Mindfulness
A New Lens on Mindfulness
How to view mindfulness through a comprehensive lens on human behavior.
Posted May 26, 2025 Reviewed by Tyler Woods
Key points
- Mindfulness refers to observing how you are, stepping back from automatic action.
- Mindfulness can be viewed through the lens of investment, influence, and justification.
- Learn to pause, notice, and realign how you act, relate, and narrate in the flow of life.
This essay was co-authored by Marcia Gralha and Brandon Norgaard.
Why do we say what we say? Why do certain things grab our attention while others fade away? Why do some relationships exhaust us while others energize us?
The ways we act, feel, think, speak, and relate are shaped by invisible dynamics running beneath the surface of our conscious minds. These patterns are rooted in our nature as talking apes embedded in complex cultural networks.
This post introduces a new angle on mindfulness based on UTOK, the Unified Theory of Knowledge. Mindfulness refers to shifting your perspective. Instead of just acting in the world through your consciousness, you shift and observe how you are, stepping back from automatic action to notice how you are thinking, feeling, and behaving in the moment.
The new lens we are bringing to mindfulness is called “JII dynamics.” The “JII” stands for justification, influence, and investment. Dynamics refers to how these processes bounce off each other.
We briefly describe each concept below and note how you can apply the JII dynamic lens to your life.
Investment: Your Energy Is a Currency
UTOK says that animals are “behavioral investors.” This means that at any given moment, you are investing your energy. Your time, attention, and effort are limited resources, and how you spend them shapes the arc of your day, week, year, and, over time, your life.
We often think of investment in terms of money. But we can also think of it in terms of what you do. Doing is investing your time and energy on things. We can think of it as your most important currency. You can burn it quickly (e.g., doomscrolling at midnight) or invest it meaningfully (talking to a friend, learning something you care about). Either way, it gets spent, and it ultimately translates into the way you live your life.
But here’s the thing: Your investment doesn’t always go where you want it to. Modern life is full of distractions engineered to hijack your focus. Shiny images, sensational headlines, social comparisons, and other flashy distractors grab your attention but don’t necessarily align with your goals. It’s easy to confuse what’s simply salient (flashy, loud, emotionally charged) with what’s actually relevant (aligned with your values and objectives). These two can often pull in opposite directions, something we have called the salience vs. relevance gap.
With this knowledge, we can put on our JII mindfulness lens and examine the ways you are spending your time and energy. You can start by noticing how you spend your time and then ask questions like: Where is my energy going today? Is this actually relevant to the life I want to live? Or is my attention getting pulled to something that is salient, but not relevant?
Influence: Your Primate Heart
We are, of course, a particular kind of animal; specifically, we are great apes who are extremely social. This is where the concept of influence comes in. And it is why the relational world tugs so strongly on our feelings.
UTOK maps the relational world with the Influence Matrix. It helps us see two core relational needs: (a) relational value (RV), our felt sense of being seen, known, and valued and (b) social influence (SI), the sense that we can instrumentally move others in accordance with our interests.
Think of a time when you felt snubbed in a conversation or when a genuine compliment made your day. When RV and SI are high, we feel good: joyful, empowered, connected. When they drop, we feel lousy: ashamed, angry, insecure.
Becoming aware of these relational dynamics in real time is powerful. You may start to notice: How do I react when I feel criticized? Do I shut down, lash out, or try to control? You may begin to track how certain people energize you, and how others pull you into defense.
JII mindfulness here means tuning into your relational system and considering the dynamics of RV and SI. This means asking questions like “What is influencing me right now?” “Where am I seeking to be valued?” “Am I reacting from a place of threat to my RV-SI, or responding mindfully?”
Justification: The Talking Mind and the Stories We Tell
If investment is about how we act, and influence is about how we relate, then justification is about how we make sense of it all via propositional language. And our language doesn’t just describe the world; it frames and interprets it.
Even private thoughts are layered with justification. We narrate our experiences in ways that reinforce identity and social coherence. When we first began to ask questions in our evolutionary history, we had to be able to answer. Who did what? What does it mean? Was it right or wrong? These questions are laden with social tests of legitimacy, trust, and group belonging. From this need, we developed the egoic psychological machinery that enables us to legitimize our experience to ourselves and others.
Sometimes, those stories track reality well, but not always. Humans rationalize and perform, spinning comforting stories or sometimes looping in self-sabotaging ones. JII mindfulness becomes crucial here.
It invites you to pause and ask: “What story am I telling right now?” “What am I trying to justify to myself and others?” “Is this narrative aligned with my values, or defending against something?”
When we see our justifications clearly, without rushing to believe or reject them, we create space to contemplate and revise our narratives, moving from reactivity to reflection.
Practicing JII Mindfulness
JII mindfulness is about learning to witness your dynamic world with compassionate curiosity:
- Where is my energy going, right now, and over time?
- Who and what is influencing me?
- Am I feeling seen, known, and valued by important others?
- What story am I telling myself and others? Is it helping me grow or holding me back?
- Where do I feel reactive? Where do I feel agentic?
- How do my investments, relationships, and justifications intertwine?
Mindfully noticing your JII dynamics is a gentle way to check in with yourself. With mindful responsivity seen through the lens of JII dynamics, we get to invest our energy more wisely, navigate relationships with flexibility, and tell stories that are aligned with our values.
