Meditation Sucks, but I Want the Benefits
Tap into the benefits of meditation without sitting cross-legged on a pillow
As humans, we do a lot of stupid things in life, but sitting quietly and breathing deeply probably isn’t one of them. In fact, you could argue that meditation is one of the most benign things a person can do. It’s practically like sleeping. Which is precisely why it’s so ironic that we love to get riled up about the topic of meditation. When it arises, we eye roll, we argue, and we heckle. We take sides, and in doing so, we miss the point entirely.
For the converted, meditation falls into the must do camp for anyone looking to flirt with peak performance. Or rather, this crowd is more likely to say that peak performance cannot be attained without it. In Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss points out that “More than 80% of the world-class performers I’ve interviewed have some form of daily meditation or mindfulness practice.” Tim’s merry band of titans includes some of the biggest names in business, sports, tech, and entertainment, which makes for a compelling case.
It’s also what makes meditation an easy target for comedy jabs. It conjures up images of gurus in flowing robes with unkempt hair who utter words about chakras and smell like they lost a fight with a sage bush that lost a fight with a moist cloud of body odor. It’s why Awaken with JP videos get millions of views. His parodies hit the heart center of everything “woo woo” in wellness culture. For a lot of people, meditation is just strange enough to file away as mysterious, vaguely cultish, and clearly in the not-for-me camp.
For others, even if they’re interested in meditation, they’re just too busy or don’t seem wired for it. I hear a lot of people say something to this effect, “I don’t have time to meditate,” or “I tried but I couldn’t quiet the chatter in my brain.” In a conversation with chef David Chang, Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon nails the sentiment, “And I do try to meditate. But I’m craaazy!” This approach leads to a lot of meditation app downloads that never get used along with plenty of self-shame.
Instead of fighting that meditation angst, author Ryan Holiday wields it like sword. “Everyone at this point has heard about meditation and heard that it works, including myself. Yet, most of us just don’t do it. I know that it works, I know there’s an app on my phone that can walk me through it, but I’m still not going to fucking do it!” Fair enough.
In his book, Stillness is the Key, Holiday extolls the virtues of various practices of stillness, without actually recommending meditation. Did he forget about it? Absolutely not. He intentionally steers around meditation because he knows that people are allergic to it. At the same time, he’s steadfast that we need more onramps to stillness, not less.
It doesn’t matter if you’re in the meditation lover, hater, or the whatever camp — it’s clear that we need something different to help us unpack our emotional baggage. Just a quick tour of current affairs reveals a culture trading in trigger warnings, cancel buttons, rioting in the streets and even capitol building Donkey Kong.
Sure enough, The Hartman Group says we’re officially living in the age of anxiety, and they reached this conclusion before COVID. For the first time in 30-years of tracking health and wellness trends, in 2019 they found that mental and emotional wellbeing eclipsed the importance of physical wellbeing. Simply put, when it comes to wellness, dealing with stress and anxiety just knocked looking great in the outfit off the podium. Hartman attributes this massive shift to a confluence of factors such as climate change, political divisiveness, social media addiction, news echo chambers, economic uncertainty, and systemic inequality. Or, as I like to call it, modern fuckery. And people are feeling it.
In the U.S., depression is the leading cause of disability with anxiety disorders affecting about 18% of the adult population. And COVID has only fueled the fire. In a CDC survey in mid-2020, they found that 30.9% of adults reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder. Perhaps most disconcerting is that the American Psychological Association (APA) reported even higher levels of stress among Gen Z adults (ages 18–23). It appears we’re at a pivotal time in history where uncertainty and crisis continue to pile up instead of resolving. The APA doesn’t mince words concluding, “We are facing a national mental health crisis that could yield serious health and social consequences for years to come.”
As Harvard biologist, E.O. Wilson puts it, “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.” To me, it seems we humans are becoming grist for the mill of our own creation. Through an evolutionary lens, it’s easy to see how we arrived here. For much of the last couple million years, we solved life’s problems with stone tools, machines and hardened hands. For our latest ails, hands need not apply. The new battles take place in hearts and minds, and we’re ill-equipped to wage them. If we’re to move toward greater emotional mastery, we need some new approaches.
If we want to be more calm with our kids and coworkers, we have to work at it. If we want to get rid of distraction and improve focus, we need to cultivate those skills. If we want more laughter and less road rage, we have to build those traits. Just as athletes train to hone their physical skills, mental and emotional resilience is crafted through daily practice.
And these practices aren’t just for people sitting in caves or waving dream catchers. I agree with psychologist and author, Rick Hanson who puts mindfulness practices on par with physical training, “They’re not airy fairy, they’re not wussy, they’re not luxury indulgence. They’re hard core.” Meditation is one such tool, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re not interested in doing it.
So that begs the question — can we get the benefits of meditation without actually meditating?
One clue comes from widening our lens to other cultures. Ryan Holiday reasons that it’s only eastern philosophies and texts that talk about meditation. This means there could be thousands of alternatives out there, let’s call them meditation-like practices, if we search for them and experiment.
Holiday found that journaling was especially useful for the stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca. Seneca noticed that he slept better after journaling, and many other prominent figures in history, such as Anne Frank, also took to their journals as a means of reflection and a space to make sense of life.
If journaling has meditative qualities, what else might hold the same potential? To figure that out, we need to understand a little bit of the whiz bang neuroscience that happens during meditation. Once we have that, it will help us tap into more alternatives.
