Forbes Article: How Busy Professionals Can Make Meditation Stick

It’s no easy task for busy professionals to make meditation a habit that sticks. I used to never be able to bump it up the ever-growing priority list of things I ought to do. What turned this around was by being mindful of the foundational pillars that will make it a habit. By following three key pillars, you will make this crucial mindfulness practice which I like to think of as flossing for your mind, as automatic as brushing your teeth.

Most people who start meditation and fail to keep it as a habit usually have one or more of the following out of sync. 

1. Clear internal motivation and vision to how it will solve your problems 
2. Starting small and then building up your practice
3. Being consistent, reflective, and flexible at the same time 

Be Clear on Your Motivation To Meditate and Where It Will Take You

When I first started to meditate, I failed to crystallize my true motivation to do it. It felt like a vitamin instead of a painkiller and I didn’t get educated on its true benefits beyond keeping up with the Joneses. When you aren’t crystal clear on why you’re engaging in a new behavior despite what your friends say, it will get lost in the shuffle when life happens.

I was initially sold on how it would make me more mindful and lower stress. Looking back at it, I realized I wasn’t convinced it would happen anytime soon. Whenever I missed a session, I downplayed it by thinking that I could just make up for it tomorrow and that someday the habit would just stick - I was too busy for it now. 

One day, my gut told me I was going too fast and slowly burning out. It prompted me to hit pause and take a weekend at a personal development forum. For the first time in a long time, I worked on myself for three days without any busy work blocking me from being in touch with myself. It ended up being a complete game-changer for my business and it helped me wrap my head around why not meditating was no longer an option. 

In the end, it made me realize how flawed my previous logic on pushing back activities in mindfulness really was. What I concluded was that the speed and direction of my business trajectory was something I simply wasn’t happy with, even though I pretended I was. This rubbed off on my employees and my creativity and as a result, the company wasn’t performing as well as it could. The inertia of always being busy blinded me from realizing that my growth was stunted and that this wouldn’t change unless I found more time to slow down. I also realized that in many ways the small joys of life were overlooked and I didn’t make time to express gratitude in them - I was always on edge and trying to push harder in what was a flawed direction. 

Meditation suddenly became a painkiller when I realized how dire it would be if I didn’t get out of this vicious cycle. This is when I properly researched its benefits and was immediately able to relate them to my newly magnified life pains. 

So how does meditation help you? Over my 1000 days of straight meditation, I have experienced various benefits. According to Harvard Medical School, meditation eases anxiety and mental stress. If you already feel relatively healthy in your mental state then you probably want to consider all the ways meditation enhances you. I experience a daily increase in my creativity, memory, gratitude, empathy, willpower and decision making.

Best-selling author of Sapiens (a book praised by Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, and many others), Yuval Harari, beautifully relates meditation to focus; “First of all, it's the ability to focus. When you train the mind to focus on something like the breath, it also gives you the discipline to focus on much bigger things and to really tell the difference between what's important and everything else.”

Start Small And Then Build Up

Whether it’s planning out a big project or looking to run an Ironman race, you will likely have major setbacks both with procrastination and being overwhelmed if you don’t break things down into small chunks - meditation is no different.

When I started meditating, I tried 15-minute sessions but found myself distracted in the first few minutes. I simply couldn’t fend off internal thoughts and external noises so distractions would always sidetrack me. This is before I started getting good at five-minute body scans and being able to focus on specific parts of my body with profound precision. Then I mastered following my breath and following it through different body parts. As these supplemental building blocks started to become habits, I became able to extend my meditation time and even my setting as I found myself meditating in public transport and other hectic parts of the world.

Building habits and strength come from breaking things down and also being aware of what complementary habits can spill over to make picking up mediation easier. Charles Duhigg, the best-selling author of The Power of Habit, breaks these spillover habits down into keystone habits. 

“When people start habitually exercising, even as infrequently as once a week, they start changing other, unrelated patterns in their lives, often unknowingly. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel less stressed.”

Keystone habits that will help your meditation practice are all of the above alongside, sleeping well and having a fruitful morning routine. Your willpower is strongest when you wake up with a fresh mind so I highly recommend you meditate in the morning before the day tugs you in draining and unpredictable directions.

James Clear, the author of the recent New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits, speaks to designing your physical environment to make success easier. Try putting your meditation stool or yoga mat next to your shower towel in the morning so you can easily slot in meditation after a daily morning shower. 

Be Consistent, Reflective, and Flexible in Your Journey

If you start small and turn meditation into a habit, you’ll be well on your way to building a base of consistency. Consistency allows for flexibility on where you meditate and what kind of advanced meditation practices you try out. 

On the topic of spillover habits, I found that meditation made journaling more enjoyable. Better journaling made me hyper-aware of how happy, grateful, and productive I was on a weekly basis which in turn, reinforced meditation as a key driver of these amazing weeks. Being more mindful and self-aware also let me quickly cut out things that were no longer serving me whereas, before meditation, I was too busy to take decisive action in changing this.

This was a full circle in allowing me to mitigate the terrifying gradual burnout I experienced before the weekend personal development forum that made me finally snap out of it. There was no snapping out of anything now, I felt in control of my life direction. 

When you master the daily practice of meditation, you have the stamina and curiosity to explore different styles of meditation and general wellness practices embedded in the rising biohacker movement. I found myself expanding beyond the Headspace app to the Waking Up meditation app which focuses more on introspective thoughts and different world philosophies. Being consistent in meditation allows you to reflect and reinforce the good it brings to your life. This fuels a curiosity to expand your horizons and gives you a fighting chance to try more advanced methods of meditation without the fear of hitting a wall like in the early days of trying to make meditation habitual.

The busier you are, the more of a reason you have to meditate to ensure you are being true to yourself and the people who depend on you. Meditation needs your full buy-in and needs to be taken as seriously as the most challenging endeavors you have had to overcome in the past. All great feats require proper practice and constant calibration with how it positively affects your life and how you can take things to the next level.

This article was originally published on Forbes Magazine as a guest contribution. The version you just read above goes more in-depth on the tactics of keeping up with your practice.