In today’s column, I examine the debate between mindfulness and meditation and show how to use generative AI and large language models to help you in either pursuit. Some believe that mindfulness and meditation are the same. Others insist that they are entirely different from each other.

One viewpoint about them being different is that mindfulness has to do with becoming highly aware of what is going on around you and entails outward attentiveness, while meditation is an inward focus. A person in meditation is calm, settled, and centered in their mind. A person who is mindful has heightened awareness and notices newness. In any case, when using AI to assist you with becoming more mindful or to be meditative, I provide prompts that can guide AI toward the avenue you prefer to pursue.

Let’s talk about it. This analysis of AI breakthroughs is part of my ongoing Forbes column coverage on the latest in AI, including identifying and explaining various impactful AI complexities (see the link here ).

Intertwining AI And Psychology

As a quick background, I’ve been extensively covering and analyzing a myriad of psychological facets regarding the advent of modern-era AI that produces mental health advice and performs AI-driven therapy. This rising use of AI has principally been spurred by the evolving advances and widespread adoption of generative AI and LLMs such as ChatGPT, GPT-5, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, and others. For a recap of my two hundred analyses and postings about AI and mental health, see the link here and the link here . I frequently speak up about these pressing matters, including in an appearance on an episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes ; see the link here .

My efforts are intended to inform and engage in thoughtful dialogue on the pressing issues at hand. There are some that focus only on the upbeat side of AI and others that concentrate solely on the downbeat side of AI. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition, namely that AI is the best thing since sliced bread or the worst monstrosity ever devised. I don’t find those extreme views to provide clarity, nor do they offer a semblance of balance. Let’s be upfront and cover the ins and outs, which allow for cogent discussions and can aid policymakers, lawmakers, researchers, scholars, practitioners, and the like in discovering sensible and suitable paths forward. AI is not going away. AI is here to stay and will increasingly become ubiquitous.

I adopt the Langerian characterization of mindfulness, which is that a mindful perspective tends to avoid automatic behaviors and enlists a process of actively identifying new distinctions associated with the present situation (per my coverage at the link here ). I have shown that generative AI can aid mindfulness in many vital ways; see the link here . Indeed, there are five key prompts you can use to aid in bolstering mindfulness; see my explanation at the link here .

A frequent question that comes up in both practice and theory is whether mindfulness and meditation are the same psychological construct. Some people contend that they are indeed the same. Mindfulness and meditation are said to be important ways to aid your mind and body. They are two peas in a pod. But not everyone concurs with this assertion. An alternative claim is that they are apples and oranges apart from each other. Let’s consider what meditation typically refers to and then compare that to the mindfulness definition I noted above.

Meditation Or Mindfulness

According to the Cleveland Clinic online health library: “Meditation is a practice that involves focusing or clearing your mind using a combination of mental and physical techniques. For example, you may sit quietly while focusing inward. Or you may pair your breath with a word, phrase, or image.”

If you accept that definition of meditation, it certainly seems quite a contrast to mindfulness. Meditation appears to be inwardly focused. You are centering your mind. Mindfulness tends to be outwardly focused. You are avidly noticing new things around you. Meditation seeks calmness. Mindfulness welcomes and seeks novelty.

Anyone aiming to meditate might be asking the question: “How can I settle my mind?” In contrast, a person pursuing mindfulness might ask the question: “What might I notice that I am otherwise missing?” Those appear to be quite different questions and address different ambitions.

I am not going to try to settle the debate here on whether mindfulness and meditation are the same or not. Scholars and practitioners will continue to banter back-and-forth on the meanings for years to come. It is an unsettled topic that remains muddled.

To give you a flavor of the variations in how these two notable psychological constructs compare, consider these possibilities:

  • (1) They are distinctly different. Mindfulness and meditation are completely different from each other.
  • (2) They are the same. Mindfulness and meditation are fully the same.
  • (3) Mindfulness taps into meditation. The process of mindfulness makes use of meditation.
  • (4) Meditation taps into mindfulness. The process of meditation entails using mindfulness.
  • (5) Subsets. Mindfulness is a subset of meditation, or it could be the other way around, namely meditation is a subset of mindfulness.
  • (6) Other views. They are distinguishable in other ways, or they are intermixed in other ways.

Depending on which psychologist or researcher that you chat with, they will tend to have an oftentimes strong viewpoint on what constitutes mindfulness and what constitutes meditation. Make sure to ask for clarification so that you have a clearer picture of their particular definitions. Clarification would be advantageous so that you aren’t speaking past each other.

