I thought I was too busy to meditate until meditation expert Erkin Bek showed me a trick I can do at work: It only takes 3 minutes

In an interview with Hindustan Times, Erkin Bek shares why meditation can be your superpower in the AI age — just three minutes can save your scattered brain.

Modern life, especially in tech-saturated cities like Bengaluru, can keep your mind constantly scattered. Your phone chimes, a Slack ping drops, the traffic comes to a dead halt, and your brain splits into a thousand competing thoughts. So when Erkin Bek — meditation expert, Geneva-based founder of World Meditation League (WML) and research organisation All Here — got on a Zoom call with me recently, I wasn't expecting to actually catch my breath.

I had no idea I would actually meditate on a work call

I had to rush into another work meeting immediately after, my mind already racing through a mental checklist of deadlines, but Erkin gently paused the rapid pace of the interview. Right there, over the screen, he guided me through a brief, 40-second micro-meditation. In that tiny fraction of time, the mental noise sort of disappeared. The chatter silenced.

And honestly? It made me realise two things. First, I can't wait for him to return to Bengaluru so I can attend his full workshop in person. Second, taking care of your mind, body, and soul isn't an elusive luxury for monks on a mountain — it is an urgent, daily strategy for anyone trying to navigate the modern world.

Through his Geneva research organisation, he is pioneering 'quantified meditation' — an innovative discipline that uses electroencephalography (EEG) and brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) to observe, measure, and visualise brain activity in real time. His thesis is simple yet radical: in an era dominated by information overload and hyper-intelligent AI (artificial intelligence), meditation is fundamentally attention training.

Erkin Bek presenting data during his Bengaluru session.

Attention economy is broke: here’s how we can fix it

"There is one unified challenge in modern society," Erkin explained during our call. "Rather than looking at what is different in Bengaluru compared to Tokyo, Los Angeles, or Geneva, I actually find a unifying trait: there's a pressure in the modern world of information overload. We get so much data thrown at us that it's really fragmenting our ability to stay on something without being distracted into a thousand things," he added.

This constant barrage has turned what used to be an 'attention economy' into something far more insidious, he shared: "Instead of being an attention economy, they're becoming a distraction economy. One minute of your attention on TikTok or Instagram is worth trillions of dollars in market capitalisation. The more you lose your mind, the more other people are able to monetise it and take you and tear your mind into a thousand pieces."

Add the rapid rise of artificial intelligence into the mix, and human focus faces an existential threat, Erkin warned. "If we don't train our abilities to sustain our attention for long, what's going to happen is that AI will overtake us — we're just going to be very robotic kind of beings that are just going to follow instructions or be completely distracted," he said.

"The AI age is pushing us to tap into a special ability that remains unique to humans: to look within and understand the nature of consciousness, and do it with the same rigour as we have done it in the external world. Building our own attention capital, clarity through stability of mind, training to deploy our internal resources on demand — this is the emerging superpower of meditation," he added.

'Micro-dosing' meditation: the 3-minute hack

For most corporate professionals working under strict deadlines, the common advice to 'sit silently for 30 minutes every morning' can feel intimidating — if not impossible. Erkin gets it. That’s why he created 'Silent Mind Interval Training (SMIT)', an entry-level approach centred around 'micro-dosing' meditation throughout your workday.

"One of the problems in meditation is that people don't want to sit for a long time, and then they set unrealistic goals, and finally, they don't do it. So we have been developing a new way of meditating, which we call high-interval meditation, where you can meditate for three minutes," he said.

According to Erkin, here is how you can use SMIT to reset your brain during a chaotic workday:

⦿ Sit at your desk, set a timer for three minutes, and keep your back straight. Close your eyes and anchor your mind entirely on your physical body and your breathing.

⦿ Take a one-minute break. Open your eyes, stretch, refresh your attention, and let your mind relax.

⦿ If you have time, perform another 3-minute round. You can do one round while waiting for a meeting to start, three rounds during a coffee break, or micro-dose for a single minute throughout the day while standing in line or waiting for a bus.

"You can do this even when you're just walking — stop, and bring your mind back to where you are. Mind towards your own body," Erkin said. "Even if you don't ever sit for one hour or 30 minutes, if you keep meditating in three minutes here, another five minutes there... we just quieted our mind and achieved stability for even 30 seconds, and it feels already so good," he added.

By breaking down the practice into manageable micro-doses, meditation stops feeling like another overwhelming chore on your to-do list and becomes a portable oasis. As Erkin summarised it, it’s about 'finding the home within'. "When you bring yourselves to being at home inside of yourselves, wherever you go, you feel at home. You bring your home with you," he shared, adding, “In Bengaluru, so many people go to temples. We can also experience another very personal temple: this home within.”

Erkin Bek addressing a session during his India trip.

Bringing lab science to the mind

What makes Erkin’s work with All Here and the World Meditation League groundbreaking is its scientific rigour. Collaborating with institutions such as the University of Geneva and the Foundation Campus Biotech, his team translates subjective spiritual states into objective, measurable neurodata.

Erkin clarified, "Certainly, we cannot quantify the entirety of human experience. But we can quantify something very specific that most meditation and the regular world of attention can value — reducing your random mind-wandering, the famous monkey-mind analogy, by regulating your attention."

Using high-precision microstate analysis and millisecond-resolution brain mapping, All Here measures how meditation suppresses activity in the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN) — specifically the hippocampal subnetwork responsible for day-dreaming, worrying about the future, and ruminating on the past.

"When you do focal, single-pointed concentration, we capture it so beautifully. It's really a game-changer. To make meditation accessible to the masses on a scale is going to be possible only with objective measurement," Erkin said. He envisions a future where mental endurance and silence are accorded the same prestige as athletic feats — a 'healthy sport of the mind' in which internal balance is elevated to a celebrated human performance.

The inner leap

As our Zoom call wrapped up and Erkin prepared to head to the airport, I was left with a lingering sense of clarity. In a world that constantly demands our output, taking care of your inner landscape isn't optional — it's foundational. "We are swiftly shifting to the intelligence era, so it’s only a matter of time before we begin to look inwardly with the same intensity and rigour as we look outward. The human edge lies within us; let us embrace it," he reflected in his closing notes.

Whether you are navigating a high-pressure meeting room or simply stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic, your inner 'temple' is always accessible. All it takes to start rebuilding it is three minutes, a quiet breath, and the decision to bring your mind back home.

Note to readers: This article is for informational purposes only and not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the advice of your doctor with any questions about a medical condition.