How To Make Positive Habits Stick

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It Is A Marathon Not A Sprint
- Ch: 04 of Mindfulness, A Guidebook to the Present Moment -

‘You can do anything, but not everything’ – David Allen

It is important to highlight something here about habit acquisition. Go slowly and make sure all changes are life appropriate. If we go too hard too soon, we risk dropping the practice entirely.

It is like the clichéd new year’s resolution to commit to dieting and exercise. Typically, the first week or so goes well; we spend every day in the gym and have home cooked meals each night. We say no to fast food and elevators and yes to the stairs. But eventually life catches up. The tasks we push out of our schedule to make time for the gym become urgent and we skip a day. We are invited out and think ‘just one dessert won’t hurt’. Soon we are exercising every other day, and then once per week. We realize that cooking takes far more time and effort than ordering in and become tempted by the latest shows. Within a month or two, we are back to where we started, waiting for the next year to roll around so we can try it all again. Alternatively, we maintain our new diet and exercise regime with discipline and vigor. But we push ourselves so hard that we overdo it and get injured or feel like we are starving due to caloric restriction. We pushed ourselves too hard and eventually our bodies gave out.

A better approach to diet and exercise would be to make a commitment to reach a particular functional goal over a prolonged time. Perhaps that by the end of the year, you would be exercising every second day, and would have cut out all sugary drinks from your diet. This approach would be far more likely to succeed because it would be implemented slower and thus would be far more life appropriate. You would find time around your current activities and would be far less likely to injure yourself.

We need to approach our meditation practice with the same mentality. It is very tempting for some people to decide to jump straight in the deep end, committing themselves to multiple hours of mindfulness practice from the get-go. Although I have read stories from the traditional literature about particularly gifted sages who managed such a feat, I am yet to see anyone be able to maintain it. They start off strong, but quickly quit. They simply do not have the skills, training, techniques, or stamina necessary to sit for so long. Not to mention the fact that most people are quite time poor to begin with.

It is for this reason that I suggest that people start with the ‘Basic Mindfulness’ meditation described in Getting Started. Just five minutes a day, each day, at least until that amount is easily managed and more time can be added. And if five minutes seems a stretch, one minute a day is infinitely better than none. Once again if we return to the exercise analogy, imagine how much stronger and fitter you would be if you simply added just one minute of squats or pushups to your day, every day. Sure, five minutes would produce far better results than one, but you would be far better off now if you had been doing that one minute for the last year.

The same is true for meditation.

I suggest this simple rule to people when they are implementing a meditation practice (or any new habit) into their lives:

Commit as much time to meditation each day as you can see yourself committing to it in one year.

By taking this approach, you will detach from your current enthusiasm and expectations and be in a better position to accurately judge just how much time you personally will be able to commit. Alternatively, you could choose to start small and then slowly increase your meditation time.

Start with five minutes a day, or even just one. Then, each month, increase your meditation time by one to five minutes until you find an amount that works for you.

I started with five minutes a day and worked up from there. My formal practice consists of 20 minutes of silent meditation followed by 10 minutes guided. I do this every morning without fail. Some days, if I have the time, I will increase this to an hour or more, or I will add aspects of mindfulness into other activities. But baring some kind of emergency, I never do less. With family, work, and my online commitments, this amount of time is what works for me. If my life circumstances change, the amount of time I spend meditating will have to change accordingly.

Sometimes it is extremely beneficial to occasionally double or even triple the duration of your meditation. I took this from Naval Ravikant’s tweet storm ‘Meditation – The Art of Doing Nothing’. Here he suggests that some of the difficulties people face when first beginning a meditation practice comes from not sitting for long enough. So once a month I will sit for 60 minutes or more in a single session. I get a lot from these sessions, and I encourage you to give a longer session a go once a month. But please, do not get discouraged by numbers or compare your daily meditation time to myself or others. Find an amount that works for you and do it daily.

Incorporating meditation into your morning or night routines is an excellent way to take the decision making out of the equation. If meditation is simply something you do each morning, alongside some exercise and other activities, you simply get up each morning and do it. There are no decisions to be made, and no amount of motivation needed. It is like brushing your teeth or taking your vitamins; meditation is just another thing you do. Give it a try for a month and see if a morning routine works for you.