then a litmus test may follow. 

This is a case of what I like to call, Yes/And. This phrase is something I employ when I want to agree that as one thing is true, something else can also be true. 

Yes, it is true that mental fitness can give us different doorways into what we might define as an outcome when it comes to mindfulness, and we can still take what we notice in our meditation practice without marking every detail as something that requires action, or change.

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