The modern American way of life is one of constant busyness. Not only do we have packed work calendars, but for many of us our non-work life offers no relief—that is, unless your idea of relief involves a mad dash from work to school pickup and dinner and sports practice. A client recently reminded me of a (probably apocryphal) story of an overworked businessman who met with the Dalai Lama. “What can I do to be happy?” he asked. He was told to meditate for five minutes every day. When he protested that it was impossible to carve that time out due to his busy schedule, the Dalai Lama replied, “Oh, in that case you should meditate for an hour a day.”
It’s hard to imagine that you haven’t heard from someone or read something about meditation in the last few years. It’s everywhere, from Goop to law firm wellness workshops. In this world where we are so scattered and living in our minds, people are thirsty for getting grounded. But as with anything that seems like a fad, it’s reasonable to wonder: what is the point of meditation, really? How can it help me, in my life?
Although meditation has been difficult to adapt to clinical study, there is some evidence of health effects in controlled trials. But rather than repeat all of those findings, I’d like to use this short article to share my personal perspective on the benefits of regular meditation drawn from my decade-plus of experience with it.
TLDR: Regular meditation practice brings insulation from discomfort, offers an antidote to anxiety, and strengthens self-confidence and intuition. Resources for further learning at the bottom.
Making time to find out
It can be hard to imagine what the benefit of not working could be when we have so many things to get done, but research supports the idea that taking time away from work makes us more effective at work. Meditation expands this idea into your daily life.
Essentially, sitting down to meditate represents a pact you make with yourself: For the next however-many minutes, you are going to sit still and check in with yourself, no matter how compelling your thoughts or your desire for distraction become.
The more your waking life is like drinking from a firehose, the more meaningful it can be to notice what’s going on with yourself while you’re in that state. Are you hungry? Tense? Worried? Happy? Sometimes the only way to know is to slow down and listen to the signals your body is sending to you. If you make a habit of making time to slow down, you will find yourself better able to withstand the kinds of discomfort that sends you to your phone for distraction. This is because meditation provides nervous system regulation. If our nerves are overstimulated, it is almost impossible to feel calm or safe. So having a reliable route to calming the mind and body is an essential antidote to anxiety.
Over time, you will be able to notice increasingly subtle feelings within you, giving you a clear picture of where you are at. Once you develop that view, with regular practice you will be able to carry the ease of meditation with you into your daily life. From then on, your meditation practice goes with you throughout your waking hours, showing you what sorts of situations and people cause you to lose your ease. That’s the kind of valuable, hard-to-earn information that supports you finding what you really want out of your life.
Practice makes present
Meditation is a practice, something you do repeatedly not to get anywhere in the next ten minutes, but for its own sake. But what’s good about that, exactly? Well, think about it this way: distance runners have a lower resting heart rate. But if I do a single 10-mile run a month, I’m not going to have a lower heart rate. The improvements in heart health only emerge from the act of repeatedly running.
So the benefit of a practice is that it doesn’t ultimately matter whether you are doing a “good job” or not; that’s beside the point. Some meditation sessions will feel good and others will feel not-so-good. The point isn’t anything other than the doing itself. Over and over again, you pause to check in with yourself, gradually building familiarity. Over the course of the dozens and hundreds of meditation sessions, you get an increasingly refined and personalized idea about what is going on inside of you.
The end result is confidence and intuition: repeated exposure to your own reality strengthens your confidence in your own experience. You find yourself trusting your own sense of what you need over external ideas about what is good. Instead of looking for a Huberman podcast to understand whether you are calm, you know for yourself whether you’re calm. Instead of relying on the pomodoro timer, you know for yourself how it feels when you need to take a break. In the long run, you learn what it means to trust yourself. That is the foundation of self-confidence.
Resources for further learning
I could write another few thousand words on what meditation has given me and what I think it could give you. But instead, I encourage you to find out for yourself. If you want more guidance, check out these resources to learn about different types of meditation:
- Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life by Jon Kabat-Zinn [Amazon]
- American Catholic monk Fr. Thomas Keating talking about the Christian contemplative practice he pioneered, called centering prayer [Youtube]
- A five-part lecture series introducing Buddhist mindfulness meditation by Gil Fronsdal, the head instructor at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California [Youtube]
Insights Therapist