I’ve always believed there is a connection between the conversations we have with ourselves and the outcomes we eventually experience in life. Someone once told me that thoughts are like passing clouds. We do not control every one that appears, but we do have some agency over which ones we follow, which ones we feed, and which ones we allow to take root.
That idea has stayed with me, mostly because I am not always very good at living by it. My mind can be an ambitious, useful, exhausting place. It can solve problems, imagine better futures and remember old mistakes with unnecessary cinematic detail.
Most mornings, I do not wake up and choose what gets my attention first. I reach for my phone, usually under the pretense of checking the time, and within seconds I have invited the entire outside world into a room it has not yet earned the right to enter. Email, texts, headlines, markets, Slack, the weather, someone’s vacation, someone’s outrage, someone’s breakfast, some baby monkey in Japan that is being bullied. Before I have stood up, the day has started arranging the furniture in my head.
This week’s tiny bet is to delay that handoff.
For seven mornings, before checking your phone, email, news, Slack, or anything else that lets the world begin making claims on you, sit quietly for 10 minutes. No need to become a person who says “my practice”. Just sit somewhere quiet, set a timer for 10 minutes, breathe normally, and notice what your mind does when it is not being immediately fed instructions.
The basic version is simple. Sit in a chair if that is easiest. Put both feet on the floor. Let your hands rest wherever they naturally fall. Close your eyes, or don’t. Pay attention to the breath wherever you can feel it most clearly, maybe in your chest, your stomach, or the air moving through your nose. When your mind wanders, which it will do almost immediately, notice that it wandered and come back to the breath. Then do that again. And again.
The point is to see, maybe for the first time all day, how quickly the mind runs away when nobody has asked it to go anywhere. It will start planning, judging, rehearsing, remembering, worrying, inventing, replaying, negotiating, and occasionally producing a thought so strange that you may wonder whether you should be allowed to operate a motor vehicle. Fine, let it. The rep is about training yourself to return.
There is research behind this. In one study, a 10-minute guided mindfulness exercise improved executive attentional control in people who were new to meditation. Another study found that eight weeks of brief daily meditation improved mood, attention, working memory, and recognition memory. A broader neuroscience review describes mindfulness as training in attention control, emotion regulation, and self-awareness. In other words, this is not magic and it is not a personality transplant. It is training. Small, somewhat boring, surprisingly difficult training for the part of us that decides what gets in, what gets believed, and what gets a response.
I like that because it lowers the stakes. We are not trying to become different people by the end of the week. We are not trying to levitate above the group chat or greet every inconvenience with the expression of a man carved into a Buddhist temple. We are trying to create a little space between waking up and being claimed.
The wager is small. The possible return is a little more authorship over the first moments of the day, and maybe, if we are lucky, a little more authorship over the rest of it too.
One favor…if you have a guided meditation app or video you like, please comment and share!