Find a life of your own.

Over the past few years, a bunch of people have recommended meditation to me, seeing as I'm really antsy a lot and tend to overthink really hard. I've also read numerous posts about how it can help ease your mind but for some reason, I just never found or rather took the time to actually try it out. About a month ago, I was thinking about this again and then it hit me: Yeah, Corona sucks but at least I've now got tiime to try out new things if I want to! So in the middle of September I challenged myself to meditate every single day for 30 days straight.

    I very quickly found a YouTube playlist of guided meditations which were also set up as a 30 day challenge, and I just stuck with it, for the most part. It was really weird the first two days, just sitting there for ten minutes essentially doing nothing. That was actually one of the reasons why I never got into meditation because I just thought I would't be able to quiet my mind for that long. As I quickly found out, it's not the goal to be able to immediately empty your mind of all thoughts and that it's rather about learning how much value you give them. On my first day, I actually tried meditating in the morning but since I'm currently living with my parents (again), it was just impossible to focus because the environment was just too loud. After a couple days I settled on meditating in the evening, at 8pm to be more exact so that I'm actually creating a habit, and have tsuck with it ever since.

    One thing I pretty soon noticed is that just a few days after starting to meditate daily, I actually slept through an entire night without waking up. This seems pretty uninteresting without context, but I literally hadn't slept through a single night since the whole Corona mess started, so for me that was a pretty big deal. Granted, it didn't happen again BUT when I wake up during the night now, it's less long and I can immediately go back to sleep and I feel less stressed out about waking up all of the time.

    About half-way through though, I had some pretty bad days and the meditation playlist I was using was getting very specific, with meditations for gratitude or openness - which are great! - but they just didn't work for me, especially since my mind was literally bathing in negative thoughts. Around that same time, I saw a tweet talking about this mediation app called "Balance" and how it's supposed to be quite good and how they are offering a free one-year trial if you upgrade in October in honor of mental health month. 

    A couple of days later, I started switching to the app instead. I was really excited about it because they really personalize your meditation plan based on what's most important for you (I think I put "increased sleep quality" as my no.1 priority) and on your experience with meditation thus far. I'm only a little bit above a week into using this app but (and this is not an ad, I swear akshdkajdsh) I really really love it! So far, I've mainly done breath focus but also started on body scan and I already feel like I'm less dissociating and it feels really good. You can also choose how long you'd like the meditation to be - three, five or ten minutes - which is really great because I found out shorter meditations are just better for me and less stressful to try to find time for.

    So, will I keep meditating? Yes! I really feel like meditation helps my mental health and helps me not to feel as helpless with my thoughts. Actually - and it could be a placebo effect, I don't know, but - I feel like I now already overthink a little bit less. So, if you have never tried meditation, I highly recommend it! It might feel a bit weird the first few times but I honestly think it could benefit anyone :)

Meditating away,

xxx Sarah