Kabat-Zinn warns his readers that in living mindlessly, individuals cannot appreciate and fully participate in their lives. He stresses how “easy it is to sleepwalk through and therefore miss much of our life” (175). Kabat-Zinn uses the metaphor of a crowded attic to illustrate the way our minds are cluttered with useless thoughts that obscure our view of the present moment. These thoughts, like “old bags and accumulated junk,” “intrude, carry us off, [and] prevent us from concentrating” (27). Because of this “accumulated junk” clouding our view, “our ordinary waking state of consciousness is seen as being severely limited and limiting” (15).

It is limited that we cannot truly see what is in front of us if we are not working to live mindfully. Instead, our busy minds mean that we are interpreting “a personal fiction” that is colored by “thoughts, fantasies, and impulses” (10). These feelings and thoughts that are filling our mind, about our preferences, preconceptions, projections, and fears, “spin out continuously” and obscure what we are seeing (10). Kabat-Zinn calls this “the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking;” he warns that this “sickness” colors all that we see and “screens us from the world and from the basic purity of our being” (51).