How I Meditated Every Day For A Month

The System I Used To Enforce my Meditation Habit

This wasn’t the first time I’ve meditated. I’ve never really been able to keep it as a habit. I know I’m not the only one who has tried meditating and found nothing.

I’ve written a post about how to create habits before.

But this is a story on how I actually did it.

Purpose Of The Craft

Like I said before, I was a long time procrastinator of meditation. I preached stoicism and mindfulness but I was never able to implement this crucial habit.

As I scoured the web, I found numerous studies illustrating the benefits. I had to meditate. Here’s what I found.

Meditation physically changes your brain

A 2011 study by senior author Sara Lazar of the Harvard Medical School discovered that just eight weeks of meditation depicted differences in brain volume in five crucial areas.

An increase in size in the posterior cingulate, responsible for the ability to control where your mind wanders. An increase in size in the left hippocampus, responsible for learning, cognition, memory retention and emotional regulation. An increase in size in the temporo parietal junction, responsible for empathy and compassion. An increase in the area of the brain stem called Pons, responsible for producing regulatory neurotransmitters. A decrease in cell volume in the amygdala, responsible for fear, anxiety and stress.

I know we should probably be taking psychology seriously, but when you’re able to actually view physiological changes in the brain — a switch just flips in my mind that tells me ‘it actually works’.

I’m not going to flood this post with the benefits of meditation because that’s a post for itself and the purpose of this was to depict the process I used to meditate.

My point is, you need to find a purpose for starting a new habit. This is what did it for me.

How Do I Meditate?

When I first tell people that I meditate, this is the first question that I get. I found an amazing infographic on reddit that might help.

This is the simplest way to meditate, it’s called mindfulness breath meditation and it involves focusing your attention on your breath.

The hardest part of meditation is what you do with your mind. You’ll probably find that your mind will wander. Thoughts will randomly appear in your mind.

‘What should I eat for lunch today?’

‘I’ll get the new chicken big mac at McDonalds today.’

‘Maybe I shouldn’t because I’m trying to eat healthy.’

‘This is boring am I done yet?’

That’s where the timer comes in. You don’t stop meditating until the timer tells you that you’re finished. Personally, I tend to get a lot of thoughts on checking the timer because I want the meditation to be over.

Who knew such a simple activity could be so hard right?

The Habit-Building Process

I have to accredit this part to Charles Duhigg. He founded the habit-loop with looks like this.

Cue — what triggers your brain to go into the habit Routine — the physical or mental actions you go through after the cue Reward — what helps your brain figure out if the habit is worth remembering for the future

This was extremely crucial in reinforcing my meditation habit. I used this exact same loop and did the exact same thing every day.

Cue My cue was as soon as I woke up. No matter what. The first thing I did was meditate. Before I brushed my teeth. Before I checked my phone. Before anything. As soon as I woke up I would go into my routine. Routine My routine involved going to my floor next to my bed and meditating (great way to get out of bed too by the way). How I meditated was in the previous section. Reward This was the peaceful feeling I got after meditating.

It wasn’t so simple though. I knew that if I had tried 10 minutes of meditation as soon as I started I would quickly give up. So for the first two weeks of the June I meditated for only 5 minutes. I then increased it to 10 minutes which is the amount I’m meditating now every day.

If you want to create any habit, remember to start small. Our minds take time to adjust to new realities so any large shocks to our routine will lead our minds to resist the change.

A good example would be going from no exercise to exercising an hour every day 5 days a week. It’s better to start 2 or 3 days a week for 30 minutes and then slowly move up from there.

The same can be applied to meditation. Start with 5 minutes, or even 2 minutes if you can’t meditate at all and slowly increment it.