91–100 of 214 posts
10 minutes of guided meditation per day is the only non-medical option that helps my ADHD other than removing caffeine and getting more sleep. It's insane how little I need to feel much more in control of my thoughts.
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You mentioned quitting cannabis. If you don't mind elaborating, I'm curious what benefits you have experienced and why you ended up quitting. Thanks!
Ex cannabis user here, so I thought I'd give you my empirical perspective & and opinion. I will tell you what I would tell my own child: Cannabis, like any recreational drug, steals the most precious resource we have: our time. I've been on benders in my life that I simply can not remember what I did during that period, sure, but that's not what I'm talking about. What I am talking about is the time any person needs…
I'm going to save this and say something similar in the future when I have kids.
I've tried in the past, but I wonder: how do you know if you've successfully meditated or not?
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The counter argument would be- just because you enjoy knitting 30 minutes a day and it relaxes you, does that mean it will work the same for anyone/everyone else? If there was a study that empirically proved knitting for 30 days made you happier, then it would be a lot easier for people to say "OK, I'll take the time to learn how to do this and do it for X amount of the day". Given that I still see your point. No rea…
Why do you need studies to give you permission to do something? Particularly when science is facing a crisis of reproducibility, I would not put so much emphasis on them. It’s really no different than the religious dogma of previous centuries, where scientists act as priests, and scientific studies as scripture.
No one said that.
>Particularly when science is facing a crisis of reproducibility, I would not put so much emphasis on them
Err.. science is facing a crisis of reproducibility? Excuse me? If you can't reproduce something- that means you haven't proved it scientifically, thus the science is telling you that it can't tell you anything.
>It’s really no different than the religious dogma of previous centuries, where scientists act as priests, and scientific studies as scripture.
Ok now, hold up. You are saying scientific studies is the same as religious dogma....? Do you honestly need me or someone to explain to you the difference?
I had always had some kind of anxiety or ocd for as long as I can remember. I'd searched for various ways to deal with it but only discovering meditation really worked for me. After meditating for 6 months every day (starting with 5 minutes daily, ending with 20-30) I've completely got rid of it. A nice side effect was that I got to be a happier person overall (though that wasn't ever a problem for me), and learned t…
Would you recommend an app like Calm or Headspace to get started with meditation?
But it's not the only one, and shouldn't be called merely "meditation" without regard to the vast body of practices that exist.
Another form of meditation that's traditionally talked about in Buddhism is shamatha, which translates to something like "concentration" or "tranquility." In this type of practice, the meditator works with a meditation object, commonly the breath, but possibly a sound, mental image, etc. The meditator learns to stabilize the mind and remain fully aware of the object, and in the process learns to debug the mechanisms that direct (and destabilize) conscious attention.
A recently published book called _The_Mind_Illustrated_ by John Yates is fa fantastic resource for this kind of practice.
If you're interested in scientific attempts to categorize and study meditation, the Center for Healthy Minds at UW-Madison does some fantastic neuroscience & psychology research.
https://centerhealthyminds.org/assets/files-publications/Dah...
In the scientific terminology that is emerging these days, Attentional, Constructive, and Deconstructive types of meditation are mapped onto various types of traditional practices (there's a handy chart in the paper).
I have the habit now of meditation for 1 hour each morning and then for 20-30 minutes before laying my head to pillow. It's really helpful to me to get myself in a space to start a productive day and end it with a good relaxing sleep. I usually get 4.5 to 5.5 hours each night. Up at 4:30am without an alarm and to bed by 11-midnight usually. I attended a 10 day silent meditation retreat last year and it really had an…
4.5 to 5.5 hours sounds ridiculously low. I thought humans need at least 8 hours of sleep to function well? Have you tried sleeping for longer and if you did, what difference did it make to your wellbeing?
They are more awake during the day than I am.
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4.5 to 5.5 hours sounds ridiculously low. I thought humans need at least 8 hours of sleep to function well? Have you tried sleeping for longer and if you did, what difference did it make to your wellbeing?
Many people find that meditation reduces their need to sleep. A few months ago when I was meditating for around 1.5 hours per day (a mixture of walking and formal sitting meditation) I felt well rested on 5.5 to 6.5 hours of sleep, when my normal needs are 7.5 - 8 hours
And yet, I feel like doing that every day is not fully compatible with the type of consciousness which is optimal to get me from day to day in my life as a software engineer.
Meditation sharpens your senses -- you may then find yourself distracted by sounds of road traffic that you previously didn't care about, you may discover that the air in your area smells bad to you from time to time, you may realize how locked most people are in their own patterns (that includes you). You may find yourself thinking about going to a Buddhist monastery somewhere and trying this for a longer time. I'm just saying it's really _that_ good.
Whereas, if I do what I love, and I let my consciousness to its own momentum, I feel like it's auto-tackling the daily roughness of life more on its own and not bothering me with otherwise unimportant things that much. In essence, you were born into this physical reality to be a thought / to have thoughts, not to be thoughtless / formless.
That said, mindfulness meditation as a consciousness-momentum modification tool, applied (even daily) within the proper bounds, can a venerable weapon for life.
I guess I just find it to be an extra overhead to manage if everything else in my life goes really well even without it.
p.s. If you use meditation as a daily crutch(?)/bandage(?) to something that _really_ bothers you, there are much more effective weapons to try (one-off, by no means regular use): Ayahuasca, Shrooms, Family Constellations -- after healing with these, the meditation itself can provide you with much more, as a cherry on the top.