The terms mindfulness and meditation are very popular at the moment, and this can clearly be seen in the rise of mobile apps such as Headspace, Calm, Buddhify and The Mindfulness App.
However, there are many things which hit the mass conscious and are quickly forgotten or proven to be fakes, so for a long time I was sceptical. Two things quickly showed me that my scepticism was perhaps unfounded:
The concept of meditation and mindfulness has been around in different formats for thousands of years under different names, for example, praying is a form of meditation and Buddhists have been practicing the art of meditation since its inception.
I’ve heard many successful people talk about incorporating some form of meditation practice into their lives. For example, Tim Ferris believes 90+% of the world class individuals he interviews have some form of meditation practice.
However, just because it’s popular, and seems to have a good deal of empirical evidence behind it, that doesn’t automatically mean it’s right for you.
If you don’t know why you’re doing it and what you want to get from it you’ll soon give up and not achieve the benefits you are looking for.
Personally, I wanted to create a mindfulness practice to help me with the following:
Improve how I handle anger and frustration
Improve how I respond instinctively in highly stressful situations
Ensure I take time to think about where different paths could take me before immediately saying yes or no, ensuring I ask the question ‘is this best for me, will it help me achieve my long terms goals?’
I have also recently started a journaling practice – which I’ll post about soon – and when available you’ll notice considerable parallels between my rationale for doing both, the more research I do into both practices the more I see that many of the benefits are shared.
Mindfulness isn’t about trying to make you ‘better at life’ it’s about making time to actively understand more about you, and give yourself the time to think through things instead of constantly running at 100mph.
The aim of this article is not to show you how to create habits – I’ve already written about that here – it’s about tackling three key things:
Explaining the differences between mindfulness and meditation
Detailing the benefits of having a mindfulness/meditation practice
Sharing what I now do for my daily practice
Mindfulness Vs Meditation
One of the biggest results of the sudden mass attention on the practice of meditation, is the interchanging and confusion of very specific terms, so let me start by decoupling some of the key terms.
Meditation is an umbrella word that encapsulates multiple different practices of consciousness, concentration and self-regulation. Mindfulness is one of these practices, and in its simplest form is awareness. Awareness of the thoughts passing through your mind at any one time, attempting to recognise them and allowing them to pass on. Through this process of awareness, the aim is to focus on being in the present moment, focusing 100% on the act you are doing, be it seeing a lovely view, smelling a lovely scent or drinking a hot drink. Other forms of practice which sit under the umbrella of mindfulness are: yoga, tantra and breathing.
Some of these practices can be combined with great effect, for example being mindful of your breath is a common form of mindfulness. Following your breath improves your awareness of being in the present. This is called mindfulness meditation, known as shamatha among Buddhists.
In short, meditation is an umbrella term for any practices of conscious, mindfulness is one of these practices and simply involves trying to practice more of this intentional, gratifying, appreciation of present-ness.
Benefits of Meditation
Despite hearing of the benefits of having a meditative practice in the media and hearing many successful individuals talk about how it has helped them, it wasn’t until I read Jon Kabat-Zinn’s excellent book ‘Wherever You Go, There You are‘ that I really understood the benefits. Kabat-Zinn is a famous doctor, author and mindfulness guru, who has studied the practice for more than 35 years. Based on the views of Kabat-Zinn and additional research I’ve done, here are the top 5 benefits I see of having a meditative practice:
Mindfulness increases attention – As the prevalence of technology in our lives continues to increase at an ever faster rate you may be surprised to hear that multi-tasking isn’t good for your brain. Having a meditation practice, and a mindfulness meditation practice in particular, keeps you focused on one thing instead of many. This means you give that one task your full attention, helping you do the best you can at it, seeing new insights into how you do it, and appreciating the task more.
