Meditation: what's in it for me?

Meditation sounds like a fluffy word. It sounds like it doesn’t mean anything. It seems too simple to have any real power. The idea that listening to your breath, and training the mind to focus on just that, is meant to be beneficial to us in a number of ways sounds crazy. It’s just too vague, too hippy-dippy, too… straightforward? Okay, so maybe you aren’t totally allergic to the idea of meditation. You’re open to it, but finding the time to do it is just proving difficult. My hope is that, having read through this blog post and my having shared with you both my personal experience with meditation as well as what the science says, you will be willing to invest the time in yourself and in your quality of life.

The first major thing I noticed in my life when I started to meditate was how much it reduced my stress, which is a known benefit of mindfulness (Goyal et al., 2014). Speaking as someone whose thoughts can spiral to towering infernos, this benefit alone is life-changing. I particularly noticed the lack of stress when starting back to school this September, for instance. Usually, pressure mounts at the dawning of a new school year - getting to grips with my new class, prepping my materials for the first few weeks, organising the physical layout of the room, worrying I won’t be good enough - but I can honestly say that this September was the easiest and breeziest I have ever had, and in a funny way I think COVID actually helped with this. I focused on what was in my control and what was most important - the health and safety of my pupils, the fact that they learn a thing or two each day, and have fun while doing so - and I let this guide my actions. The usual background noise I let seep into my thoughts and wind me up other years faded when I didn’t give it air-time, and I truly believe meditation has caused this psychological shift.

Secondly, regular mindfulness has been linked to decreased anxiety, especially in individuals with high trait anxiety (Orme-Johnson & Barnes, 2014). I have felt this in full force in my own life, for sure. I remember before my second attempt at the driving test, sitting outside the office, waiting to be called in, and feeling extremely panicky as I thought of all the ways it could go wrong. I had recently learned a breathing technique called 7-11s - breathing in for a count of 7, breathing out for a count of 11 - which I called on at that moment. Within a minute, my heart rate had visibly slowed, my palms felt less sweaty, and my mind was a far more serene place (and, FYI, I aced that test). Similarly, COVID has thrown us all into a world of glaring uncertainty, which is, for obvious reasons, very anxiety-inducing. I really feel that meditating regularly has helped me weather the storm of the pandemic, focusing my attention on the present and on what I can control, and leaving the worrying to the politicians.

Another advantage regular meditation brings is that of improved emotional health, something I feel has come on leaps and bounds this year with my mindfulness practice AND that is backed by the research (Kiken & Shook, 2014). This is not to say that we won’t have a negative thought or two now and again, because that is just life and no-one is expected to be happy all the time, but since meditation is all about cultivating a quiet, non-judgmental mind, it is easier to spot these negatively skewed thought patterns without all the background noise and stop them taking a hold of us. I use the Headspace app for a lot of my meditation (shameless plug), and over lockdown I completed a 30-day course on relationships. Part of the practice involved picturing people in your life, someone you really like, someone you are neutral towards, someone with whom you struggle to get on, and imagining them smiling, as sunlight beams down upon them. While this was difficult at the start, I felt its benefits after a few weeks, as thoughts about a person in my life who at the time had been causing me a lot of frustration seemed to bother me less and less. I also feel that taking the time out every day to just sit with myself for a few minutes has increased my love and appreciation for myself. If anything resonates with you in this blog post, let it be this.

I could discuss at length a myriad of other ways in which meditation enriches our lives, such as enhanced self-awareness, improved sleep, and lengthened attention span, but the main take-home I want you to get from this is that meditation does not have to be time-consuming; therefore it is easier than you think to fit it into your everyday life. I usually meditate for 10 minutes a day, and I still have time to do all my other activities, usually with a clearer head too. If you find you’re pressed for that time, take 10 minutes off of something else. Could I suggest repurposing the time you spend scrolling on social media timelines, maybe? You could stare mindlessly at your screen for 20 minutes, absorbing negativity from other people’s pages - whether it’s bad-news headlines, airbrushed, filtered photographs of unrealistic bodies, posts that just make you feel awful (maybe even without your realising it) - or you could spend 4 minutes - 240 seconds - in the quiet, listening to your breathing and trying to clear your mind of worry, left feeling more calm, less anxious and in the long run better about yourself as a person. Think about it. What is a better use of your time?

References

Goyal, M., Singh, S., Sibinga, E. M., Gould, N. F., Rowland-Seymour, A., Sharma, R., Berger, Z., Sleicher, D., Maron, D. D., Shihab, H. M., Ranasinghe, P. D., Linn, S., Saha, S., Bass, E. B., & Haythornthwaite, J. A. (2014). Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA internal medicine, 174(3), 357–368. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.13018


Kiken, L. G., & Shook, N. J. (2014). Does mindfulness attenuate thoughts emphasizing negativity, but not positivity?. Journal of research in personality, 53, 22–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2014.08.002


Orme-Johnson, D. W., & Barnes, V. A. (2014). Effects of the transcendental meditation technique on trait anxiety: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Journal of alternative and complementary medicine (New York, N.Y.), 20(5), 330–341. https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2013.0204