Meditation - How I Got Hooked
It’s 2020. We’ve upgraded from pictures of coffee, but since Yoga requires sweat equity and skill, we’re all meditating now. Or at least we want to. It’s pretty cool, right?
Or is it only cool to the same people who chatter incessantly about their tiny dog sweaters or their crossfit meetup? Perhaps you know one of these people and thought, “if meditating leads to being obnoxious, no thanks.”
The unsurprising truth is that there are plenty of people talking about meditation, but very few actually doing it. The gym has less of this problem; most people who are out of shape don’t talk about their gym habits, unless they’re making clear progress toward their goals. But with meditation, there isn’t a credibility check for it’s advocates. It’s pretty easy to just speak authoritatively without putting in any time or deriving any benefits from it.
The end result is that those who aren’t very familiar with meditation find it’s proponents to be pretentious, and don’t really dive in on the topic. But it does have tons of measurable benefits which are backed up by science, and it’s encouraged (even mandated) in virtually every religious text ever written.
Recently a relatively straight laced, no-nonsense friend of mine who works as a campaign manager for underdog political candidates expressed an interest in meditation, but had serious reservations based on the other ‘meditators’ he had met. I ended up writing an email to him with some of the resources that have helped me.
I’m not a regular at meditation I’ll admit. I’m not a regular gymgoer either. I go when I need the health and energy boost. Sometimes I go at a consistent pace to get to a specific goal. Meditation is the same type of hobby/skill/discipline. I meditate when I need the boost in clarity, calm, and focus. It’s a skill that definitely yields more results with repetition, but you don’t have to be an expert to derive some substantial benefits.
The text that follows is the email to my friend. It includes a TON of fun videos, some pseudoscience, a bit of woo-woo, and a whole lot of subjective reasoning. Now that you’ve been warned, give it a go. I dare you to try it for a week and tell me it yielded nothing.
Warning: There is some mild language.
“Hey man, hope you’re well. Here is the follow-up I promised.
I was gonna just send links, but I felt some background was in order. I explore many things- I commit to and endorse very few. I wrote this up for you, as I would like you to have the kind of tools that I've had access to, without spending months in the YouTube rabbithole. Yes. I wrote this entire fucking five page monstrosity because I realized that I may be able to use it again later but for now, it was written specifically with you and your career in mind.
I didn't know it when I started, maybe it was a Holy Spirit thing, but for me, this was about survival. Literal survival. 1 in 5 people with BPAD II kill themselves, and 1 in 3 will attempt suicide. Though I’m trying to figure out whether I actually have a disorder or just sit on the spectrum, I have always had mood stability issues and when they eventually turned into episodes of depression and then suicidal thoughts, I knew I needed to get something figured out fast or get medicated (or both.) I doubt you have any similar disorder or psychological limitation, but you strike me as someone who likes life-hacking and finding better tools. That’s a sufficient enough reason to explore meditation.
You particularly are involved in a new kind of combat in the election game, where psychological clarity, speed, strength, and purity (I call it mental velocity, since velocity = speed, power, AND direction) is what sets you apart from the competition and very well may keep you from 'getting killed' so to speak. Maybe this is about survival for you too. At very least it's one of the healthiest things you could experiment with, from a purely neurological level.
At one point in my life I was inadvertently doing many of these things in my life without realizing it, because of my book-a-day youth and my repeated visualizations for crafting movies. I lost a ton of momentum as I destabilized my routine (marijuana is a very, very powerful tool, but a horrible, godawful daily habit, and I didn't know why until I had undone years of mental work) and I want it back. Much like going to the gym, thankfully, muscle memory is real for the brain and body, and it's easy to regain progress.
WHY MEDITATION?
As with many things, I do a shit load of research (read- browsing pop psychology websites and YouTube how-to’s) before I commit to a long term use of anything that requires my time. I initially looked up mediation to deal with what I thought was ADHD induced monopolar depression- I wasn't able to concentrate on tasks, and felt very little motivation to take on large projects for fear that I would be too disinterested to complete them.
As I was reading about ADHD (and eventually Bipolar), I knew that many physical maladies often have physical cures through therapy like stretching, breathing, weightlifting, cardio, etc. I wondered what sorts of exercises might be used for enhancing mental health. I knew I had done some breathing and sudoku/brain games to increase my memory and retention skills that had been very effective, so I presumed emotional stability, confidence, decision making power, and long term project focus, could probably all be enhanced by targeting specific challenges with the brain.
The two pieces that popped up repeatedly were daily breathing exercises and meditation. Breathing has direct control over the voltage levels of the heart, which directly effects the Central Nervous System and is responsible for mental/emotional energy. Tired people are more emotional, erratic, depressive, confused, easily buffaloed, etc, so having mental energy was my first goal. One reason sleep affects our mood is because the body auto-regulates into deep breathing. Cardio forces us to breath very deeply and increases voltage output of the heart as well, and cardio definitely affects mental energy. Deep breathing during waking hours affects energy during waking hours, deep breathing in the morning leads to deeper breathing throughout the day. One major reason for better sitting posture (and avoiding sedentary work habits) is deeper breathing.