A little over a decade ago, researchers discovered a network in the brain, called the default mode network (DMN), which is considered to be the home of the self or the ego. The DMN plays the role of autobiographer, laying down stories that help us relate to our thoughts and feelings, and form identity. When you think thoughts like I’m a democrat or I’m a smoker, or when you ruminate a bit much over a charged conversation with a coworker, that’s the DMN telling stories.
Much of the time, the DMN is a pretty cool feature of being human. Michael Pollan, author of How to Change Your Mind, explains, “When all is working as it should be, the ego keeps the organism on track, helping it to realize its goals and provide for its needs, notably for survival and reproduction. It gets the job done.” But gone awry, an overactive DMN is associated with depression, anxiety and addiction .
When meditators do their thing, DMN activity plummets. And when the DMN chills out for a bit, we can too. Neuroscientist Judson Brewer explains in his book The Craving Mind, what it feels like to take the DMN offline, “no striving or struggling necessary, as we get out of our own way and rest in an awareness of what is happening moment to moment.” We temporarily lose our sense of self and feel more connected to everything. Brewer suggests this is why mindfulness training may be helpful with managing pain, addiction, anxiety and depression.
If we can find other practices that put the DMN in airplane mode or help us feel more present and connected, then perhaps we can expand beyond the meditation pillow. My own experiences with breathwork, awe and surfing have become fertile ground for ego dissolution.
Breathwork is fast-emerging as the “new” mental resilience training that’s been around for thousands of years. If you watched people in a breathwork studio, you’d notice that it has similarities to meditation but instead of stillness and quiet, you’d see bodies pulsating loudly in a rhythmic fashion, often too some vibey music. As the name suggests, breathwork involves more active physical engagement, which may be an option for anyone who feels like traditional meditation is too passive. Even after a short breathwork session, I feel like I hit the reset button on my mental and emotional state that leaves me feeling energized and clear-minded for hours afterwards. Integrative medicine pioneer, Dr. Andrew Weil says, “I can’t imagine anything that’s more powerful to change both your mental state and physical state than regulating the breath.”
Now we need some practices that can get us off the mat and the concept of awe offers helpful insight. The word awesome gets tossed around a lot but I think we’ve lost touch with its deeper meaning. Awe is actually a complex emotion that bubbles up when we experience something vast that makes us feel small temporarily. Think about the feeling that arises when you look up into the expansive sky on a star-filled night and it hits you just how insignificant humans are in the grand scheme of things.
These experiences often force us to upgrade our world view and come with a host of potential benefits. Awe has been associated with feeling more connected, experiencing more positive moods and even expressing more generosity. Perhaps not surprisingly, “the default mode network goes quiet,” and, “what happens in the brain is your self becomes silent,” explains Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology and awe researcher at UC Berkeley.
One of the most reliable producers of awe is nature experiences. In Japan, awe is practiced through a concept called shinrin-yoku, also known as forest bathing, or more simply, a nice walk in the woods. Beyond obvious nature immersions, awe can also be produced indoors and even in urban environments through art, architecture and music. For example, a moving piece of music, or stunning architecture can elicit awe, and maybe even give you goosebumps. That’s awe in full effect and it has many onramps.
My favorite entry point to awe is the ocean. At an early age, I noticed that every time I went surfing, it didn’t matter if the waves were good or bad, I felt better for having done it. Surfing gave me an unflappable resolve that seemed to help the bullshit of life bounce right off me. Though I had never officially meditated at that point, I often described surfing as a form of moving meditation.
Surfing and action sports not only have meditative qualities, they’re also reliable producers of flow states. Flow is typically described as an optimal state of consciousness when you feel and perform your best. When you’re in flow, you become totally immersed in the present moment and time dilates. According to psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow also initiates the loss of self-consciousness, meaning that meditation shares common ground with flow. And following this logic, it may mean that activities that produce flow can also generate some of the benefits of meditation.
Csikszentmihalyi discovered through his pioneering research that almost any activity has the potential to produce flow, if we can enter the sweet spot. He describes this sweet spot as the Flow Channel, which is where an activity challenges us to stretch our skills to meet the challenge. We’re not bored and we’re not drawn to the point of anxiety either, yet we’re still a little bit outside of our comfort zone. Csikszentmihalyi found that it isn’t just action sports that can get us into flow, but everyday activities like mowing the lawn, or even cooking hold equal potential.
In his book Cooked, Michael Pollan describes the process of cooking as a potentially meditative experience, at least for Buddhist monks. As for himself, he said, “I couldn’t meditate if my life depended on it.” Then he spent a year deepening his cooking practices (presumably hanging out in the flow channel), which revealed an important shift.
“I don’t want you to get the idea it’s made a Buddhist of me, but in the kitchen, maybe a little bit. When stirring the pot, just stir the pot. I get it now. It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to be able to do one thing at a time, one thing to which you give yourself whole-heartedly. Unitasking.”
By opening up the aperture of what it means to meditate, an almost unlimited number of possibilities appear to help us reap the benefits. We don’t have to conform to a one-size-fits-all model, sit on the sidelines, or take sides. We can pick our own path of wellness.
Surely, not every option we choose will elicit flow or switch off the DMN, but engaging in meditation-like practices can help us become more present. And when we make being present a practice, it tends to spill over into the rest of our lives, and that doesn’t seem stupid at all.
