This article was originally adapted from a podcast, which you can check out here.
At the beginning of the new year, in Episode #538, I introduced the practice of habit tracking and provided you with a template habit-tracking spreadsheet. Since then, Five-Minute Fridays have largely revolved around daily habits and that theme continues today with my daily habit of meditation.
If you’ve been listening to SuperDataScience episodes for more than a year, you’ll be familiar with my meditation practice already, as I detailed it back in Episodes #434 and 436 — episodes on what I called “attention-sharpening tools”. You can refer back to those episodes to hear all the specifics, but the main idea is that every single day — for thousands of consecutive days now — I go through a guided meditation session using the popular Headspace application.
Some days it’s only a few minutes with headphones on while I’m on the subway to work, other days it’s a much more effective half hour session while I sit cross-legged on my couch. The key to successfully maintaining a habit is that we set an almost comically low bar for achieving the habit on a given day. I never feel bad when I’m only squeezing in a quick session if that’s all I felt I had the time or energy for on that day. And by keeping the daily habit chain unbroken in this way, it means that eventually I’m sure to get back to the more effective, quieter, longer sessions. To boot, like the alternate-nostril breathing I covered in last week’s Five-Minute Friday, even a few minutes of meditation can make a big difference to my day. So, there’s a general habit tip for you: Make your habits extremely easy to attain. This ease both keeps the habit going long-term and the easiest imaginable variation on a habit can nevertheless make a material difference to your day.
Anyway, when I do find time for a longer session, I wear my Muse electroencephalograph headband to receive auditory biofeedback on how well I’m avoiding getting caught up in thought while I meditate. That biofeedback helps me stay on track with my meditation — it’s been a game-changer for me — but I won’t repeat all the details today. Again you can refer back to Episodes 434 and 436 for a full explanation. In those episodes, I also provide lots of alternative meditation tools. My personal favorites continue to be the Headspace and Muse tools I covered today (but, in case you’re wondering, these are purely my personal preferences; I’m not being paid to endorse either product).
Like the habits I’ve already covered in this recent series of Five-Minute Fridays on my daily habits, I choose to log meditation as a binary habit — either I did it or I didn’t — so using the habit-tracking template I introduced Episode #538, I set the min column for this meditation row of the spreadsheet to 0 and the max column to 1. An alternative approach could be to log how many minutes of meditation you carry out each day — this might nudge you in the direction of experimenting with longer sessions — but I choose to keep it as simple as possible for myself with a binary flag.
All right, that’s it for today. In a Five-Minute Friday in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be back with another daily habit. In the meantime, keep on rockin’ it out there folks, and I’ll catch you on another round of SuperDataScience very soon.