Mind the Beginner

Are you having trouble focussing on a single task, being constantly distracted by thoughts? Have you ever listened to your mind chattering away in your head?

You have, haven’t you!

At night when you lie in your bed you can’t stop thinking about things, how life should be, what your goals are or what you’ll have to do to become successful.

The good news is, we all do that. The bad news is,  we all do that.

Would you like to learn how to overcome this and get an almost laser-like focus? It’s just one of the benefits of meditation. There are reasons besides enlightenment why people meditate, very practical reasons:

1. You’ll develop a laser-like focus

During meditation you train focussing on one single task. In most types of meditation this task is counting your breath. For 20 to 25 minutes you sit perfectly still and just count every exhale. Each distraction -that is, each thought that is not concerned with the counting- is ignored once you realise that you got sidetracked. And of course, noticing you got sidetracked is the first step in going back to what you were supposed to be doing.

2. You’ll need less sleep

It’s true! If you meditate every day you’ll start noticing that you sleep better. Not only will you fall asleep easier because you can control that chatter in your mind but your sleep will become better as well because you’ve already started to process everything that happened during the day while you were meditating. If you make meditation a part of your bed time ritual, just imagine how rested you’ll feel even before you actually go to bed. Lights out in ten minutes, or less.

3. You unclutter your mind

How stressed do you get when you’re in the big city, in the subway during rush hour perhaps. All those people talking, all those noises. A constant bombardment you try to drown out with your iPod. That might work great in the world out there, but in your head it’s the same thing. A lot of noise, a lot of talking all-the-time. If that won’t get you worked, up nothing will. With meditation you learn to single out that voice in your head that does matter. The rest will go away with time because you no longer listen to them. Your thoughts will become much clearer.

4. Your pain threshold increases

Meditation is quite uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong there, it’s a ritualized form of self-torture with a happy ending. You’ll be sitting in a position that will cause your legs to start aching after 10 minutes and by the end of the session it just might hurt a bit more. Meditating on a regular basis will train you to ignore this minor discomfort and focus on what you are doing instead. It’s not that uncommon for people to actually shed a few tears the first times. That’s all perfectly alright, you’ll be able to handle it soon enough.

5. Your endorphin levels rise

Managing the pain has a lot to do with endorphins. A hormone that reduces the pain signals from your body to your brain and makes you feel good. It’s the same hormone that gets released when you reveice a long hug from your loved one, eat chocolate or take a long run. (The runner’s high) This hormone stays in your body for a short time and if you meditate daily you’ll always have some of it in your bloodstream so you’ll feel good, all day long!

6. You’ll automate happiness

There’s even more to these endorphins. Given enough time – a few weeks- the thought on meditation alone, seeing your meditation mat or folding your hands in the same way as you would while meditating will cause a Pavlovian reaction. What’s so great about that is that wherever you are and you feel like you need a quick fix of “feelinggood” (right before an exam) you can mimic the meditation posture and your body will react. Say goodbye to performance anxiety.

7. Your overall quality of life will increase

After meditating for a while, not only will your focus become better but your overall quality of life will increase too. You’ll feel better about yourself, better about your surroundings and you will have a clear mind that allows you to focus on your goals. Becoming aware of the present moment will lead you to being able to influence the present. A better life starts now, not tomorrow and meditation forces you to be in the present.

A summation: It will make you feel great!

Meditation is good for you. You could find hundreds of reasons and find that they all interlink somewhere. The biggest benefits are:

• your ability to concentrate will drastically improve
• you’ll find discomfort easier to handle
• it will make you feel great!

And all it takes is 20-25 minutes every day. Time you have to spare because you fill that time with unproductive things right now.

If you want advice on meditation or have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line or leave a comment.

As therapist I often told people who were depressed to just go and take a walk. Preferably with a little bit of fire in their pace. You have no idea how many people have looked at me strangely for suggesting that they take a hike.

If you are a runner you probably know why, but if you are not a runner have you ever asked yourself why these people go through such lengths to run? They actually enjoy running a marathon for instance and beating their body up. Strange behavior, but according to Darwinian beliefs it must have some sort of benefit.

