Meditation is officially mainstream, just ask Calm co-founder Michael Acton Smith. The meditation app, which he set up with his business partner in 2012, now has 100 million downloads and 4 million subscribers. “We spotted fairly early on that mindfulness was this extraordinarily valuable skill but hadn’t really been made accessible or simple” Acton Smith told GQ earlier this year. “It was early in the days of the smartphone and social media, but we both felt that stress in the world was growing.”
He was onto something – not least because, in the decade since Calm started, our stress levels have soared. A study from the start of 2022 found that people in Britain were more exhausted than ever before, with over a third on the brink of burnout. With the threat of rising bills and quite literally darker days looming on the horizon, finding ways to quieten our brains is perhaps more important than ever. Meditating for a few minutes a day is not only valuable work for good general mental health, but also as a balm for everything that's thrown at us.
Meditation is everywhere: Jack Dorsey, founder of famously-calming social media app Twitter, spent a recent birthday on a ten-day silent meditation retreat in Myanmar. “A healthier lifestyle ultimately makes me more creative and allows me to think more cohesively,” he explained, presumably having left his phone at home. New Manchester City striker and apparent supersoldier Erling Haaland has employed a meditative pose for some of his (many) celebrations. Joe Jonas says it's the first thing he does in the morning: “Even if it's like three minutes… while I’m brushing my teeth and getting ready. It’s just about being mindful instead of starting any social media.”
It's all well and good listening to celebrities extolling the virtues of meditation, but how can us regular, non-Jonas-brother Joes get into – and importantly, feel the benefits of – the practice? Meditation isn't something one slips into, nor is it always going to be the great saviour of your day. “Meditation is quite trendy recently because people say it helps with anxiety, with stress, coping with a busy city,” explained Yulia Kovaleva, the founder of London-based Re:Mind wellness studio. “I do believe it’s much more than that. For me, it’s about self-discovery.”
As it's such a varied discipline, drawn from different religions and cultures, not everyone will respond well to every form. Your experiences, to start with, might be less-than-ideal, but meditation is like powerlifting for your brain: it’s not meant to be a series of constant joys. As Andy Puddicombe, co-founder of Headspace, explained at 2019's GQ Heroes. “If we want to make some healthy decision about our physical health, that begins with the mind… We need to nurture the mind the same way we nurture the body.”
The benefits of meditation
Meditation offers better focus, stress relief and the opportunity to have a calmer mind – all things that are quite handy in increasingly uncertain times. Sara Lazar, a psychology professor at Harvard Medical School, found that after a course of meditation, the regions in our brain responsible for empathy, learning and memory and reasoning and planning all increase, while the amygdala (a traffic light for stress) decreases. “By practising meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and increasing our well-being and quality of life,” concluded a research colleague of Lazar's.
It's increasingly undeniable that meditation can both sharpen and unburden the human mind. “Stanford University’s Dr Fred Luskin found that we have more than 60,000 thoughts a day, of which 90 per cent are repetitive. We are either lurching into the future or leaning in the past,” explained Shireen Jilla, the founder of the West London Mindfulness Centre. “Yet after a mindfulness programme, Harvard Business Review confirmed that after a mindfulness course, stress was down 28 per cent, it resulted in 20 per cent better sleep and 19 per cent less pain.
Here, Shireen Jilla, founder of the West London Mindfulness Centre, shares tips on how to meditate and get the most out of the benefits of meditation:
The benefit: Improves mental attention
How: Sit somewhere quiet and draw your attention to your breath in your belly, simply sensing its movements. If your mind is too busy, count your breaths. If your mind starts wandering, notice where it goes and bring it gently, kindly back to the breath. Ideally, do this for ten minutes a day. The calm and relaxation created will naturally increase concentration throughout your day.
The benefit: Reduces anxiety
The meditation: Settle upright but relaxed, bringing your attention to the sensations of your body. Heat, tingling, coolness, discomfort: come up close to whatever sensations there are. Notice any judgement, instead accepting with curiosity and care whatever is present and observe any changes moment by moment.
The benefit: Clears your mind
The meditation: Quietly focus on sounds and be aware of what you are listening to. Notice if you are judging or narrating the sounds. Move your object of meditation from sounds to thoughts, imagining they are on a cinema screen. Label them as they arise: planning, worrying, daydreaming. Notice your tendency – leaning back into the past or lurching into the future. Remember: negative thoughts are like Velcro, positive ones are like Teflon.
The benefit: Increases productivity
The meditation: Pepper your day with three-minute breathing exercises. Simply pause. In a sentence, what is going on right now? Then count breaths. Finally, widen your attention to the whole body, before getting back to work.
The benefit: Reduces weight
We often eat on autopilot. Our taste buds tire easily so the thrill is in the first five mouthfuls. Mindful eating can lead to weight loss, as observed by Dr Carolyn Dunn from North Carolina State University in the US.
The meditation: Eat at least one meal or snack a day in silence without technology. Simply be aware of all the senses stimulated: sight, smell and taste.
The benefit: Frees up time
The meditation: American philosopher Henry David Thoreau had it right: “Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify, simplify.” An upside of meditation is that we come to trust our intuition more, which frees up time.
The meditation: Relax and focus on the whole body by simply sitting for five minutes. Then note and be curious about the internal weather pattern. Moods colour our consciousness like weather colours the sky. Ask yourself, what is your mood right now?
The benefit: Increases happiness
The meditation: Before you go to sleep find tiny details you appreciate about your day: sunlight on your morning run; a WhatsApp from a close friend; your first sip of coffee. This practice leads you to appreciate tiny things as they happen, even on the most challenging of days.