Meditation

It has gone more than a week since I last wrote something on the blog. Even that I promised myself to not feel any pressure how often I should write new entries when started the blog, I have felt a small guilt every second day for not putting up something. To be honest the days have just flown away, and I haven’t had any inspiration on writing. So im actually glad that I didn’t force myself to just write something for the sake of it.

As I told you earlier one of my big interests is self-improvement and productivity, so I listen to a lot of audiobooks in this area. I will most likely do a compilation of books I would recommend in the future.

One take from more or less every book in this area that I have read is that you should Meditate daily! As with most things, don’t start out to hard from the beginning. Start with doing a 5-minute meditation each day for at least 21 days. If you go out hard from the beginning it’s much more likely that you won’t continue. Why 21 days? It’s far from an exact science, but it’s a number that is often used when estimating how long it takes to build a habit. Actually I think 21 days is a bit short.

When you start out I recommend you to use an app, there is a ton of different ones, but the most famous ones are most likely Headspace and Calm. You can try them for free, but if you want all functionality you have to sign up for a subscription. There is free alternatives, and you can also find a lot of good meditation sessions on for example Spotify.

Even if you want to meditate without guidance from an app I recommend that you use a habit tracker app, or a plain old calendar. This will encourage you to not break the habit.

I myself use Muse.

Muse 2 is a multi-sensor meditation device that provides real-time feedback on your brain activity, heart rate, breathing, and body movements to help you build a consistent meditation practice.

I can’t say that I think it works perfectly, but it offers a lot of different kinds of meditations.

• Mind meditation
• Heart meditation
• Body meditation
• Breath meditation
• Guided meditation
• Timer

I mostly use mind meditation and have Ambient music as background. When you are calm the music gets calmer, and you start hearing a twinkling sound. After you are done, you get some stats about how long time you where active, neutral and calm. They also use gamification to make it more interesting and easier to build a habit. For example, challenges, habit tracker, levels and so on.

So event that the brain-sensing algorithms probably not is perfect, I really think it helps out.

Have a nice evening!

Ps. my current streak is 34 days, my longest one is 51.