I have tried to get started on meditation/mindfulness several times but I have never been able to stick with it. Any suggestions on a good way of getting started with it?
Assuming you're not making a joke regarding procrastination --- a way that worked for me was to take a mindfulness class that met regularly for a few months. The contents of the class was largely meaningless to me, but having it on my schedule every week and then attending the class, saying hello to the instructor and then spending at least 45minutes meditating helped get me started.
For me the headspace app worked wonders. It’s really only ten minutes a day to get started. Ten minutes, a comfortable rest and no interruptions. You don’t need more.
Headspace app has worked well for me too. I have been using it for more than 3 months, meditating for 20 mins every day and I feel calmer throughout the day.
I can thoroughly recommended the book "The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness", by John Yates.
Routines are powerful automatic habit-makers and slice through the cognitive dissonance of starting/continuing an uncomfortable activity e.g. exercising first thing in the morning instead of being able to convince yourself you're too tired to do it after work from having dreaded it all day.
Try doing it first thing in the morning so it becomes automatic and you experience some benefits from it that will then naturally remind you to keep it up cause it's positively benefiting your life (positive feedback loop).
For me it's the self-awareness/calmness to handle any tough situation and quiet my brain's anxiety/impulsive thinking that keeps me practicing mindfulness/mediation daily, wish you luck!
See if there's a Shambhala centre (https://shambhala.org/) or another place that has beginners group meditation sessions near you.
The sessions will likely be longer than what you’re used to. But there's less chances for you to bail out and you might grow to have a deeper appreciation for it so you can stick with it.
10 minutes a day is all you really need to get started. There is basically no way one can reasonably convince themselves that they don’t have 10 minutes to spare per day.
I've used several meditation apps including Headspace, Calm and Ten Percent Happier and found Harris' Waking Up to be by far the best. It separates itself from the others in that it speaks to the epistemological question of what it means to be a person.
Meditation is much more than simply clearing your mind or practicing letting go of your thoughts, although those are certainly benefits. It's about completely re-orienting yourself with respect to your relationship with the world and, most importantly, other people.
I have done sessions on Focusmate [0] every day for about 3 weeks so far. I personally do other work, but a lot of people I match with use the sessions to meditate. I've found it to be a surprisingly effective anti-procrastination tool.
I've been struggling to do this for years. Previously, the longest I ever made it was 15 days with the Insight Timer app. Its shows you how many days in a row you did and it's very encouraging.
What actually got me to do it for longer, and without any willpower, was pirating Sam Harris' Waking Up course.
This is because I already had the muscle memory for going through audiobooks and podcasts on my phone, so I'd just open up VLC every night and instead of a book I'd listen to a guided mindfulness meditation. I did 150 days in a row.
The course is 50 days and I just started over when I was done because I liked it so much.
If I actually got his app, I don't think I would have been as successful, I think it was really the muscle memory in my thumb that opens VLC every evening to listen to some relaxing audio that got me through it.
The course itself is highly recommended: I've been meditating for years but with different methods. With Sam's guidance I made more progress in a few weeks than I've made in years.
Also worth mentioning, if you can't afford it, you can email him and he'll let you have it for free.
I believe I am fairly "mindful" - but I am also a huge procrastinator, especially on tasks I don't really want to do. Maybe I'm not as mindful as I think?
What's also interesting is that - for certain of these tasks - once I get involved in them I tend to find some pleasure in doing them. Usually things involving maintenance or repair of my home environment, or my automobile. But both are tasks that I will usually procrastinate on, or just pay for someone else to do it (especially if it's during the summertime; depending on the task, heatstroke here in Phoenix is a definite possibility for me).
It would be interesting to take both of these tests, just to see where I would place on them. Hopefully this thread may have some tips on how to stop or reduce my procrastination tendency, something I've had all my life and has probably limited my potential at times.
I wonder if the aversion is not to the task itself, but to the disruption of cognitive frame. Now that I think about it, I never have a problem with simple chores like laundry--I just hate tearing myself away from whatever I'd otherwise choose to be doing.
Based on mroe than just this comment, have a serious talk with yourself
Procrastination is often not about being lazy, but a deeply embedded or burried fear of failure. That being said, being overwhelmed can also stop you from taking action of any kind, and a part of fixing that pattern (which has usually already developed once you start to recognize procrastinating is a provlem for you) is indeed cutting everything into bite sized chunks.
Break the work up into smaller chunks, writw them down on a physical piece of paper. Also try running the program Focalfilter, block the sites which most commonly distract you.
It sounds like a joke but it’s actually a pretty serious conundrum. Those who need the most help with procrastination very well might be procrastinating getting that help.
