How My Initial Meditation Practice Is Progressing
As part of a Lifehacker’s Fitness assignment, I try various meditation techniques for 30 days. This is the second week of my challenge, and I took another step towards developing a consistent meditation regimen: I lengthened the meditation sessions and tried midday meditation rather than morning sitting. The results were … less than desirable.
Experiment with different times of the day
In the first week, my comfort level with meditation increased, but my stress did not necessarily decrease. I suffer from stress mostly during the workday – an ever-growing to-do list can be overwhelming, and most of the time I let it go beyond my waking hours. For the second week, I decided to meditate for five minutes in the middle of the day.
I continued to use the Headspace app, but found that the number of sessions I wanted to do during the day increased from three minutes to 10; my plan to take five minutes didn’t work. It was ten minutes.
Meditation during the day in multitasking mode
Meditation requires a willingness to give up any responsibility for a specific time. For those who enjoy multitasking, trying to get rid of those responsibilities in the middle of the day seemed impossible. I found that I could not allow my thoughts to pass me by, as indicated in the session. I was thinking about a deadline or a meeting I had later that day and couldn’t get rid of it. My persistent thoughts forbade any moments of calm that I tried to achieve. This may be related to a deeper problem: anxiety disorder.
According to counseling site Better Help , high functioning anxiety manifests itself in a variety of ways – for example, through being forced to overwork or because of an overwhelming fear of the future. Although I have not been diagnosed with high-functioning anxiety disorder, these symptoms seem terribly familiar, and I could benefit from methods of relieving them. Better Help explains that mindfulness has proven to be an effective treatment:
Incorporating mindfulness into cognitive therapy helps counselors of people with high functional anxiety give their patients the tools they need to stay at the core of their own thoughts and feelings in the moment, instead of worrying about what other people are thinking or what might be happening. Currently. far future.
Learning to turn and push
After reading about the benefits of mindfulness and anxiety, I felt empowered to continue my task. Since midday meditation was having an adverse effect on what I wanted, I decided to switch to meditation before bed. I often stay awake until 2 or 3 am, watch TV and sometimes work. I hope that meditation at night will make me put off the day at a reasonable hour and help my body fall asleep more easily and sleep more restful. This can be the key to consistency for me and possibly means less stress during my work hours.