CULTIVATING CALM, CLARITY &
DIGITAL SAFETY
Calm is how it feels. Clarity is what keeps you safe.
**Research in progress. Shared as it happens.**
About Me
My name is Anna Collard
I've spent more than twenty years in cybersecurity observing that it's rarely the technology that fails first, but often it's the moment a human reacts. That moment became my research question.
I hold an MSc in Cyberpsychology and am completing a PhD at Nelson Mandela University on why we're susceptible to social engineering and online manipulation and whether attention can be trained as a genuine defence.
By day I'm SVP Content Strategy & CISO Advisor at KnowBe4 Africa. I serve on the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Cybersecurity and am a founding board member of MiDO Academy.
I'm also a certified yoga and yoga Nidra teacher, which is less of a contradiction than it sounds. This site is where the two halves meet.
Welcome visitors to your site with a short, engaging introduction. Double click to edit and add your own text.
An open research journey
Digital Mindfulness is the home of my ongoing research into a question: why are humans susceptible to social engineering and online manipulation? And can mindfulness-based skills act as a genuine defence?
I'm working towards an integrated model of human susceptibility to both social engineering attacks and broader online manipulation. Rather than waiting years for a finished thesis, I'm sharing the journey here as it unfolds.
My ultimate aim is to translate academic research into practical, everyday tools. I believe one of the answers lies in presence: training our attention so that we notice the nudge, the urgency cue, the emotional hook, before we act on it.
This site is thinking in progress, and you're invited to follow along.
"Almost every successful manipulation, a phishing email, an outrage post, a dark pattern depends on the same thing: a reaction that happens before reflection can. My research asks whether we can train that missing pause."
Anna Collard, Digital Mindfulness
Bring this into your organisation
I speak and consult on human risk: social engineering, online manipulation, AI-era cognitive load, and the digital mindfulness practices this research is producing.
From keynotes for security and leadership audiences to helping teams embed the structural practices that actually change behaviour, if any of the thinking on this site would land with your organisation, conference or leadership team, I'd like to hear about it.
TRY THESE MICRO-PRACTICES
While the academic work develops, these short, science-informed practices translate what the evidence already suggests. Each takes between one and ten minutes and are designed to fit into an ordinary working day, between emails, before you click or whenever the scroll takes over.
Attention
The Pause Before Reacting
A strong reaction to a message is information about the message, not about you. Learn to notice it without becoming it and then ask what it was built to make you do.
Working with AI
The Two Speeds
You can't check everything, and trying to is what's frying people. One five-second question: what breaks if this is wrong? tells you when to carefully read.
In the Organisation
The Three Minute Open
Optional wellbeing offers don't change behaviour. Structure does. One to three shared minutes at the start of every meeting, on the agenda, owned by the chair.
WHAT IS DIGITAL MINDFULNESS?
A definition in progress
This page will evolve as the research does. I'd rather define the term carefully in public, revising as the evidence sharpens, than pretend it arrived finished. If you work in this space and see it differently, I'd genuinely like to hear from you.
Digital mindfulness is the deliberate practice of bringing awareness to how we use technology: what we pay attention to, how it makes us feel, and what we do next.
It sits at the intersection of two fields that rarely talk to each other. From contemplative science, it borrows attention training and *decentering* the ability to notice an emotion without being run by it. From cyberpsychology and security research, it borrows the understanding of how attackers and manipulative systems use urgency cues, authority signals, emotional hijacking, dark patterns, algorithmic amplification.
Put together, the argument is this: almost every successful social engineering attack, scam and manipulation attempt depends on an automatic reaction. The phishing email works because we reply before we reflect. The outrage post spreads because we share before we verify. The dark pattern converts because we click before we notice.
Digital mindfulness targets the gap where all of these succeed: the missing moment between stimulus and response.
Cyber-mindfulness, defined
Within this broader practice, the term cyber-mindfulness applies to the security-specific scope: present-moment awareness deployed as a defence mechanism against social engineering and online manipulation.
A small number of studies, including my own, suggest that mindfulness deployed *at the task* attention directed at the specific message rather than cultivated in general, is associated with better detection of manipulation. General mindfulness is a weaker and less consistent predictor. That gap is one of the things the research is trying to explain.
The doctoral research behind this site is developing an integrated model of human susceptibility to both social engineering and online manipulation, which we'll share here as it evolves.
What it is not
Digital mindfulness is not digital minimalism, a detox, or techno-pessimism. Technology is not the enemy; unexamined automaticity is. The goal is more agency, more understanding and a relationship with our devices in which we decide, moment by moment, where our attention goes.
BLOG POSTS
Get in touch
anna@ annacollard.com