Research On Psychological Constructs

In a research paper on psychological constructs entitled “Everyday Mindfulness And Mindfulness Meditation: Overlapping Constructs Or Not?” by Brian Thompson and Jennifer Waltz, Personality and Individual Differences , August 2007, these salient points were made:

  • “Everyday mindfulness involves maintaining the open, accepting, present focus of attention during day-to-day life.”
  • “Two studies examined the relationship between measures of everyday mindfulness, mindfulness during meditation, and the five-factor model personality domains.”
  • “For the meditation, participants were asked to shift their chairs to face a blank wall behind them.”
  • “Little to no relationship was found between mindfulness during meditation and everyday mindfulness across all three samples.”
  • “The results may suggest that everyday mindfulness is a different construct from mindfulness during meditation.”

This is an example of an empirical research study that sought to explore the relationship between mindfulness and meditation. The use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to examine psychological phenomena is a crucial means of gaining an understanding of the mind and human psychology; see my discussion at the link here .

Using Suitable AI Prompts

If you are interested in using generative AI to help you become mindful, or when seeking assistance in meditating, it is worthwhile to clue AI about what you mean by “mindfulness” and what you mean when referring to “meditation”.

Keep in mind that LLMs are initially trained on all sorts of data by the AI maker, including scanning widely across the Internet and pattern-matching on human-written content. The gist is that you don’t know for sure which definition of mindfulness or meditation the AI has landed on. As the saying goes, when using AI, it is like a box of chocolates, and you never know what you might get.

You can easily straighten out the matter by explicitly telling AI what you mean when referring to mindfulness and/or what you mean by mentioning meditation. A prompt will get the topic on the table and steer AI in the direction you want to go.

Example Definitional Prompts

One useful approach is to directly tell AI what your definitions are.

For example, this is a prompt you can use to tell AI that you are seeking help with mindfulness:

  • User prompt for mindfulness: “I want help with mindfulness. By mindfulness I mean heightened awareness and active noticing of what is occurring, especially noticing things that are new or different.”

Observe that rather than merely stating that I wanted help with mindfulness, I included a brief definition too. That should set the record straight.

In the case of meditation, here is a prompt that would tell AI that you are seeking help with meditating, and includes a definition accordingly:

  • User prompt for meditation: “I want help with meditation. By meditation, I mean an inward practice intended primarily to calm and settle my mind.”

Those definitions in those two prompts are not cast in stone. You are welcome to adjust the definitions as you see fit. In addition, the AI might not get the drift from just a one-sentence definition. Be ready to engage in a dialogue with AI to provide additional amplification about your preferences.

You might be tempted to tell AI the two definitions in one fell swoop:

  • User prompt to establish definitions: “Whenever I use the terms ‘mindfulness’ or ‘meditation,’ do not assume what I mean. Use these definitions. By mindfulness I mean heightened awareness and active noticing of what is occurring, especially noticing things that are new or different. By meditation, I mean an inward practice intended primarily to calm and settle my mind.”

This has the advantage of alerting AI that you consider mindfulness and meditation to be different psychological constructs. The downside is that sometimes the act of mentioning a topic to AI can inadvertently cause the AI to become distracted.

To identify how distraction can happen, consider a prompt that intends to focus on mindfulness and meanwhile rule out meditation:

  • User prompt for one and not the other (mindfulness): I want help with mindfulness. By mindfulness I mean heightened awareness and active noticing of what is occurring, especially noticing things that are new or different. I do not want help with meditation. By meditation, I mean an inward practice intended primarily to calm and settle my mind.”

There is a chance that the very act of mentioning meditation is now going to put meditation into the contextual realm of the AI. It goes like this. If you mention the word “boat” to a person, they will often not be able to get the topic of boats out of their mind. You have seeded the word into their mind, and they are now stuck with it there for a while.

In a sense, without anthropomorphizing AI, you can accidentally stir the AI into a contextual milieu that you otherwise would not have been stuck in. If you had solely mentioned mindfulness and avoided saying anything at all about meditation, there is a chance that no confusion would arise. Once you’ve put meditation on the table, there is a possibility that the AI will now dip into the meditation topic, despite your interest in focusing on mindfulness, and despite your prompt insisting that you aren’t interested in meditation.

Chatting with AI can be a slippery slope.

Do you consider mindfulness and meditation to be the same or different from each other?

Perhaps you view them as overlapping. In whatever way you view the two topics, it is useful to realize that the field of psychology is somewhat conflicted on the matter. Thus, if you didn’t realize that there was a legitimate dispute, knowing now that there is a brouhaha will be useful in any circumstance involving discussions or chats regarding mindfulness or meditation. Make sure to clarify in any human-to-human or human-to-AI interactions the meaning of the two topics.

A final thought for now. Mark Twain famously made this remark: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter -- it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” Mindfulness and meditation might be extraordinarily different; they might be moderately different, or they might be construed as fellow cousins. The bottom line is to clarify what you mean when using those terms so that you don’t get struck by lightning when you intend to see a glowing lightning bug.