How meditation can upgrade your mind and life

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By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here.

One sentence summary: meditation has been a key way to upgrade my mind and therefore my life. 


Overview

  • I view meditation as a ‘foundational life element’. 

  • Foundational life elements are things I don’t compromise on. They are the foundational pieces upon which all else is built. 

    • If you don’t sleep well you’ll get through life but life will be shorter and sh1tter. 

    • If you don’t eat well you’ll get through life but life will be shorter and sh1tter. 

    • If you don’t exercise well you’ll get through life but life will be shorter and sh1tter. 

    • And… if you don’t meditate well you’ll get through life but life will be shorter and sh1tter. 


Meditation = give our minds a break

Meditation = calm

Meditation = focus

Meditation = gain emotional awareness of ourselves

Meditation = reset our emotions

Meditation = gives us the ability to stop thinking about something

Meditation = gives us the ability to think about what you want


There are thousands of peer reviewed academic research pieces extolling the virtues of meditation. 

I’m a decently data driven dude. 20 year old Duncan thought meditation was some weird hippy religious crap. 35 year old Duncan now sees meditation as a core way to upgrade my mind and improve my life. 

Jingle: Meditation = marvellous mind moulding


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Details

What is meditation?

  • The most common form of meditation is simply focusing on your breath for eg 10 mins. 

  • You simply focus on breathing in and out. 

  • When your mind drifts from focusing on your breath you bring your attention gently back to focusing on your breath. 

  • Many types of meditation are focusing on something. Eg a mantra, a body scan, eating a piece of food, etc. So they are substituting breath focus for focus on something else. 

  • What the hell can this do for you? Focusing on your breath for 10 mins a day is somehow going to change my life? Actually, I think the answer is yes. 


What do I think are 2nd order outcomes from meditation? 

  • Meditation = practicing calm

    • By eg focusing on your breath you are able to let go of whatever is going on in your head. 

    • Are you are ‘building your calm capabilities’. Then if the seas get rough you can bring out your cultivated calmness and dampen everything!

  • Meditation = emotional awareness

    • “You don’t learn from your experiences, you learn from reflecting on your experiences.” 

    • By focusing on your breath you are able to let go of what is going on in your head and thereby realise what was going on in your head. The number of times meditating I’ll realise part the way through meditating that ‘man I was really amped up’ or ‘wow, I was frustrated’, how come I didn’t realise this before? Is disconcerting. 

    • Slowly over time because of meditation i’m getting better at emotional self awareness. 

    • Increased emotional awareness in yourself => increased emotional awareness of others

  • Meditation = overall calmer state = 1. Better at being calm * 2. Better at emotional awareness

    • Calm = one foot in front of the other, not unnecessarily expending energy

    • Calm = take the time to be creative

    • Calm = better to yourself

    • Calm = better for others to work with

  • Focus = Attention - Distractions

    • Meditation = practicing attention on one thing (eg your breath)

      • Getting better at focus helps everything. 

      • “So few people are actually training their ability to concentrate that if you’re one of the few to do so, you have a huge competitive advantage” - Cal Newport

    • Meditation = less distracted

    • Meditation = can give your energy more to what you want

    • Meditation = increasing your ability to be present 

  • More present => increased awareness in the moment of what is going on => increased ability to Respond, not React 

    • Meditation = a way to start to respond more

  • Meditation = a way to stop thinking about something

    • I don’t know about you but my mind has a mind of its own! Sometimes the more I want to stop thinking about something the more I think about it :(. 

    • Meditation = concentrating on breath and thereby stopping thinking about anything else. It’s increasing your ability to let go of things. 

    • Sometimes you need to be thinking about a problem. But you don’t need to be thinking about a problem all the time. Imagine if you were just to say ‘I’m going to worry about that problem later’ and were able to do it! Well IMO meditation really helps with this. 

  • Meditation = a self administered mood change

    • Ever in a bad mood and then you watch your favourite TV show and at the end your mood is now relaxed, calm and happy? well I find meditation can do this for me in 10 minutes. 

    • Ever in a bad mood and then you play your favourite happy song and at the end your mood is totally different? well I find meditation can do this for me in 10 minutes. 