It has got everything to do with certain types of hormones in our body. Something closely related to morphine and cocaine: endorphins.

Receptors

It was back in1972 when scientists began to question how and why opiates influenced the brain. After some hypothesising and experimenting they came to the conclusion that the body must have receptors to handle this stuff and make us feel like we do when getting a morphine shot. After that shot the body wanted more of course. But why would the body have such receptors if the body couldn’t make that substance by itself?

Turns out that the body has these receptors because it does make it’s own drugs. A substance that in the right amount causes pain to subside, moods to lift an give you a general “on to of the world” feeling. Substituting this stuff with i.e. morphine will make the body produce less of it so in time we need more morphine to keep the levels up.

After running for about 10 minutes these hormones start to kick in. The first ten minutes of running are agony but after that the pain goes away and we start feeling better with every step. It’s sometimes called as the “runner’s high” and it’s one of the biggest reason people take up running. The same goes for dancing and meditating.

Agony and discomfort

Meditation isn’t necessarily an eastern invention. It was not so long ago that Christians would kneel on a hard floor for an extended period of time to be alone with their thoughts about God. Muslims pray five times each day with nothing more to sit on than a small rug. Imagine the pain they have in their knees each time.

People do this to feel better about themselves and I can tell you it does work. Why? What do running, prostrations or sitting perfectly still in a lotus position have in common? The agony, the bodily discomfort of this action and at the same time the programming of the body.

If the body is in pain it will react in one of two ways (I’m simplifying here). Either it releases adrenaline, or endorphin. It all depends on what outcome we expect. If fighting and running away is in order we’ll get adrenaline. But if we expect a positive outcome and know the current hardship is just temporary and something we need to get trough we get a shot of endorphins.

The body provides it’s own fix in order to make the hardship more pleasurable. The effect on us is that we feel better and have less pain. The longer and bigger the hardship we endure while knowing things will be alright the more endorphins will be released.

Thus, accomplishing a marathon gives a greater high than a five mile jog.

There are roughly four situations in which the body produces endorphins:

1. In general when we feel good
2. When we are subjected to suffering (physically or mentally)
3. When we sleep or rest
4. When we find ourselves in a new and unusual but non threatening situation

Ritualized self-torture

Say you meditate every day for twenty minutes. You hit a small chime to let everyone in the house know you are meditation, you light some incense and contort your body into a highly uncomfortable lotus position and sit perfectly still while counting your breaths slowly. Your knees will start to hurt like hell, your back will tighten, your butt might start aching from the firm pillow you are sitting on. To sum it up, ritualized self-torture. And then the twenty minutes are up and you unfold yourself and stagger back to the living room for a cup of tea while having a huge smile on your face.

Notice how many things in this ritual hurt you and how many things can be used as cues. After a few months of doing this any one of the cues by itself will trigger a Pavlovian reaction in your body. The smell of incense will get those glands secreting endorphins like there is no tomorrow an the chime triggers a flood. So far so good. And now the real power: Counting your breaths will also trigger endorphin production.

Although you don’t have a chime with you everywhere and people on your cubicle farm might not like you if you start putting up an incense smokescreen you can always count breaths and trigger the response that calms you down and makes you feel good.

Imagine that, when entering a boardroom or waiting in a traffic jam and feeling yourself get irritated. Use the cue and get a quick fix of happy hormones.

Why?

So why do people hurt themselves? To get these happy hormones pumping. Seriously, scientists have administered naloxone to runners (A drug that prevents the receptors in the brain from receive endorphins) and in just a few runs these people no longer felt the urge to run anymore. It didn’t feel good because they didn’t experience the runner’s high anymore.

Although there are many ways to get these hormones to be released into our bloodstream (like eating chocolate) there are few so effective as ritualized self-torture. Every religion on earth has picked up on this long ago and practices it in one form or the other.

If a therapist tells you to take a hike, please do take the hike, and put some fire in your pace. You’ll feel better afterwards.