Meditation is the fourth and last of our foundational ideas for The Curvy Road Project (along with sleep, diet, and exercise.) I really debated adding this as a foundation, mostly because it’s the one foundational skill I regularly forget to do. When I do it, the benefits are noticeable and almost immediate. Yet I struggle. I have as much difficulty getting into a meditation habit as I have difficulty flossing regularly. Which makes this an ideal foundational topic because it holds me accountable.
The Purpose of Meditation and How It Works
If we cut through all the new age shit or spirituality mumble-jumble, meditation is really nothing more than an effective method to gain some control over your emotions. To understand how this works, there are two important ideas we need to understand.
The first idea is metacognition. Humans have a rather unique ability to think about the stuff going on in our own heads. If I’m thinking about that raspberry jelly donut I ate last week, I can mentally take a step back “observe” my own mind thinking of that jelly donut. Importantly, I can also observe the emotion attached to eating the jelly donut… which I likely guilt. We’re consciously aware that we’re thinking and feeling creatures, and we have the ability to understand what we’re thinking and feeling. And we can analyze our thoughts and feelings critically.
The second is how emotion (feelings) and cognition (conscious thoughts) work. Our brain constantly receives a TON of information, which may come from the outside (through our eyes, ears, nose, taste buds, skin [touch, temperature, pressure, and pain], vestibular [balance], kinesthetics (stretching and body position), and the inside (our memories, internal sensations like when CO2 builds up in our bloodstream, etc.) Our brain also experiences biological drives (hunger, thirst, warmth, safety, social belonging, companionship, pleasure, sex, etc.)
These sensations and drives conspire to create various emotions, such as happiness, fear, sadness, anticipation, trust, anger, surprise, and disgust. There is about 27 common emotions all humans experience. The full list is at the very bottom of this post for those of you who are interested. Anyway, the creation and expression of any given emotion occurs before we think about it. When we’re recalling the memory of eating the jelly donut, we FEEL the guilt, THEN we think “Awe, shit, I really shouldn’t have eaten that donut.”
The implications of this are significant; it means we’re not rational creatures. We’re rationalizing creatures. Something in our environment interacts with our biological drives to create an emotion, then our brain tries to make up a story to make sense of the emotion. Generally, the smarter you are, the better you are at rationalizing your emotions. This is why really intelligent people are the easiest marks for con men… the con men know how to elicit emotion and they know the smarter people more effectively rationalize that emotion in a way that will play into the con.
So… what does meditation do for us?
Meditation basically trains us to use that metacognition superpower to observe our own emotions and how those emotions create rationalizations. It causes us to get better at seeing our own feelings, and how those feelings affect our thoughts.
The Benefits of Meditation
The list of benefits from meditation is pretty long. Mediation helps…
Increases mindfulness, which is basically living in the moment versus ruminating about the past or obsessing about the future.
Reduce and control stress, anxiety, and depression.
Improves emotional health.
Improves self-awareness (the ability to objectively see yourself as others see you.)
Improves your attention span and ability to focus.
Improves age-related memory loss.
May help fix addictions.
Improves sleep.
Controls pain.
Decreases blood pressure.
Different types of mediation (not the kind I describe here) can help you become more empathic and kind.
All of these feed into the main point of The Curvy Road Project - to make our lives better. The greatest benefit, though, is developing that superpower of metacognition to analyze your feeling-thought cycles. The better we get at this skill, the more we understand ourselves. The more we understand ourselves, the easier it is to improve ourselves.
The Basics of Meditation
Meditation is really easy. Just follow these steps:
Find a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted for a few minutes. Your body position isn’t critical, but most people sit upright with their legs crossed (“Indian-style” for Gen Xers, “criss-cross applesauce” for Millennials.) Close your eyes.
Focus on breathing in and out. Focus on a specific point, like your chest rising and falling or the air passing in and out of your nose.
Within a fraction of a second, some thought is going to pop into your head. THAT’S NORMAL! Just make a mental note that the thought popped in your head, then “reset” and go back to focusing on your breathing. The next time another thought pops in your head, do the same thing. If you have a sensation or feel an emotion, do the same thing. Note it, then go back to focusing on your breathing. Do this for a few minutes in the beginning (I start with five minutes), then increase the time by a few minutes every week or so.
The first few times I tried developing a meditation habit, I didn’t really get the third point. I’d get extremely frustrated because I couldn’t focus on breathing for more than a few seconds, so I quit. I didn’t understand the benefits of meditation come from the sheer number of repetitions of that resetting process. This is how meditation trains us to get better at metacognition.
Over time, we begin to understand the thoughts and feelings that constantly bounce around in our head are mostly reactions to things that happen in our environment, internal sensations, biological drives, past memories, or thinking about the future. By recognizing those thoughts and feelings, we gain the ability to mentally step back, which allows us to prevent those thoughts and feelings from controlling us.
It’s kind of like our brain is a small room filled with drunken monkeys. And those drunken monkeys are always noisily fighting over this and that. When we’re sitting in the middle of the room with the loud, frenetic monkeys screeching around us, we get stressed out and can’t make good decisions. Meditation teaches us to be able to step outside the room, which effectively quiets the monkeys. The silence calms us down and allows us to make better decisions.
Conclusion
My goal is to start doing a deliberate meditation session once every morning and once every evening. I’ve always been good at the whole metacognition thing, with or without meditation. For me, it’s always been a matter of recognizing when the shit storm in my head is causing negative effects, then remembering to take a mental step back. Regular meditation helps remind me.
I recommend all of you reading this take that same step. Keep us posted on your progress by discussing it in our Facebook Group!
Also, this is a good time to do a check-in for everyone following The Curvy Road self-improvement journey. Ask yourself the following questions:
How is your sleep? If it’s not as good as you want it to be or it’s regressing, go back and revisit the checklist of steps to improve sleep.
How is your diet? Are you still eating healthy foods in moderation? If not, revisit the Diet post.
How is your exercise going? Are you exercising at least a few times per week and getting in those 150 minutes? If not, revisit the Exercise post.
Lastly, thanks for following along on this journey! Those of you who have posted and commented in the Facebook Group has been hugely motivating for me. I appreciate all of you.
~Jason
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Full list of the 27 widely-recognized human emotions:
Confusion
Craving
Disgust
Empathetic pain
Entrancement
Envy
Excitement
Fear
Horror
Interest
Joy
Nostalgia
Romance
Sadness
Satisfaction
Sexual desire
Sympathy
Triumph
Admiration
Adoration
Aesthetic Appreciation
Amusement
Anxiety
Awe
Awkwardness
Boredom
Calmness