“Do nothing for 15 seconds.”

The ad on my iPad screen taunted me with its invitation, set against a soft-focus image of rain-kissed greenery.

Scott Rosenberg is an editor at Backchannel. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Do nothing for 15 seconds! I cracked up. I’d already been doing nothing for 15 minutes. “Doing nothing” is pretty much my raison d'être when I pick up my iPad. I do nothing in the form of playing Words with Friends. I do nothing in the form of making rows of colored blocks disappear in the game 1010! I do nothing in the form of almost anything you can imagine except actually, literally, doing nothing.

Now this come-on for a meditation app called Calm was offering me a window into tranquility. Of course, the ad didn’t truly want me to do nothing; it wanted me to install the Calm app. The thought arose in my mind: Peddling a mindfulness app via digital advertising is like depositing a temperance pamphlet at the bottom of a booze bottle. You’ve got the right target market, for sure. But it’s kind of an awkward place to put the message.

I bit anyway. I’ve dabbled in simple, non-flaky meditation for years—no crystals, please!—but have never managed to make it a regular part of my routine. I installed Calm on my phone, clicked impatiently through the pop-up box that told me to turn on notifications “to fully experience Calm,” and checked out its offerings: introductory meditation sessions; guided sequences; sleep relaxation techniques. I made a mental note to give the app a try early the next morning. And then I went back to my usual drill of doing nothing, unassisted.

Bzzzz! Not more than five minutes later, my phone vibrated, nagging me with a notification from Calm. “It’s time to meditate.” Really?

Then my eye snapped to the next notification on the screen. The New York Times wanted me to know that “a violent protest in Charlottesville, Va. turned tragic.” Of course, I clicked on the news. Nirvana would have to wait.

With 12 million downloads, Calm is part of a broader wave of apps that aim to counter digital anomie and smartphone numb-out by planting a flag of mindfulness in the citadel of distraction. It's an alchemical strategy—a bet that you can somehow transmute your phone from an engine of diversion into a lens of mental focus. “It’s almost like a bit of jiu-jitsu,” Calm’s CEO Alex Tew explained to me. “You use the device’s power against itself in order to fix some of the issues that it’s causing.” Could that possibly work?

Andy Puddicombe, the monk-turned-entrepreneur behind Headspace—another popular meditation app—thinks so. As he put it on a recent TV appearance, “for most of us, the phone is the most stressful thing in our life—and I love the paradox in that, the irony. The phone’s a piece of plastic, a piece of metal, a piece of glass. It’s not good or bad...We define the relationship with the phone. I love the idea that the phone can actually serve up something really good, that’s good for our health.”