But if cardio can solve the deep breathing issue, and increase voltage and mental energy, why is meditation also popular? Why is yoga a prescribed practice for PTSD and ADHD, and not just jogging? Jogging never solved my ADHD. Weightlifting only made me more likely to be angry all the time, I didn't have any more emotional stability, I just had more energy to direct my negative emotions.
I also found many testimonies of people with mild to chronic Anxiety, mild to chronic ADHD, and mild Bipolar II who claimed they 'cured' themselves through meditation. I think that’s probably a stretch, but if people are managing their mental health more effectively through a simple practice, I’m willing to try it. From this reading, I found that meditation isn't just about giving energy to your brain, but strength. Breathing increases voltage but doesn't direct it. Cardio doesn't make your bench or squat power any better, it just increases energy. The analogy is imperfect, but I got this far so I’m going to stick with it.
Then I started learning more about Placebo Effect and it's evil twin, Nocebo. Placebo famously occurs when a subject unwittingly believes something, and it changes them emotionally, mentally, and even physically. Even highly skeptical Ben Goldacre had his mind blown (this video is hilarious).
I started to connect the scientific aspects of this with some of my Christian upbringing and the ever important mythology surrounding the power of faith. So what if you could harness the power of placebo by choosing to put your mind into a state to believe in magic? What if you could eradicate the neurotic 'burden' of knowledge by doing 'drills' on simple beliefs? What if faith isn't a randomized emotional belief without evidence, but is a mental muscle capacity that can be strengthened, along with the willpower to act?
I know, I know. The hyperbole is yuuuuuge. But you get it, right?
That's where meditation does more than just affect breathing. That's why jumping straight into a 'clear your mind' style Eastern meditation doesn't work for Americans. We'd be better off going for a jog. But focusing your mind, planning in advance how you intend to flex your brain along certain pathways? When we go to the gym, we use specific machines to work specific muscles. The brain has similarities.
What I Wanted vs. What They Gave Me
I wanted to vastly increase my reserves of genius, willpower, and faith. I wanted to know what I was achieving with my time. So I tried a few popular anti-anxiety meditations and was profoundly, profoundly disappointed. There are so many weird 'Law of Attraction!!!! OMG" level crazy nerds, and people who think we are somehow going to float ourselves off the planet into another world and... well, bless their hearts. Yet there is some kernel of truth to their crazy enthusiasm.
Most meditations were very flowy, hippie-bullshit fairyland dreamy pie-in-the-sky magic in their explanations and orientations, which completely disinterested me. They still have some benefits, but those benefits are inconsistent, don't benefit disparate personalities equally, and there is no way to 'measure' your productivity. So they really weren't my thing.
Then I found a doctor in a Ted Talk who is hyper-rational and struggled with similar mental frustrations. He explains how each portion of the brain works physically, and his story is somewhat similar to mine in that he was attempting to solve his own depression, but was quite convinced that 99 percent of the information out there is unhelpful, misleading, and incredibly unscientific.
He started investing time in mediation based on clinical research on deep breathing, heart rate/voltage production, placebo, etc. His name is Dr. Joe Dispenza, and after checking his cited sources, I was persuaded that the science behind it is pretty airtight. He even has some great guided meditations of his own.
He started with some important assumptions about the mind and it’s responsibilities.
Our Brain Must:
- Evaluate our actions and their butterfly effects over time
- Choose between paths that may seem nearly identical
- Manage priorities without being anxious about their importance
- Choose to believe in things that don't tangibly exist, in order to create them (innovations, writing, movies, etc)
- Regulate impulsive emotional state changes
- Remember things, sometimes complicated things with details and nuances
- Empathize with others effectively, so that we can work together to accomplish goals larger than one person
- Plan out short term tasks to achieve long term goals
- Create new plans rapidly as old plans fall apart
- Be fulfilled and find joy in self-sacrificial behavior, for the good of our loved ones
- Be able to possess epic means of violence and consider the consequences of violence without engaging in violence or thinking violently
I think this is a reasonable but also somewhat terrifying list of jobs for an immobile glob of gray gloup to perform. If you simply ranked a person on the above skills with 1 being poor and 10 being best, we could all agree a 1 should not be in leadership and will not be successful, but a 10 in all categories could be a terrific leader.
An oft-quoted idiom is that readers are leaders; and in fact, it's because reading is a form of guided meditation. As one quote puts it, reading is just staring at thin slices of trees and hallucinating vividly. It's trippy, but weirdly true- the word is not just a technology for carrying information, it's a technology to get us to stop using our eyes (and the 70 percent of the cerebral functions they hijack) for navigating a physical world, but to send our brain coded messages that induce a low level meditation on abstract concepts.
