[ajb]

This isn't the worst article, and it's triggered a decent amount of discussion (despite being very short). However, I really dislike "What you're doing wrong/failing to do" titles. They are intended to trigger anxiety, which is manipulative and (in this case) precisely contradicts the concern the author is purporting to have for the rest of us.

On the subject: some people find meditation very helpful, others find it a net negative, or useless, or impossible to do. So a categorical "you should do this" isn't correct or particularly helpful. Try it, if it works for you, great; but don't put it about that people who aren't doing it are being negligent in some way.

[wolvoleo]

> On the subject: some people find meditation very helpful, others find it a net negative, or useless, or impossible to do. So a categorical "you should do this" isn't correct or particularly helpful. Try it, if it works for you, great; but don't put it about that people who aren't doing it are being negligent in some way

Absolutely. I've tried mediation in many situations and some classes but it's just not for me. My ADHD brain doesn't work that way. It's painfully boring and not relaxing at all. What does work for me is a walk through nature after a stressful day. There's another thing that works even better but too fringey and a bit nsfw to go into detail :) But anyway mediation definitely does not.

You need to find what works for you.

[ifwinterco]

It being boring is part of the point - normally your brain is constantly stimulated so it does indeed feel strange and uncomfortable when that stimulus is taken away.

Pushing through that is what leads to progress.

Meditation is like physical exercise, it's not exactly "fun" at the time, you sort of have to learn to enjoy it, but it's never easy. Like exercise the real reward is backloaded

[wolvoleo]

This is exactly what the OP and I argue against, people insisting that it must be good for everyone. By the way the 'painful' part does more heaviy lifting there, not the boring.

I've really tried a LOT during therapy and in some other situations. And it just doesn't work for me.

Same with traditional exercise by the way. I can't do exercise in a gym (too empty) or have those 'gamification' goals, it must be more natural. I'm extremely anticompetitive and antiauthoritarian so some watch telling me I'm doing great just generates irritation.

[nmcfarl]

That’s all reasonable, and everyone is different , but I do think your original comment needed pushback, because meditation is often portrayed as enjoyable and easy at least in certain kinds of media. And I do think a lot of people give up when they find it boring and painful on their first practice.

And for me, it is boring and painful AND useful. And took weeks to start to show any benefits at all. Sort of like going to the gym. And people should know that that is a common thing, that you might hate meditation practice but still find it useful and continue.

[pigpop]

You should include the same advice that is given for exercise, it can and should occasionally be a bit painful but you have to discover your safe limits and only push yourself a little past them each time. You don't want to rack weights in 45lbs increments until you tear a muscle, you do it in 2.5lbs or 5lbs increments and practice for several sessions of work/rest at the same level for a while before making another small increment. People often quit both exercise and meditation because they just try to push through the pain and often end up with negative results due to injury or emotional and cognitive strain in the case of meditation.

[squidsoup]

The thing about meditation is, if you're doing it, there is no "you" that it is either good or bad for.

[pigpop]

It's all exertion, for both "meditation" and exercise.

I'm convinced that meditation doesn't work for a lot of people because it has too much dogma about what it's supposed to be, and maybe those aspects are valid for certain pursuits, but it obscures the core principle.

Take exercise as an example first. It's also a practice that is layered under heaps of nonsense and complexity or fluffed up with idealisms and systems. If you strip all of that away it's about one simple thing: strengthening the muscles and connective tissues of your body including organs like your heart and lungs. Muscle and living tissue only responds to repeated exertion and rest (rest includes nutrition). If you never exceed your current capacity, it will never grow or strengthen and will probably weaken. So exercise becomes simply pushing yourself a little beyond your current capacity and then properly resting afterwards. How you do that is up to you, taking a longer walk than you did last week, slowly mastering calisthenic poses, progressive overload weight training, becoming actually good at ballroom dancing or ballet, competing in field sports, the same principle applies and you get much the same results.

