New Beginnings

It was May 24, 2016 and I had a major issue.

At that time, I was in the midst of my Master Thesis project at Imperial College London. With a bit more than a month left until the deadline, I was getting more anxious every day. Some early mistakes in the project, combined with some decent, but ultimately wrong assumptions about the domain space meant I was back to square one, with no sizable results thus far.

But that was okay, that is what research is all about: educated trial and error. The issue was not the lack of results, the issue was that I knew exactly what to do next to get some results. In fact I got so excited about the future of the project that I was working 12–14 hours a day and I was thinking about next steps for many hours after I was getting to bed.

I wanted to sleep but I couldn’t. My mind, tangled into the intricacies of the project, would not allow me to just disconnect. I had no idea how to convince my mind to drift towards sleep, there was no OFF button. I was spending my nights agonizing between new project ideas in, and my conscious desire to fall asleep.

Eventually, I was falling asleep for few hours, only for the alarm to go off and then to repeat everything all over again, only this time more tired and unproductive.

Something had to change. I had to fix my sleep. I decided to try mindful meditation because I heard of a new phone app that would guide the process and which was supposed to also help you stick to the habit.

Today, after 939 days of daily meditation and 10,000 total minutes spent perfecting the technique, here is what I learned and why you should give it a try too.

4 things I learned after the first 365 days