How I Made Meditation a Daily Habit
It took Emily Fletcher, an aspiring Broadway actress, 10 years to climb the ladder of success through sheer hard work and get recognition for her roles in Chicago, The Producers and The Chorus Line. However, that success came at a very heavy price. At the tender age of 27, Emily suffered from insomnia, she was getting really sick very frequently, her hair started going gray and injuries kept propping up. Her success started getting hampered as a result and she faced a quarter-life crisis.
Fast forward a few years, Emily is now a successful entrepreneur running her own health & wellness company, an author and was named one of “Top 100 Women in Wellness to Watch”. She regularly gets invited to speak at Harvard Business School and Google to share her success story.
How did she turn herself around? She attributes it to building one new habit of success - Meditation. Surprisingly, before I came across Emily’s inspiring story, meditation was one new habit I started building 2 months ago in September 2020. No, I am not going to convince you here that you should start meditating like Emily or myself.
Instead, I want you to learn the art and science of forming a new habit and you can choose the habit yourself. It could be meditation. It could be exercising. It could be reading or it could be something as simple as not using your cell phone first thing in the morning.
In the past if you have tried forming a new success habit and relied solely on willpower, then you approached it all wrong! (Perhaps, that’s why you weren’t able to sustain it)
According to the research of a Stanford Behavioural Scientist Dr. Brian J Fogg, you can form a new success habit if you follow the following Behaviour Model:
B = M A T
Where B = Behavior, M = Motivation, A = Ability and T = Trigger.
The model states that a new behaviour can be developed whenever there is motivation, ability and a trigger for this new behaviour. Let’s take a closer look.
B = Behaviour
If you want to build a new habit, it means you need to change your behaviour in some way. When a new behaviour becomes automatic, you have developed a new habit.
Start with being very clear and specific about the new behaviour you want to turn into a habit.
For example, if you want to follow my footsteps and start meditating, then you have to decide:
When will you meditate?
I did my research and found that early morning is the best time to mediate. However, there is no wrong time either! Meditating in the afternoon or night is better than no meditation at all.
For how long will you meditate?
As a beginner, I set a target for 5mins only. Now, in 2 months I have moved up to 10mins.
Where will you mediate?
Find a place in your house where there is peace, stillness and tranquility. For me, that was my living area at dawn time.
Will you use some tools to help you in your practice?
I will highly recommend utilizing tools that can help you ease into the practice of meditation. For me, it was using guided meditation apps such as Calm or Headspace where the voice of the digital coach will guide me throughout the practice.
(SECRET TIP: If you are not yet committed to spend money on subscribing to these apps, then you can find tons of free guided meditation videos on YouTube. Here is one that I started off with: 7 days of calm)
Depending on your budget, you can also purchase the Muse headbands that can give you real-time feedback and gamify the experience.
M = Motivation
When choosing the behaviour, you should choose something you ‘want’ to do, rather than something you ‘should’ do. The motivation needs to be intrinsic. There is no magical way of creating inherent motivation. However, it is very difficult to build a new habit around something you don’t like doing.
Secondly, knowing ‘why’ you want to build this new habit is extremely important. Sometimes, the difference between ‘wanting to do something’ versus ‘should be doing something’ is derived from the ‘why’.
Usually the ‘why’ is connected to some sort of emotion. Knowing your ‘why’ is important because it fuels the motivation. Whenever you feel lost and defeated, remembering why you started the new habit can refuel the motivation.
My motivation: 1) For me, I wanted to start meditation because I wanted more clarity in life. I wanted to become more focused & less distracted so that I can increase my productivity. And of course, meditation is a great way to train my brain to be less distracted & more focused.
2) As part of my research on the Secrets of Greatness I discovered that meditation is one of the many success habits of all-time-greats such as Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Weiner and Bill Gates. So I thought to myself: “If these people swear by it, then I must give it a real shot”
Hacking Automaticity: You can also hack automaticity by creating positive emotion inside yourself as you execute on the behavior (or afterwards). My hack has always been to ‘write it down’. Writing down each time I meditated triggered the positive emotion in me that told me: “Well done! You did it today!”
The more you are able to create these positive emotions inside yourself the faster you can turn the behavior into a habit.
Some other hacks that may work for you:
Singing celebratory songs in your head
Sharing your progress with a buddy and get positive acknowledgement
A = Ability
The biggest mistake I’ve seen people make when building a new habit is that they go in with the attitude of: “Go big or go home”. More often than not, that attitude results in a disaster.
Rome wasn’t built in a day. Emily didn’t become an accomplished meditation coach in one day. LeBron James didn’t become the best overnight.
Similarly, it is important to ease yourself into the new behaviour. Set small, attainable, yet challenging goals. If your goal is to start reading a book, then set the goal of reading perhaps just one page a day initially. If your goal is to start exercising, then set the goal of exercising perhaps just 15 mins everyday.
The easier you can make the behaviour initially, the more likely you are to do it, because everyday you are training your brain & muscles to get better and better at the task. The more the brain & muscles are trained, the easier it will become to perform the task. Most importantly, starting small allows you carve out space in your routine for the new behaviour. And this is where a lot of people struggle: “I don’t have time to exercise or read a book or to meditate”.
As you build time, momentum and consistency, you can always crank up the intensity and even take masterclass courses or find a coach to improve your skill-levels.
When I started meditation, I made sure I start off by using guided meditations. Performing
T = Trigger
The trigger is a prompt or a cue. What will remind you to perform the behaviour? A trigger can be internal or can come from your environment or it can be a part of your existing routine.
Internal triggers are when you suddenly remember the behaviour. Of course, this is not recommended as relying on your memory cannot always be reliable (unless you are a memory expert).
A few examples of triggers coming from the environment:
If you want to go for a run everyday, keeping your shoes near your bed might be that trigger that will make it easier for you to take action. You can use your calendar (my favourite productivity tool) to set the trigger. I know some people love using post-it notes to remind them of the action that they need to take.
For me, I purposely designed the trigger to be a part of my existing routine. I usually wake up at 6.15 or 6.30 AM and I realized that if I wanted to fit meditation into my existing routine, then I would turn back the alarm clock to 6.00 AM thus giving me an additional 10 mins (with a few minutes to snooze the alarm) to perform meditation.
Another example for fitting a new behaviour into your existing routine: Choosing to read a book during your commute time instead of sleeping or checking emails or Facebook.
The good news is that everyone in this world is dealt with 24 hours in the day. Whenever we are incorporating a new habit into our daily routine we have to sacrifice one or more activities from the existing routine. Ideally, you want to compromise on non-productive activities (e.g. time spent scrolling YouTube or Instagram). In my case, I chipped away 15 mins from my sleeping schedule. You win some, you lose some. The important thing is that what you win weighs a lot more than what you lose for you.