... Which underscores again the fact that all of us need at least one kind, honest friend and a dose of humility to listen to their feedback.
I don't know about needing to be non-judgemental to be mindful. I tend to curse myself out (repeatedly) at self-infractions and it seems to help.
Though i recently noticed that explaining my problems to others seems to help the most. Somehow just the act of of it makes me more capable of avoiding these procrastination activities.
If I'm working on a difficult problem and I've spent hours/days/weeks getting nowhere, I view constant procrastination as a signal that I need to step back and do something else. Once I step back and do something unrelated (even washing the dishes or ironing), I usually have a breakthrough on the issue.
Procrastination also cripples me if I let it get out of control. Have you ever had a 2 hour work day between 7 hours of Reddit/HN?
I was able to set up a consistent meditation habit for several months by combining the Seinfeld method and a commitment contract. I used a large wall calendar to mark the days I meditated and used Stickk to make a 6-month commitment to meditate at least 20 minutes a day every day.
Several comments here have stated that they have trouble starting meditation/mindfulness due to procrastination.
Rather than answering directly, I figured I'd share my own experience with procrastination. I've been a severe procrastinator, among other things, my whole life, as far as I can remember. Over time, I've tried to use various strategies to cope: breaking the work into smaller chunks, convincing myself to work for 10 minutes and that I'd stop if I felt like it, keeping to-do lists, asking other people to tell me to do stuff, among a bevy of other strategies. I've also tried to keep up exercise and eating well, finding fulfilling hobbies, etc., but could never keep doing it for long and as a result I grew progressively out of shape as I aged. I've also tried meditation and mindfulness at times, as suggested by various articles and books I'd read when trying to cope with getting work done.
Despite finding it hard to get any work done, whether required or related to my hobbies, I could get by through all of my education with relatively good grades, mostly through studying and doing the work at the last possible moment and lots sleepless nights. I've also been lucky, I lost count of the times where events outside my control saved me from the consequences of my procrastination (professors missing classes, deadlines getting pushed back, weather, power or network outages, etc.) giving me an extra day or week to finish something I couldn't finish on time because I started too late. In general, I managed to maintain the illusion of competence at great cost to my physical and mental health. I had trouble going to sleep at night and waking up in the morning, I was constantly tired and stressed, as a consequence of which I couldn't keep up with any exercise routines and would regularly resort to unhealthy food for comfort.
Things got progressively worse as I continued my education, because the work got considerably harder. I would catch myself regularly going to sleep at 6 a.m. or later because I was finishing something that should have realistically taken me a couple of hours to do and that I had an entire week to do.
Sometime after (barely) finishing my doctorate thesis, I decided that this was not sustainable anymore and went to seek medical help. After doing a lot of tests ruling out physical causes like diabetes, which I am very glad I don't have (my lifestyle was very unhealthy), I was referred to a psychiatrist. I was diagnosed with adult ADD and after some trial and error we settled on lisdexamfetamine, along with some other drugs. I'd love to say that the medicine solved all my problems immediately, but that's not how it works. What did happen, almost immediately after I started taking lisdexamfetamine, is that all the strategies I had tried over time for dealing with procrastination actually started working. I could effectively start doing my to-do lists or working those first 10-minutes and then not stopping, I had the energy to cook healthier food and exercise. I can now fall asleep almost immediately after laying down, waking up is easier and I could easily take a nap during the day (despite the stimulant) and wake up refreshed. My doctor suggested mindfulness exercises and meditation could help, so I started again and found that I could actually do the 10 to 20 minutes of calm, collected thinking and resting.
This got a bit longer than I planned, but the tl:dr is that none of the techniques worked for me until I got medical help. The medicine didn't provide a magic pill that solved all my problems like some people expect, but it did give me ability to use the tools I already knew about in order to solve my problems and improve my well-being.
I am quite thankful that my doctor explained to me that the medicine wouldn't work by itself and that getting better is a process, and for working with me throughout. As I result I've been feeling better about myself than I ever remember feeling. I do regret not going to a doctor earlier, but in the past I was convinced I could power through, that I was one of those people that "work better under pressure" (when the truth was that under pressure was the only time I could get any work done at all), which combined with the fact that I come from a culture with a distrust of mental health professionals, I don't think anything could have convinced me to get help earlier. In effect, I procrastinated getting help.
I'm not trying to say that taking medicine is right for everyone, and I'm fully convinced a lot of people can get through their procrastination by applying existing techniques like mindfulness/meditation or other coping strategies, maybe with help from other people. But my own experience has changed my view on seeking help with mental health and taking medicine, and if procrastination is interfering with your life and health, maybe do look into going to a doctor. My experience taught me that knowing how to solve a problem does not mean being able to apply the solution.
