Meditation: Why You Should Do It

What Is Meditation?

Meditation forces one to disidentify with their mind and emotions. It is perhaps the easiest to learn and most readily available personal developmental tool on the planet. The disabled can do it. Children can do it. Stephen Hawking can do it. Anyone with conscious awareness can practice it.

You can do it on a crowded bus. You can do it in a monastery. You can do it in your bedroom. You can do it now as you read this. Experienced meditators can even do it while they sleep.

The benefits of meditation—mental, emotional, and physical—are innumerable and there are no side effects to a small daily practice.¹ You can learn to do it in as little as five minutes and once you learn you’ll never forget. Doing it as little 10 minutes a day can make you happier and healthier, and doing it as little as 30 minutes per day could change your life.

Yet almost no one does it regularly. Myself included. Why?

It’s hard to do. Really fucking hard. No seriously, take a few seconds and close your eyes and try to think about nothing for 30 seconds. No seriously, try it. Just for 30 seconds. I guarantee you can’t do it.

If you try, you’ll soon notice that our minds are producing a constant stream of thought vomit, and most of us identify so strongly with it that we don’t even notice. Our mental energy is sapped by an endless stream of useless, unhelpful thoughts and opinions:

“I hope the Lakers win tonight. I wonder if Shannon will ever call me back. I really enjoyed our date together, but maybe I should have picked a better restaurant? Oh, that’s silly worrying about that. I wonder if that new Sushi place near Dave’s is any good? I should call him, I haven’t talked to him in a while. He can be overly negative though sometimes. Oh, I should buy a movie to watch this weekend, that will be cool. I wonder what though. I remember when I watched that one movie with Sara, my teenage girlfriend. God, we were young and naive. First kisses are awkward. But yeah, I should call Dave, I haven’t called him in a while. I should call Dad too, he gets testy if I don’t call him. Oh, today’s Tuesday, Breaking Bad is on.”

Chances are your mind sounds like this on a daily basis, and you’re rarely aware of it. Few of us are. Meditation trains our minds to prune and hone our thoughts, to only focus on what’s useful and important, to disregard the rest, and to separate our egos and identities from the thoughts and emotions running through our heads. This may sound like little, but it adds up and the life benefits are massive.

I got into meditation as a teenager and became serious about it in college. Since graduating, I’ve lost touch with the practice (got distracted with girls, booze, and work), but it’s a goal of mine this year to reboot the habit. The benefits of meditation in my life were very apparent, and I miss the clarity and consciousness I had when I practiced regularly.

If your mind is a muscle, then meditation is a way to take it to the gym. The stronger your control of your mind becomes, the more you’re able to consciously control what your mind focuses on and how it processes new information.

Strengthening your mind in this way affects every aspect of your life: your emotional health and self-esteem, your work performance, your discipline, your relationships, your overall happiness, your stress levels, and your physical health as well.

I attribute a lot of the success I’ve attained in other areas of my life to all of the meditation I did when I was younger. In everything I’ve pursued since that time, I’ve noticed that my mind is more focused than most and that I’ve always been able to strip away the unnecessary distractions and get right to what’s important in any endeavor.

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Benefits of Meditation

Of all the so-called “spiritual practices,” meditation probably has the largest body of scientific research backing up its utility and power. In fact, meditation is so powerful that it can rewire our brain. Numerous studies using MRI and EEG have shown that a regular meditation practice can rewire the neural patterns in the brain and even increase grey matter.^2,3

In a nutshell, meditation leads to:

1. Reduced psychological distress
2. Better emotional health
3. Better cognitive abilities
4. Better physical health

Let’s take each of these in turn.

1. Reduced Psychological Distress

All of us face varying degrees of psychological distress in our daily lives—from regular stresses and worries, to anxiety, depression, and addiction. Meditation and mindfulness interventions help us deal with all of it.^4,5

Solid research backs up the common knowledge that mindfulness techniques reduce anxiety and stress.⁶ In fact, they have long been prescribed to patients who suffer anxiety disorders and panic attacks as a way to calm their nerves with relatively good success rates.⁷ Interestingly, research also shows that meditation retreats are more effective than traditional vacations in reducing daily stress and improving mood.⁸

Several studies also show that meditation can reduce depressive symptoms, maybe even more so than antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy in the long run.⁹ Clarity of thought and the ability to step back and get perspective reduce our tendency to ruminate, which often plunges the most vulnerable among us into depression.

On the addiction front, mindfulness can help people to stop smoking¹⁰ and reduce binge eating¹¹ as well as drug and alcohol abuse.¹² It makes sense that being more mindful would help us control our worst impulses, and the science backs it up.