Now returning to meditation, the first thing we should do away with is the label because it is almost as much an error as calling all exercise bodybuilding. It should really be thought of as "attention training" where you are improving your control over and the capacity of your attention. Like with your body, your mind responds to exertion and rest. Both are required. How you train your attention is up to you, sitting without distraction is perhaps the most accessible but it's about as challenging as limiting yourself to doing prison cell bodyweight exercises. Walking without distraction is a very valid practice but is harder to manage since it requires isolation and freedom from interruptions that many people would find on a walking route. Many other techniques have been developed with many different aids and systems but the important thing to remember is that you are trying to do the same thing for your attention as you are for your muscles, push it a little more beyond your current capacity each week and giving it sufficient rest between sessions (including proper nutrition and sleep). If the usual things that are sold as meditation practices don't work for you then try things that seem more natural to you but which still stretch your attention. This could be viewing a piece of art for a set amount of time, finding a location with a fairly static view and doing the same, holding or placing an item you own in front of you and examining it, repeating a line from a book or a poem, listening to a single note repeated on an instrument or hummed. It doesn't really matter much what it is as long as it takes effort to contemplate it for a long duration and isn't so complex and changeable that it overwhelms your untrained ability to fully consider each part of it. Even more active practices can train your attention like writing, penmanship / calligraphy, painting / sketching, yoga, dance, martial arts and others but they are probably not the best place to start if you are fully untrained.

This dovetails into the point of the article, that programming is a form of "meditation" for many people. Really, it's something that you can infinitely stretch your capacity for and exert your attention on.

[wolvoleo]

Yes a lot of people compared it to exercise. But that's something I don't do either unless it's on my own terms.

I know it would be good for me to work out an hour per day but I don't. I just can't bring myself to it.

It's the same with eating, I'm obese but simply eating less just doesn't work.

I can only do exercise when I combine it with something else. Like exploring new trails in nature.

I just don't have discipline and it's not in my character to build it. It'll just end up a few weeks till I drop it again. And more importantly I wouldn't be happy being a disciplined person.

Mediation probably would bring me benefits but it's just too much friction to get to that point so I'll never get there. I've stopped feeling bad about not doing all those things and instead focusing on the things I can do well and that do work for me.

So the problem isn't with mediation, it's with me. But either way it's just out of reach and that's why it didn't work for me.

The point of programming being meditative is equally the point. It just happens to be a way people can get into that. It's something that works for them. It doesn't necessarily mean that more traditional mediation will suit them.

Personally if my job would change so much and I didn't like it I'd pivot to something else instead. Though that's admittedly not always easy.

[pigpop]

I'm sorry those other things haven't worked for you and I can understand the struggle of giving up on pursuits like that. I was hoping to communicate through what I wrote that you don't need to do things the traditional or recommended way. If you like exploring trails then by all means just explore trails, you don't need to do it as a gateway to exercise or meditation, just do it because you enjoy it and if you get other benefits out of it then so much the better.

[suttontom]

Agree with you on exercise. But staring at a painting is to meditation what curls are to building your core. People all recommend the same type of meditation for a reason--so that you can close your eyes, focus on something, notice when your mind drifts, and bring the attention back. You didn't mention anything about awareness or noticing when you lose focus, so your advice seems to completely miss the point.

[pigpop]

I did say that starting with something active may not be the best introduction if you want to improve your general ability to control your attention. That said, it does work for many people including myself since I became aware of the ability to train my attention through both programming as well as weightlifting. Funnily enough doing bicep concentration curls is something that has all of the aspects of a meditation practice for me and where I can really find a complete and singular focus and exclude all other thought and distractions. Building mind-muscle connection naturally leads you to focus solely on the muscle you are working, the sensations of adduction and abduction, the proprioceptive sense of maintaining the same path for the weight to travel and keeping the muscle under tension and flexing it fully. If you're doing it right then you are focusing on nothing else, you're not thinking of anything else, you have no inner monologue other than counting reps and sets and it becomes a flow state.

