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Hey Life Warrior!
You pick up your phone to check what the weather is going to be like tomorrow. You unlock it, open whatsapp and start reading the messages you had unread. One of them contains a link to an instagram post. You click on the link and start looking at your Instagram feed. An interesting offer pops up in your Instagram feed. You get up and go to get your wallet. About ten minutes after you picked up your phone, you put it back on the table. What’s the weather going to be like tomorrow? No idea, you haven’t looked at it.
Are you familiar with this situation? In today’s society, we are subjected to thousands of distractions. Tons of companies make a living at the cost of attracting your attention and keeping you with them. Their technique is to provide you with impulses that your brain perceives as positive or pleasant. Consequently, your brain pushes you to seek more and more of those impulses. Whether it’s likes on your posts, followers, watching one more episode of the latest Netflix series, buying the umpteenth sweater that, of course, you don’t need at all… all of this has one thing in common: it stimulates your dopamine production without you even realizing it. Some time ago we talked about this phenomenon and how to counteract it, or rather, how to make it play in your favor (click here if you missed it).
Today we bring you one more tool to incorporate to your arsenal: Meditation
Meditation is an ancient practice that has become quite fashionable lately through mindfulness. In fact, some people mistakenly identify the two concepts, but they are not the same thing. Mindfulness is a mental state of mindfulness, and incorporates a series of techniques that help us to reach that state. Meditation is one of these techniques. In turn, meditation for mindfulness is one of many kinds of meditation.
Another misconception of meditation is that it is some kind of an esoteric practice, or that it is necessarily linked to Buddhism or Hinduism. Undoubtedly the ancient Eastern civilizations have had a great influence on the development of this practice, but that does not mean that to meditate you have to be a Buddhist, any more than to practice Kung Fu you have to be a Shaolin monk.
Finally, another common mistake is to identify meditation as a relaxation technique (it is not) or as a practice whose goal is to “blank the mind”.
Actually, the goal of meditation is training our brain to be mindful of things. When I get distracted, to be aware that I’ve been distracted, and when I get to be focused on my breathing, to be fully aware of my breathing.
Naturally, when we start meditation practice, distractions are very frequent. We get to it, we start to focus on our breathing and automatically our mind jumps to going through the shopping list, to the things I have to do when I finish meditating or trying to remember the name of that great restaurant. It’s perfectly normal. Our brain is designed to never stop, and to perform a lot of functions in “autopilot” mode. The key is to realize that we’ve been distracted and refocus our attention on our breathing.
Meditation has for us Life Warriors an immediate benefit: it helps us to focus our minds on what we really want to be focused on, and to avoid the many distractions around us. This full awareness of the world around us allows us to be more effective in the things we do, more productive and it certainly gives us more time to do the things we want to do.
But although this benefit alone would be enough, meditation has many other benefits for our health, extensively described by our admired Marcos Vázquez in this excellent article: improved blood pressure, reduced cortisol levels, improved concentration, better sleep quality, recovery after physical exercise, and many more that you can see in Marcos’ article.
And you know the best about meditation? Two things: you don’t have to be an expert meditator to get the benefits, as these are proven in beginners as well, and it’s totally free!!! What else do we want?
If I have convinced you and you have decided to start meditating, congratulations! During your first few months of practice, it is best to follow guided meditations. Eventually you will be able to do without this help. You can find guided meditations on YouTube, Spotify, and of course, a lot of mobile apps. The one we use is Down Dog (you have both free and paid versions), but any other one you have will do.
Do you think that incorporating meditation to your daily routine sounds like appealing but you don’t think you have time for it?
