What I learned after 10,000 minutes of Mindful Meditation
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
1. Mindfulness is an active skill, not a passive one
Take gym for instance. By going to the gym, you train passive skills. You feel fresher, stronger, happier and more confident. Stick to the gym and you don’t need to do much else to get those results.
Meditation, in contrast is an active skill. It will not make a difference, unless you actively and consciously apply what you have learned. What I mean is that once you master meditation you can, for instance, clear your mind and relax at will. However, you won’t be more relaxed in general, when you forget to exercise the skill.
2. Mindfulness can increase your pain tolerance
Pain management becomes easier when you apply the correct mental framework, something exercised through meditation. This can be useful, whether it is a physical pain, mental pain or just the pain of doing a boring menial tasks. It can help you run that last mile of the marathon as well as going through a tougher period of your life.
3. Benefits are cumulative but meditation should be regular
When talking about muscle, we say “use it or lose it”. Same goes for meditation. Skip a day, or be less present during a practice and you will see your skill slowly diminish. The good news is that 10 minutes every day is enough.
4. However, meditating 10 minutes every day is difficult
You sometimes forget about it until late in the night when you are tired, or tipsy, or just lazy. Having some sort of accountability system (like a streak counter which resets to 0 when you miss a day) can help a lot with the motivation of not skipping a single day.
How does meditation work?
I think this is the time to just hit pause for 10 minutes and really try it. There is an amazing app for guided meditation called Headspace which offers 10 free sessions. Below, I will explain the steps, but really you should try it out yourself first, so that I do not spoil your first impression.
Just download the app, make sure you are not distracted for 10 minutes, give it a go and let me know what you think. I am sure it will be the best spent 10 minutes of your year, but if you think it was a waste of your time, let me know and I will publicly apologize to each and every one of you.
However, here is how it works. These are the main components of a 10 minute practice.
- Take a mental note that you are about to meditate, be aware of your decision. This is especially important once meditation becomes a routine, but hopefully not so important for your first practice. Then close your eyes.
- Next, take deep breaths to calm down. There are various techniques which achieve different results. The 4 variables are the breath-in time, the hold time, and the breath-out time. My favorite is the 4–7–8 rule, for which I even wrote an app (check it out). There is even a separate iOS app that teaches breathing without meditation. Headspace likes to keep it simple and advices you to just take deep breaths through the nose and breath out through the mouth. Do this for 1 minute.
- Next, perform a body scan, going from head to toe, in a slow methodical fashion, being aware of each part of the body, whether it feels tense or loose. Do this for 5 minutes.
- Next, find a point of focus. The easiest is to focus on the breath. Notice the inhales and exhales and how the chest feels at each moment. To make it easier to stay focused, count the breaths: 1 with the inhale, 2 with the exhale. Count up to 10, then start from 0. Do this for 3 minutes.
- Next, be mindful of your surroundings, get back into your body, listen to the sounds around you. Do this for 1 minute.
- Next, allow the mind to do anything it wants. Stop controlling it. You’ll notice this is the part of the meditation when the mind is the quietest, but it does not need to. Do this for 20–30 seconds.
- Lastly, open eyes and notice how you feel now. Compare that with how you felt when you began the practice. Do not move for 1–2 minutes, just enjoy the feeling (or lack thereof, doesn’t matter). Do this for 1 minute or more.
That’s it. Again, I think Andy, at Headspace, explains the process way better in the 10-day free trial. They put together a couple of animations which explain what to do if during the meditation you fall asleep or are restless or can’t stop your thoughts coming (spoiler — you should not fight your thoughts). The paid app gets into more advanced topics, but that is beyond this article.
Do I recommend mindful meditation?
A successful entrepreneur was once asked by a student: “Should I become an entrepreneur like yourself?”. After moments of thinking the entrepreneur answered “No”. “Why so?” the student asked. “Well, if I said YES, you chase this dream to my advice and fail, you will get upset with me for wasting your time. However, if I say NO, but you have what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur, you would totally disregard my advice anyway, and just go ahead and be successful”.
I did recommend meditation to a couple of close friends in the past, but they gave up after few days. Meditation can only stick as a habit if it is your idea to try it out. You have to believe this is something worth investing time on. So I say no, do not try meditation, although deep inside I really hope that you will disregard my advice.
Stay mindful, stay foolish!
Hey there, Andrei here. If you enjoyed the article and want to make sure you know about my next one, you can sign up with your email address below. I only send blog-related updates and have a zero-spam policy.
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Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Headspace. I am not compensated for this article. I am just a paying user of the app and have used it every single day for the past ~1000 days.
FYI, they have a 40% end-of-year discount. Again, no affiliation…