2. Better Emotional Health

Meditation also leads to better emotional health in general. Being in a mindful state—even momentarily—is associated with a greater sense of well-being.¹³

You can also learn to regulate your emotions through meditation and mindfulness practice. Mindful individuals have more emotional awareness, are more understanding, more accepting, and can better cope with being in a shitty mood.^14,15 People who are prone to outbursts of anger or sadness are better able to regulate and control their emotions with the aid of meditation.¹⁶

Psychologists have also noted that patients who practice meditation develop greater awareness of their actions and emotions. In fact, some therapists prescribe meditation to their patients to assist them in their therapy.¹⁷

Meditation also lowers the need for external validation. Meditating trains you to become more aware of what thoughts and emotions dictate your behavior, primarily where you’re trying to receive your love and validation that may not be working. It forces you to become more aware of your needy and neurotic behaviors and put an end to them.¹⁸

Not only will you rely less on external validation, you will also have healthier relationships all around. This is primarily because meditation increases your ability to empathize with others. Brain scans show that meditation activates the positive, happy, empathetic aspects of the brain. People who regularly practice meditation report an ability to empathize and care about the emotions of others, thereby bonding with them more easily.¹⁹

3. Better Cognitive Abilities

Quite simply, meditation trains you to remove all of the unnecessary garbage from your mind, which frees it up to retain what is useful and important more efficiently.²⁰ In a nutshell, you’ll have better memory and be able to think more clearly.

Meditation also increases focus and discipline. Practitioners of meditation are able to retain focus on specific tasks and are less likely to deviate from those tasks.²¹

Interestingly, meditation also improves your intuition. Often referred to as your “gut reaction,” your “instinct,” or your “intuition,” meditating gets you in touch with your unconscious decision-making processes. Daniel Kahneman refers to it as your “first brain.” Malcolm Gladwell refers to it as “blink.” Whatever it is, that instant, gut reaction that you have about some things is often right. Meditation will increase that.

4. Better Physical Health

Not only does meditation help you psychologically, emotionally, and cognitively, it can also make you physically healthier. You get better sleep, better cardiovascular health, lower blood pressure, increased tolerance to pain, and better immune functioning.²²

As the physical health benefits of meditation are less commonly known than its other benefits, I want to show you what exactly meditation does for your body. I present to you… the Meditation Nerd Box:

Meditation is by no means a cure-all for your problems. But I believe that it’s a powerful tool. Meditation’s purpose is to give you perspective and clarity on your internal issues. It doesn’t fix them for you.

Years ago, one of the most upsetting parts of my involvement in meditation was the sheer number of long-time practitioners I met who convinced themselves that meditation fixed all of their psychological and emotional problems, when it didn’t. It helped them experience and become aware of those problems, but you still have to go out into the world and commit the actions to overcome them.

Sitting in a room staring at a wall all day is unlikely to do that.

How to Meditate

There are dozens of meditation styles and techniques—from mindfulness, spiritual, movement, mantra, to loving-kindness, and more.³²

The beautiful thing is that none of them are right or wrong, simply different. Whatever forces you to focus your mind on your awareness and let go of any thoughts or emotions that arise is a form of meditation. Whether it involves mantras, counting breaths, yoga, chanting, rituals, or whatever.

But to begin, I recommend people start with a basic sitting and counting of breaths. The process is easy:

• Set aside 10 or 15 minutes. Get a clock or timer and set an alarm preferably, because you are going to be tempted to get up or stop before the time is up.
• Go into a quiet room where there are no distractions.
• Toss a pillow on the floor and sit on it cross-legged. Don’t worry if you can’t cross your legs perfectly, just do it as much as possible while remaining comfortable. Plant your ass firmly on the pillow and then make sure your back is straight.
• Relax your diaphragm and let your belly hang out (don’t worry, no one’s looking).
• Look straight ahead. You can close your eyes or leave them open, it doesn’t really matter. I prefer leaving mine open, but to start out you can close them if it makes you feel more comfortable.
• You can put your hands on your knees or you can rest them in your lap, one on top of the other, palms facing up, as shown in the picture.

• Now comes the hard part. Allow whatever thoughts to enter your mind without judging them.
• Breathe through your nose into your chest until your chest is full. Your belly should expand. Then slowly exhale. One.
• Do the same thing again. Count each breath.
• When a thought or distraction arises, start the count over again at one. Thoughts and distractions WILL come up, and if you’re just starting out, they will often come up without you even noticing them until they’ve been rattling around for a few seconds.
• Don’t judge yourself. Don’t get mad. Don’t get frustrated and say, “I suck at this.” Just acknowledge the thought, let it go, and reset your counting. Chances are you won’t get past two or three the first few times you meditate. It often takes people months to even get to ten.

Do this for the full 15 minutes. It’s only 15 minutes, but I guarantee it will feel closer to three hours. By the fourth minute you’ll be dying to get up and do something. Your mind will be going crazy. Chances are you’ll start to let your mind go and just start thinking about the party last weekend, or the project that you’re working on at work. That’s fine. Don’t judge. Just let go and start the count over again.

This is the most basic form of Zen meditation, which is the practice I followed for a few years. If you get through one session, congratulations. I imagine you will get up feeling much more relaxed, clear-headed, and will feel calmer throughout your day.

These sessions are easier to do and to keep up with if done with someone else, so you can keep each other accountable. Daily practices are best. Start with 10 or 15 minutes each morning when you wake up and slowly add time from there. Once you get to the point where you can keep your mind thoughtless for a full 10 breaths or so, there are other techniques or practices you can begin to add.

Many people find it useful to start with meditation apps. There are many excellent ones out there: Headspace, Calm, my favorite Waking Up, and dozens more. Each app will have a particular style and approach to meditation. Take advantage of the free trials and figure out which one works for you.

I hope by now you see how powerful meditation can be and have some ideas on how to get started. Now it’s time to try it out and experience its wonders. It will change your life.