how is the meditation going?
About a month ago I decided to really try a consistent meditation habit. It felt a bit like giving up smoking - I knew it would be good for me but I couldn't bring myself to do it until one day, something mysterious in my brain clicked somewhere and I was ready.
I wrote a bit about my previous feelings about meditation before I started, in a post called I hate meditating.
I feel like this makes me petty and childish and immature. What do you mean you can't sit still for ten minutes? It feels like torture.
This post is deliberately pretty dramatic and over the top - I think it helped me to vent out all the whiny baby thoughts of why I didn't want to do it before I started (it's boring! what's wrong with constant stimulation anyway!) but I also knew it was based on nothing but a couple of half-hearted tries and one class I'd taken over ten years ago and hated. I knew I'd never really given meditation a fair shot.
I have to say up-front it's really worked for what I wanted it to work for - sleeping. I don't understand how - although to be fair, I've not done much research.
To be honest, wanting to try meditation again was based mainly on a lot of half-remembered information about it being good for you swirling around in my brain (which is how I come to most conclusions about things, honestly). But my theory was that my trouble sleeping, and probably some of my troubles with other issues like anxiety and being unable to keep my negative feelings under control, were caused by not being able to tolerate stillness. If I practiced this through meditation, it seems like it could help me.
And I has - I haven't had any major sleep issues since I started. It kind of feels like magic. Uncomfortably, it feels a bit like the sort of magic I shouldn't think to much about in case it stops working. To be fair, I've made a few other changes, some recently, some last year:
- I deleted the instagram and tumblr apps from my phone when I started the meditation habit (however, I still use them on the browser and use my phone before bed)
- I started taking sertraline about a year ago
- Around the time I started taking sertraline, I did an NHS CBT course
I mention this because although I didn't immediately see a sleep benefit from the sertraline (it levelled out my mood but I still found myself prone to negative spirals, triggered by minor things in my personal life) and the CBT (which I had mixed results with I felt at the time) I think it's likely they've slowly been overall contributing to a positive change.
Would deleting social media apps without the meditation have worked just as well? I'll never know, but it definitely felt like it helped me to lose my "crutch" - I wrote about this and how embarrassed it made me feel in the post Re: no, really, it's an addiction
I makes me think about the thing I don't want to acknowledge, that I can't sleep without my phone. Well, more that I can't face insomnia without my phone. Things inevitably feel very bleak in the middle of the night and I'm often overwhelmed by my thoughts and feelings, which are kept at bay by squardle or worse, browsing instagram reels.
I still play squardle at night. And sometimes, on the browser, look at instagram videos. But it's much easier to put the phone down after a short while and be asleep before I know it now, in a way I don't really understand.
Another thing I want to mention is it's only been a month, which means it's only been one menstrual cycle for me. I've become more interested in cycle tracking, by which I mean being more aware of what stage of my cycle I'm in and how that may effect me. Clue has a good resource on the different stages, What are the phases of the menstrual cycle?. But relevant to this post is I've noticed I'm definitely more sensitive in the days before my period starts, the luteal phase (when most people with periods are prone to get PMS). Being aware of this is more helpful than I thought - in a funny way, it helps me take my moods less personally to know what else may be effecting them.
What do I still find hard about meditating? Well, during my meditation session this morning I was drafting this blog post in my head, so I'm obviously not finding it easy to clear my mind. I think this comes from a worry of forgetting something, or losing a good idea if I let the thoughts go. I need to trust they'll come back.
Related to this I haven't yet tried going over 10 minutes. This is partly due to finding it hard (see above) and partly due to trying to find the time. I'm not very organised, to taking 15 minutes out of my pre-work morning routine feels like a big deal to me.
But I'll keep working on it. You can find my on-going meditation log here. This is such a long post, but if you're reading this I hope you've found it interesting or helpful, and that if you're interested in meditation or finding some calm you figure out a way to make that happen for yourself. Sometimes you have to wait for the right time, so go easy!