    • In short IMO meditation is an essential tool to live a good life. Meditation is an essential tool to upgrade your mind. 


2c on how to start meditating? 

  • Smiling Mind app

  • Sam Harris Waking Up App

  • HeadSpace app

  • Read “Wherever you go there you are.”

  • Read “Why Buddhism is true.”

  • Comment: 

    • When I first tried meditation (2011) I sucked at it so bad. I was literally more stressed at the end than at the start because I thought after that ‘I could have done anything else and been more productive than this’. 

    • I hope that I’m better and better at meditation each year. I’d consider myself proficient after 8 years of trying this! 

    • The first few times you try it,  expect to feel like nothing is happening and for you to feel more anxious at the end of meditating than when you start. But  don’t give up. 


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Addendum

I quite like this part so I’m going to include it… I normally try to junk 50% of what I write as if I’m not doing this then ‘I’m not editing properly’. But you can get this as a bit of extra fun! 

“For the vast history of the human species, boredom was a fact of life. There was no television, no smartphones, no cars, no 24/7 businesses, or even fulfilling jobs. We also lived in tribes of 150 people (dunbar’s number), there isn’t much gossip with 150 people. 

 Even when life was much harder and more dangerous—like for hunter gatherers—boredom would have been constant. Research shows that hunter gatherers work on average 20 hours per week to provide subsistence levels of food for themselves. That’s a lot of time sitting around, particularly for kids too young to do much in the way of contributing.

 

But flash forward to today and we have utterly banished boredom. We have social media. We have iPads to stream Netfliex in the car. We have jam packed schedules so we’re never not doing anything. This can’t possibly be natural!”


If you want to be healthy, live how humans used to live.

  • Eat how they ate (mostly vegetables, just 200-500g of meat a week, many humans eat that a day now. You can get by on no meat, but humans did eat it)

  • Exercise how they exercised (natural movement, not training for the olympics (ie pushing body to limits). Varied exercise, not just running)

  • And let your mind have much time being ‘bored’. 


Your mind is used to having significant downtime. It’s not used to constantly being fed something. 

  • Boredom done well = relaxation. 

  • Boredom done well = calm and peace. 

  • Boredom done poorly = anxiety. 

  • Meditation done well = relaxation. 

  • Meditation done well = calm. 


For machines downtime is a bug, for humans it’s a feature. 

  • One analogy I like is that meditation is like stretching for your mind. 

  • If you spend all your time exercising and don’t stretch you’ll get cramps / injuries. 

  • If you spend all your time doing something with your mind exercising eg working or feeding it something (instagram, netflix, speaking to people) you’ll give it cramps and injuries. 

  • In hunter gatherer times there were hours a day of ‘natural meditation’ built in. You didn’t have anything to say. 


They say that english today has 750k words, that english 1000 years ago had 50-75k words, and that dogs have 12 words. 

  • Humans are supposedly biologically indifferent from humans 10-50k years ago. So you could take a child from 25k years ago and it would be indecipherable from a child born today. 

  • How many words were there 10,000 years ago? They don’t know, but if you live in a tribe of 150 people and they are all the people you speak to all your life, there are no books, no TV, no language written anywhere… it’s MUCH smaller! 


So what did we have? 

  • 10,000 years ago: 

    • Way less words. 

    • No books, no TV, no smart phones

    • Speaking 90% of our life to the same 150 people

    • Work was menial (either gathering, hunting or farming)

    • And work was 20-30 hours a week

    • So we had HUGE amounts of time sitting around and no language with which to talk, and only 150 people about which to talk, and no books or ability to get access to other information. 

    • So we would have done hours a day of sitting and ‘staring at the fire’, or ‘waiting to see an animal to hunt’. Aka natural mediation. 

  • What happens today:

    • For the average person we are feeding our mind 100% time. Be in work, news, podcasts, TV, message apps, instagram / twitter / facebook, email, speaking to others, etc. 

    • So basically, not just massive change… what we do today is totally unrecognisable to even 500 years ago. What the average person’s mind does today is 90% different to what the average mind did 500 years ago. Think this 90% change is going to have an impact on your mind? 

  • If you are not giving your mind time to do nothing (aka be bored, aka meditatte) IMO you are being bad to your mind.