Seventeen practices, ranked honestly

What each one costs you, how well the record supports it, and how far the sales pitch runs ahead of the evidence.

Wren · a Goodness publication

Three scales. Two of them are the obvious ones and the third is the whole point.

Friction

  1. Very low. Fits in the gaps of a day you were having anyway
  2. Low. A few minutes and minimal setup
  3. Moderate. Needs a slot, privacy, or specific conditions
  4. High. Weeks before anything happens, or a teacher

Evidence

  1. Thin. First-person report and tradition only
  2. Suggestive. Small studies, or a mechanism without trials
  3. Moderate. Real literature, modest or non-specific effects
  4. Strong. Replicated, with a described mechanism

The gap

  1. Small. Claimed is roughly what is supported
  2. Moderate. Some inflation, mostly harmless
  3. Large. Promises things the record does not support
  4. Extreme. Unfalsifiable, invented, or it has hurt people
What this deliberately does not rate is effectiveness. Every one of these seasons ends on the limit of what the record supports. A grid announcing that one of them is highly effective would throw all of that away in a single image, and it would be the image that got passed around without the argument attached. Friction and evidence can be defended from the record. Effectiveness cannot, by me or by anyone else being straight with you.

Where each practice sits

Numbers are season numbers. Hover any point for detail. The full table is below.

The gap 1 Small 2 Moderate 3 Large 4 Extreme

The table

Click any column heading to sort. Default order is the order the seasons were published.
# Season Friction Evidence Gap The short reason

What the shape says

Four quadrants, and the distribution is not what I expected when I started scoring.

Cheap and well supported. Start here.

Breath, the Circle, the Cosmos, Letting Go, the Name, and the honest grain inside Aimed Feeling. If you only ever act on one row of this table, act on Breath.

Expensive and well supported. Worth it if you will actually do it.

Attention, the Body, the Waking Dream, Signals from Sleep, the Bench, Deep Rest. The best research in the volume, and every one of them asks for weeks before anything happens.

Cheap and thin. Harmless, but keep expectations low.

Tones, the Looker, the Oracle, the Flame at its shallow end. Nothing here will hurt you and none of it is well evidenced.

Expensive and thin. One entry, and it is alone.

Short Moments. The highest entry requirement here, the thinnest evidence, and a tradition that says openly you cannot start without a teacher.

Three findings I did not expect

  1. The best-evidenced practice has the smallest gap. The Body Knew First is the only row scoring 4 on evidence and 1 on the gap. Gendlin found something about how people change, said exactly that, and did not inflate it. Modesty and good evidence keep company more often than the cynical read predicts.
  2. Cheap and oversold go together. Every 4 in the gap column sits at friction 1 or 2. Ease is what makes a thing sellable, so the easiest practices attract the biggest claims. If something asks nothing of you and promises everything, that combination is the tell, and you can see it in the table before you know anything about the subject.
  3. The most oversold practices usually have something real underneath. Breath scores 4 on evidence and 3 on the gap. Aimed Feeling has a genuinely measured grain and the most harmful claim here. A real effect is the best possible thing to oversell, because the first thing the customer tries actually works. So a large gap is not evidence that a practice is worthless. It is evidence that somebody found something and then could not stop talking.

Which is the argument of the whole project, arriving as a shape in a table rather than as a sentence: keep the practice, drop the claim.

The honest limit of this table

A ranking is a genre, and the genre lies. Putting seventeen practices in a grid implies a precision I do not have. These are considered judgements against the record, not measurements, and a different careful reader would move several of them by a point.

Friction is personal and I have guessed at yours. I scored drawing a circle as the lowest friction here. If you hate drawing, it is not.

And the practices I would actually recommend are not the ones with the best evidence. Attention training has the strongest research and sits at friction 4, which in my experience means most people will not do it. The gap between what the record supports and what a person will sustain is the real problem in this field, and no table closes it. Use this to pick something cheap enough that you will still be doing it in eight weeks, then let the evidence column break the tie.