Meditation is so weird to me. This is a short note about some specific aspects of my personal experience with meditation that give me that reaction.
I’ve been meditating with varying levels of consistency for maybe 6 or 7 years now. I started with Headspace and 10% Happier and their guided meditations, but for the last few years I’ve been mostly just doing a 15m timer and sitting with whatever is present, commonly focusing on the breath as an anchor. These days I’m pretty consistent about it and have built it into my morning routine.
I’ve definitely noticed that, when I am consistently meditating every morning, it has a real observable effect for me. My mood/headspace/orientation to the world is generally a bit better; I’m a bit calmer, a bit more observant – especially about myself and my own emotions and needs; I’m a bit less reactive, I’ve got a bit more grace and equanimity in general. It’s not a huge effect but I’m pretty convinced it’s one I can detect in myself.
It’s just … weird to me this is true?? Like, I think in some sense it’s completely unsurprising if you’ve read anything at all about meditation or talked with a single experienced meditator. But also it feels somehow super counterintuitive to me, and I feel like I totally a lack anything resembling a “good theory” that would predict this.
Some specific aspects of my experience:
- It feels like very much some sort of moving average, more so than something as simple as “on days I meditate I get the benefit.” Somehow that’s weird to me – I think of the brain/mind as having effects with characteristic timescales of minutes or hours, and there are clearly long-run ones on timescales of years, but with meditation it feels like something in me is effectively doing a moving average over the last few days, and that hing is sensitive to spending c. 1% of that time in this particular mental space.
- If it’s so good for me [which, again, both “everyone” and my own experience agree on], why is it, like, mildly aversive on average to actually sit down and do it? Why have neither evolution nor some sort of experiental learning loop made that connection? This feels somehow related to the timescale thing, to me – somehow the “behavior” -> “outcome” connection is too decoupled in time to be easily learnable by my lizard-brain and so I have to actually Do Cognition to make the connection.
- To that point: I have managed to meditate consistently primarily by building it into my morning routine; every morning, I do (roughly) the same sequence of activities in the same order, one of which is my 15 minute sit, and the force of habit and repetition suffices to make me Actually Do The Thing.
- But when I’m traveling, I lose my usual structure, and I almost always stop meditating entirely or almost-entirely while on the road
- … and that gives me another opportunity to notice the cumulative effect: I very often notice that, after a trip where I’ve dropped the habit, getting back into it is is hard. The first two days back, the 15 minute timer lasts subjectively forever and I can just feel myself rebelling – I notice myself getting bored and antsy, I notice myself wondering “is this doooone yet,” I notice my attention wandering all over the place, etc. I even notice myself procrastinating the meditation – I’ll get more-easily sucked into just tapping things on my phone, catching up on the internet, etc, instead of just sitting down and starting my timer.
- … but gradually over a few days, I observe myself get back into it, and sitting quietly for 15m becomes easy, even pleasant.
