Even if you’re tired, just keep going, my mind reasoned. For weeks, I had woken up sore, tired, and anxious. During the day, I would suppress my stress to go to school and interact with friends on auto-pilot. In the afternoon, I would come home depleted and still tense, leading to embarrassingly grumpy interactions with my younger sisters and parents.
I could feel the stress of my commitments and perfectionism weighing on me. Not to justify the time I got annoyed with my mother for offering me half of an apple—sorry, Mom. Unfortunately for both of us, I incorrectly thought that productivity outweighed kindness to myself and others.
That mentality didn’t support a sustainable lifestyle. Seeking solutions, I made a five-minute addition to my daily routine: mindfulness meditation. I initially doubted the habit’s efficacy, as I had sworn off the repetitive inhales and dreary exhales years ago, when my elementary school guidance counselor poorly introduced meditation to me.
Yet, as I attempted it with an open mind, meditation improved my mental health and allowed me to be more mindful. That mindfulness doesn’t just affect how I feel internally, but ripples beyond: how I treat others, how I consume food, and how I talk to myself.
The benefits of mediation that I’ve experienced are gratifying, especially for the little time I spend on it each day. I open a free meditation app I downloaded called Medito, choose a five-minute meditation, and then concentrate on being mindful of the sounds and sensations around or within me.
The tiny time commitment doesn’t necessarily mean that the practice of meditation is easy. Some days, I lose focus two minutes into a session and don’t reap all the benefits I hope for. I often revert back to old habits and stressors when I miss multiple days or weeks of this mindfulness practice.
Meditation is not a silver bullet. I took Medito’s 30-day beginner course, which contains much longer meditations, before switching to the shorter daily ones, and building the skills to meditate challenged me. The inclination to fidget was definitely something I needed to overcome, making me realize that meditating for even just five minutes can be difficult.
In other words, I’ve learned that meditation isn’t a self-care technique in the sense of taking a bubble bath or binging Netflix. It takes work and discipline—which ironically was the very thing stressing me out. But dedicating myself to meditation ultimately enabled me to understand that we don’t live to work. Instead, we work to live—and to be in thoughtful, attentive presence with everything around us.
