The Meditation Experiment

I love self-experiments. I have been both the researcher and the test rat for a myriad of health and wellness experiments over the years. Testing cod liver oil supplementation to increase retinol bioavailability, comparing endurance exercise performance on raw vegan 80/10/10 diet versus a high protein one, and scrutinizing the efficacy of antioxidant foods for treatment of chronic diseases have been a few of my recent studies. Although my studies usually focus on using food for wellness, I more recently became intrigued with the practice of meditation. I began to notice the ubiquity of alternative health practitioners and doctors’ high praises for the practice of meditation to promote both physical and mental wellbeing. Since I practice yoga daily and generally love any excuse to move, I thought meditation would be another unnecessarily sedentary burden. A good run or yoga class clears my head, so why should I have to sit still to get the same result? I challenged myself to meditate every day for 21 days.

I completed my 21 days yesterday, and I’m proud to say I missed only two days over the duration of the experiment. I was hoping for a grand transformation or awakening, but in reality, the effects were far subtler than I had hoped. I recently read an interview with ABC News anchor Dan Harris that echoed my experience with meditation: “meditation makes me ten percent happier.” Although this is definitely an oversimplification of the effects of meditation, it does make sense to me. Just like a test in which ten percent is the difference between an A and a B, meditation makes a small yet significant change. Meditation is a frustratingly subtle tool in our sensation-addicted society.

In a Zen Buddhist article entitled “You Are What You Download,” the author discusses how meditation brings up all the mindless media we assume we will forget. She talks about how meditating made her less inclined to engage in idle web surfing because she didn’t want to be haunted by it the next time she meditated. I definitely experienced what she was talking about. Especially the first two weeks of meditation, I would spend the majority of my time trying to fend off all the random thoughts I hadn’t ever really consciously considered before. I found myself thinking about the design on the bottom of my shoes, the side-by-side comparison of a Labradoodle and a chicken nugget that came up on my Facebook news feed, the thank you notes I need to write, the bothersome way my friend worded a text a few days ago, the National American University commercial song, and the list goes on. The meditation experiment has made me painfully cognizant of how my online habits affect my overall well-being. It’s difficult to separate from the deluge of pop culture clutter, but I took the first step by deleting Instagram and Facebook off of my phone. Since I made the change two weeks ago, I have become hyper aware of how much time my friends spend scrolling through their feeds instead of making eye contact.

This may sound hippie-dippy, but meditation really does create a shift in perspective. As you become more aware of the world around you, it will become more vibrant, and, best of all, you’ll realize that there is no separation between yourself and that vibrant, glowing world. Try meditating and you too can join the ranks of sober health freaks like me who sound like washed up rock stars reminiscing on acid trips of yore.