Someone said that intelligence isn't merely a latent talent, but the result of prolonged conditioning. What if readers are leaders because readers are meditating every day by accident? What if intelligence or 'mental velocity' is less of a gift, and more of a martial art, or a collection of muscles and movements that can be trained, layer by layer? This isn’t just a question of rational intelligence, but emotional intelligence. Studies have shown that kids who read Harry Potter in school were markedly higher performers in acts of empathy.
So let's take our brains to the gym. Let's find out which machines can affect which muscles and learn to do a simple routine to get in shape. It doesn't take being Arnold to be an incredibly strong person, it can be done in about a year with 25-30 minutes a day. A half hour of focused effort a day for five years will put you in the top 1 in 100,000 in the world for physical strength, and I'm beginning a new journey to be 1 in 100,000 in the world for mental velocity. But to get there, I needed a 'trainer'. I needed a routine. I needed an easy starting point for a first month.
Vishen and Mindvalley
Like exercise, the science behind meditation is pretty simple and predictable, but the style and methods can vary wildly for body/brain type, goals, and motivation personality. So I started looking for a rational scientific meditation method that worked for me, and I found Vishen Lakhiani, who is a silicon valley life-hacker type, who was trying to accomplish as much as possible with meditation tools in the smallest period of time possible. I tried it, liked it, got good results with very little practice, and those results multiplied pretty rapidly. Within a couple weeks, I had a significant shift of conscientiousness.
I kept it up until I was making good money again, and then I started drinking heavily and regularly, which screwed up my schedule and with it, my meditation habits. Recently I heard a psychologist discussing the importance of protecting circadian rhythm and schedules. The emphasis was on the importance of controlling the focus and routine of your first 30 minutes in the day. Having a sacred morning routine is cited by most mega-achievers in the world, for what it’s worth. So I decided to reinvest some time in my meditation practices, and I'm already glad that I did.
INTRODUCTORY SESSSION:
Here's the 35 minute video, in which Vishen gives a rapid fire overview (he does this more thoroughly, along with the science and methodologies used to develop these techniques, in his book Code of the Extraordinary Mind) and he concludes with a 10 minute guide. He talks a LOT through the 10 minute guide, but it's a great walk through for an easily distracted mind (like mine) the first couple of times.
MORNING ROUTINE VERSION - 20 MINUTES
Throw in your headphones. This is the one I challenge you to do every morning for a week.
Here's a 'full length' morning routine, it's 22 minutes, still with a lot of vocal guidance, but the goal is to eventually do it without any guidance, as any interruptions, even helpful guiding points or structure, actually do distract the brain a little bit.
For a more 'intense' version, use this one with binaural frequencies. These are very helpful for some, very distracting for others. The vocalization and guidance in this one is a little less disruptive, so after you've done the above version a handful of times, this may be a good upgrade.
GETTING MORE FROM EACH PHASE:
What I did last time worked really well, and I saw some other users recommending this on Reddit and other places. MindValley Quest offers a free course on using the 6 phase meditation, as well as some regular free content. They promote the crap out of some premium content all the time, but I wouldn't worry too much about it.
OMVANA:
Vishen's team also put together a a free app for meditation/guided hypnosis enthusiasts, and most of the products and content are utter bullshit. But Vishen provides all the 6 phase versions and their instructional components for free within the app, along with a variety of different musical tracks and free meditation tracks if you want to change it up a bit. So maybe you want to meditate on a specific problem or spend more time on just the future visualization or 24 hour planning? You can load up binaural music tracks and play them solo, or you can pick whichever component you want and play it with any music track you like. There are multiple music options with different frequencies that achieve different things, but I haven't got enough experience to speak to how effective they are. I haven't started studying binaural frequencies or brain wave types enough to fully endorse or apply the ideas.
There are a few really, really DEEP meditative tracks (45 minutes plus) in Omvana that I or friends have tried that deal with planning out a future, fixing bad reflexes or impulses, or dealing with chronic future stress issues like procrastination. A friend of mine I recommended this to me years ago when he kicked a five year cocaine habit and stopped smoking after two weeks. Yes, anecdotal testimony only goes so far, but I was intrigued enough to check it out. Another friend significantly reduced his stutter. They require a lot more focus and control of your mental imaging, so I usually just tell people about the 6 phase and let them go on our their own journey from there.
It's a neat tool, having all the content in an app that uses less battery than the online videos is nice, as well as changing up the music so it's not quite so repetitive.
Cheers to finishing out this work cycle strong, and I would wager that if you use this 6 phase as a semi-regular part of your routine, you'll be as excited about it as I am.
~ John.
P.S. I'm sorry for how long this was. I just realized that despite some huge differences in personality, you are likely every bit the evidence based skeptic than I am, and I wanted to give you at least as much information as you needed to dive further into any area of mental hesitation, and get the rest of the research. Hopefully I've helped limit the amount of bullshit you have to sift through on this very important topic.