Meditation is often challenging, but the practice can pay off.
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Several times a week, I do planks, sit-ups, and push-ups. They are difficult. They’re not particularly enjoyable. I’m not “good “at them, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is doing them. I do planks, sit-ups, and push-ups to get stronger.
I also teach meditation and related topics to undergraduate students, who express many common misconceptions about meditation. Most of them think that meditation is about “clearing the mind.” Some view meditation as a relaxation technique, so they expect to feel calm when they meditate. When they encounter difficulties, they often assume that they’re doing it wrong or that the session didn’t go well.
Meditation is hard. It’s a tough mental workout. The idea is to try to notice your immediate, present-moment sensations, such as breathing, with as little judgment as possible. When you lose focus, you begin again, over and over and over.
Distractions will arise. Managing those distractions with minimal judgment is a normal and essential aspect of meditation. Over weeks and months, these mental “reps” cultivate attentional control and reduce judgmental tendencies, including harsh self-criticism, and thereby improve mental health. Meditation isn’t a contest to see how long you can maintain your focus, but a training session to cultivate mental capacities.
Challenges with meditation are the norm. Restlessness, doubt, drowsiness, worry, distractions, and self-criticism often emerge. You can expect thoughts like, “what should I make for dinner?” “I’m still annoyed at that comment my sister made last week,” or even, “I’m terrible at this.” Although they seem like impediments, difficulties with meditation provide an excellent opportunity to shift mental habits. After all, people don’t meditate to get “better” at meditation, but to improve their lives.
For instance, if you rush to blame yourself for losing focus during meditation, you can practice reacting with less judgment. What if you try to be as friendly towards yourself as possible when you lose focus during meditation, and then repeat that a thousand times? It’s likely that you’ll start treating yourself in a kinder, more encouraging way.
Meditation is associated with a cornucopia of benefits. There is now a robust research literature demonstrating that meditation improves attention, self-regulation, empathy, relationships, and overall well-being. It also reduces stress, depression, and rumination, as well as both generalized anxiety and social anxiety. In terms of physical health outcomes, meditation is linked with less pain intensity, lower blood pressure and cortisol levels, and improved sleep, inflammatory regulation, and immune functioning.
But meditation requires a learning curve that can be daunting at first. Beginners must endure the difficulty of learning to handle the mind in a new way. Tolerating both the difficulty and the resulting thoughts and feelings is usually hard at first but becomes easier with practice.
Sometimes meditation practice is peaceful, easy, or relaxing. Or perhaps some moments are tough, and others are enjoyable. It might feel like an intense workout in the moment but leave you feeling better afterwards. Just as meditation doesn’t have to be peaceful or relaxing to work, it also doesn’t have to be painful and frustrating to provide benefits. If you meditate regularly, you can expect a range of experiences.
Many of my students are athletes, and others exercise regularly. Yet those same students often expect immediate results from meditation. They wouldn’t expect every physical workout to be easy or fun; in fact, they understand that demanding workouts build strength.
You can start meditating with sessions that are only a few minutes long. Shorter sessions might be more practical to implement into a busy schedule. However, the first five or ten minutes during a meditation are often all over the place. The mind can be like a shaken snow globe that needs a few minutes for various thoughts and feelings to settle down.
Meditation might feel easier and more enjoyable if you meditate for twenty or thirty minutes, rather than five or ten. Researchers have also identified a dose-response relationship between lifetime meditation and mental health, with more lifetime hours of meditation associated with greater benefits.
I have empathy and compassion towards my students’ experiences because I hated meditation when I first tried it. It seemed so long, and I felt agonizingly bad at it. Managing my own restlessness, impatience, and self-criticism turned out to be extremely valuable, both within and beyond the meditation practice itself. And beginning a meditation practice or a physical exercise program is often the hardest part. Once you gain more experience with either mental or physical workouts, they become less intimidating.
Perhaps meditation, just like your physical exercise routine, will become somewhat more enjoyable with practice. Or maybe not expecting it to be easy, fun, or calm will allow you to stick with it long enough to experience meaningful benefits.