Working memory gets stronger – When our lives go at a million miles an hour our long-term memory often doesn’t have enough time to take important things we learn in and keep them safe for the next time they are required. Having a daily meditative practice allows you to take time to think about the things you’ve learned, witnessed, experienced recently and transfer them to your long-term memory. Once safely secured there it is much easier to bring them back. In fact, evidence found a 30% increase in admissions exam scores after participants undertook mindfulness practices.
Meditation helps build greater resilience – The mechanism for greater resilience is similar to that for greater memory. Taking time to access the small negative things that happen to us on a daily or weekly basis gets us in the habit of dealing with bigger negative things which might happen. Having a meditative practice teaches you to see the positives more often and be able to move past the negative things or events. In Stoicism this principle of building resilience occurs through ‘negative visualisation’, for more information on this I’d suggest reading this post.
Help control the reptilian part of the brain – This again follows a similar pattern as memory and resilience. Taking time to understand, appreciate and respond to stressful or emotional situations helps you deal with them in a more constructive way. If we don’t acknowledge a negative emotion at the time – formed in the reptilian part of our brain – it can spill over into other situations and impact our wider lives, or lead us to handle a situation poorly, making things worse for yourself instead of better.
Slow down brain ageing – Before I wrongly get your hopes up, starting a meditative practice will not make those wrinkles start to disappear, however UCLA analysis shows that having a daily meditative practice can help slow down the ‘ageing’ of the brain, helping push back some of the horrible brain based degenerative diseases which are prevalent today.
My Meditation Practice
I have written previously about my personal morning routine and changes I’ve made to it over time, if you’ve read these you’ll know I have a fairly busy morning already. However, after doing more research on meditation, I decided to try and create a daily habit of doing mindfulness meditation.
Ultimately, I want to do this practice every morning, however for now that remains a pipe dream. I have started by practicing in the mornings when I don’t go to the gym.
I do 10 minutes each day with the Headspace app, I class this as mindfulness meditation. You can do a 10-day taste for free, after which you can sign up for monthly access (£9.99 per month), yearly access (£5.99 per month – all in one payment) or Lifetime access for £299, full details here.
The specific time of day I meditate depends on what I’m doing, but I try to fit into one of three buckets.
Before work – if not going to the gym in the morning
Before bed – if going to the gym in the morning
With tea on the weekend
Headspace gets you thinking about different things: (a) feeling within the body (b) scanning the body (c) listening / smelling the environment (d) breathing. For me personally, breathing is the most effective.
In terms achieving the things I wanted my meditation practice to help with:
Improve how I handle anger and frustration
Improve how I respond instinctively in highly stressful situations
Ensure I take time to think about where different paths could take me before immediately saying yes or no, ensuring I ask the question ‘is this best for me, will it help me achieve my long terms goals?’
When measured against these things, I think it has been a success. I feel less stressed, more grateful for how lucky I am and think more strategically about my career decisions.
I have been doing my daily meditation practice every day for 75 days (and I haven’t yet missed a day!). If I haven’t done my full 10-minute morning meditation – usually because I’ve been to the gym and not had time – I’ll do one of the mini meditations on Headspace (restore, refresh or focus) if I know my day is likely to be particularly stressful. I do these anywhere, it’s easy to shut your eyes for a short a time on the train or at your desk without people thinking you are asleep!
Conclusion
I have really enjoyed starting a meditation practice and will continue to do it.
From my experience I’d say there are two key things for people to be aware of:
Have a purpose for meditating. If you don’t have a purpose you will lose the will power to keep going and not have a basis to measure change from
Losing focus during a meditation is okay, the key in the exercise is returning to the focus, that it what I spend the majority of my time doing when meditating
For a long time starting a meditation / mindfulness practice was on my to do list, but something would always get in the way. It wasn’t until I read Jon-Kabat-Zinn’s ‘Wherever You Go, There You Are‘ that I felt motivated enough to start.
Therefore, if you’ve read this and really want to get started do it now, if you’ve read this and you’re still unsure I’d suggest reading the book! Good luck and enjoy.