You can only tell people so much in words about how to maintain and train their attention. The better way is to learn by doing and it's easier for people to learn when it involves doing something agreeable to them rather than forcing them to do it the way you did. The original poster said they had tried the standard way many times even with help from a therapist and they didn't make any progress. That's why I felt it necessary to point out that there isn't just one dogmatic way to do it since your attention can and is applied to many different things and just like using your muscles and body to do many different physically demanding things you can train it in a variety of ways.

[ajb]

It eventually worked for you - great. That doesn't prove that it will eventually work for everyone.

At some point, when something is not working, you have to write off the sunk cost. In many cases, there's no obvious threshold as to when you make that decision, and it's easy to think that maybe, if you'd just held out a little longer, been a bit more determined, you could have made it work. But you have to make a call, without knowing for certain either way. And it can be the right call, even if, with perfect information, you'd have made the other choice.

So, while I'm sure lots of the people saying "you should just have tried harder" are doing so with complete good will, it's not helpful. You don't know, for another random person on the internet:

* how much work they put in

* what other burdens they were carrying

* what other needs and responsibilities they could use that time and energy on

* how their mind is different to your mind

etc, etc. In short, you don't have most of the information needed to make that decision for them, and you don't have any call to judge them for it.

[ifwinterco]

I'll be honest, both these things are true:

It works extremely well, and I don't do it as consistently as I should, precisely because it's actually kind of hard work and the reward is uncertain and delayed (though it can also be enjoyable at the time sometimes).

So I'm also in the boat where I don't get the benefits I could get, I get it. Making it a routine is legitimately hard.

I just find it hard to believe that it wouldn't be beneficial to most people if they stuck with it, because so many human problems are caused by fixating on the past and future and ignoring the present.

I can't experience what it's like to be someone else, but based on what other people say and do, most people seem to be experiencing similar problems to me in this regard.

Having said that: if you have any kind of mental health condition like depersonalisation, derealisation etc, you should consult a medical professional before starting any kind of meditation programme.

These are powerful techniques that can be dangerous if used inappropriately by the wrong person

[Tarq0n]

Relaxation isn't really a goal of meditation. When you do it you cultivate a kind of meta-cognition, an awareness of - and control over - the kind of invasive thinking that usually dominates our awareness.

As a fellow ADHD person I didn't get out the first few times I tried, but now find it quite helpful.

[pantulis]

This. It's like you end up growing your own PAUSE button for the rest of your day and you can break your own fourth wall.

[wolvoleo]

For me it just doesn't work but everyone is different, that's my point. And the relaxation is a prerequisite for having control.

[hashmap]

At the risk of you hating this answer, because I hated this answer, but to me that sounds like you are holding it wrong. I have adhd and found it dumb and boring and possibly not even real / placebo or new agey until during one attempt I hit the phase change and had the holy shit this is amazing moment where it worked for like 3 seconds. The quiet relaxation felt like idk a euphoria in every part of my body just to not be anxiously mentally bouncing around for half a second.

[wolvoleo]

Maybe but I've just not been able to make it work. I get that in other ways though.

[mcculley]

> It's painfully boring and not relaxing at all.

It is a common misconception that the purpose of meditation is to relax. My experience is that meditation is very difficult but has worthwhile benefits for those around me after I meditate.

[ghostby_md]

I think people overcomplicate this. What is meditation in most practices? Focusing on something someone has difficulty focusing on.

Following that logic, assuming focus is a generalizable and modifiable skill through these means, improved focus on something someone doesn’t want to focus on is the outcome of practicing it.

That’s why I believe it’s one of the best non pharmaceutical interventions someone with adhd can do. It’s directly training a “muscle” that may be atrophied.

[jacobgold]

> "They are intended to trigger anxiety, which is manipulative and (in this case) precisely contradicts the concern the author is purporting to have for the rest of us."

What? That's a very uncharitable take.

I wrote this blog post and it was a sincere attempt to genuinely help people. It seems to have been very helpful for some people, based on the responses/messages I've received.