Meditation is one of the most important habits of self-improvement.

It’s the most direct way of improving our mental health and conquering our own mind. Every successful man practices meditation, because apart from helping us living less stressful, happier lives, practicing meditation also improves focus and concentration.

If you haven’t meditated before, here's how you do it:

Sit down, with a straight back. The way you sit is irrelevant, sit on a chair, cross your legs on the ground, it doesn’t matter. But the important is that when meditating, you have to be relaxed and alert at the same time. You don’t want your muscles to be too tense, but you also don’t want to lay down and go on full rest mode.

Take a few deep breaths. Inhale deeply, and as you exhale, relax your muscles one by one. Shoulders, neck, back, face muscles, and anywhere else you feel tension. 5-10 deep breaths should be enough.

Close your eyes.

Breathe normally, without controlling the breath, and focus on your breath. Thoughts and feelings will come and go, and your goal is to notice them and then to direct your attention back to breathing. That’s one rep, keep repeating this for a set amount of time.

As you can see, meditation is not a matter of ‘not thinking anything’, but rather the constant awareness of thoughts and the constant conscious direction of your focus. By meditating every day, you are practicing your mind’s ability to control its attention.

Think about just how useful this skill is:

• You are working on a project, but suddenly you remember a video and you search that up on YouTube… With enough practice, you can notice that thought, that desire to open YouTube, and not suppress it, but rather let it pass and get back to your work.

• You are procrastinating with small tasks instead of doing the work that truly matters… With enough practice, you can notice the procrastination, direct your attention to the root cause of it, and as an example, notice that you are procrastinating because you are overwhelmed, then let the feeling pass and get to working.

• You are mindlessly scrolling on TikTok, you don’t even know why… With enough practice you can fully notice that you are acting like a loser, and then direct your attention away from the black hole that is TikTok. Delete the app while you are at there, seriously, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Read last week’s letter if you need help with that:

However, these benefits do not come from a few bouts of intensity, but rather from a constant daily practice. Meditating for 2 hours once won’t significantly change your life. Because frankly, if you aren’t a seasoned monk, those 2 hours of meditation will be mostly idle daydreaming. On the other hand, if you meditate for even as little as 5 minutes every day, after a few months, your life will improve significantly.

It’s crucial to learn how to stay consistent, and if you’re ready, here are my 6 tips that will help you stay consistent with meditation:

1. Make a true commitment

A man’s word is his honor. But most men don’t treat it as such when they say they will meditate every day.

If you want to achieve your goals, you must mean it when you set them. You must make a true commitment.

A true commitment means giving everything you’ve got to achieve something, and that, regardless of the external circumstances.

Don’t underestimate this.

On most days, the reason why you don’t meditate will not be that “you can’t”, or that “you don’t have time”. The reason why you will will be because meditation does not matter enough to you. Thoughts like “It’s okay if I don’t meditate just today”, “I am going to sleep soon anyways, what’s the point of meditating?”, “Meditation doesn’t seem to work, I am just wasting my time”, are the bane of consistency.

There’s only one way to eradicate these thoughts and it’s to have an unshakeable belief in your dedication to meditation.

And that’s the first and the most important tip: Make meditation a non-negotiable priority.

2. Start small

To avoid any confusion, you must be clear about your commitment.

Is your goal to meditate 10 minutes per day, 20, or as much as you can?

I wish you all a lifetime of meditation practice but, of course, the specifics of your commitments will change over time. At a certain stage of your life, you might meditate for just 5 minutes a day, at another you can meditate for 2 hours a day.

Either way, remember to set a number you can manage, something you can stick to every day.

If you are just starting out, start with 5 minutes or 3, or even 1, there’s no shame in that, and I have great respect for someone who has the humility to do that. That person has the potential to slowly increase from 1 minutes per day to a solid 30 minutes per day meditation practice.

On the other hand, a newbie who starts with the goal of 30 minutes per day will likely fail and get discouraged from meditation. He will not stay consistent, and thus, he will get less rewards from his meditation practice.

A good rule of thumb is to pick a number and divide it by two. For instance, if you think you can meditate for 20 minutes every day, drop it down to 10. Over time, you can surely increase it progressively to your original goal of 20.

If you are a complete beginner, you can also start with the easy goal of meditating for any amount of time per day. Seriously, I can’t think of anyone in any circumstances who can’t meditate for like 10 seconds in a day.

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Of course, setting a small goal at the start shouldn’t stop you from trying longer sessions from time to time. If you like, meditate for 3 hours once every week. But do not do that at the expense of consistency.

3. Keep yourself accountable with a habit tracker

Some people think that habit trackers are there to motivate you. Look, I have a 10 day streak, I want to make it 11!

But to me, its true power lies in its ability to keep you accountable.

It’s easy to say to yourself “I think I have been quite consistent with meditation this month.” Your brain loves deluding itself.

But a habit tracker tells no such cute lies, it will tell you frankly and brutally that you have missed 9 days of meditation this month and you should get your sh*t together the next month.

Building a habit tracker is simple, you don’t need any apps to complicate it.

Just open on a note taking app or pick a pen and a paper, and put down check boxes. Seriously, something as simple as this will suffice:

4. Add meditation to your to-do list

It’s a tip I have written about in a letter on writing to-do lists: if a habit gets tough to manage, we put it on the to-do list. 

Here’s the plan: Every day, you’ll have “▢ Meditate for X minutes” on your daily to-do list.

This will act as a daily reminder to check your habit. Afterwards, you can note it down on your habit tracker as well.

5. Create regularities

Now we are getting to the juicy part: building a habit

You can meditate every day without building a habit, but making it a habit makes staying consistent much easier.

The best way to build a habit is building regularities. It means doing things similarly during your meditation sessions. Our brains love patterns, and will happily build more efficient neural pathways to reduce the friction it takes to meditate. The more you do it in similar ways, the more it will get easier.

Here’s what building regularities looks like in real life:

• You could build time regularity, meditating every day at 7 PM.

• You could build event regularity, meditating every day after brushing your teeth.

• You could build place regularity, meditating every day in the living room.

• Heck, you could even build cushion regularity, meditating every day sitting on the cushion taken from the sofa at the kitchen

Of course, don’t attach to them too much, meditate even if you missed the correct time. But still, know that building regularities makes meditation easier, and try to stick to your regularities most of the time.

6. Celebrate after every meditation session

Celebrating is another great ‘hack’ to set a habit in place.

It doesn’t have to be anything crazy, just tell yourself “great job”, and you’re good to go.

This way, you will become the kind of person who meditates every day, and you will be proud of this achievement of yours.

Alright, now you know how to stay consistent with meditation. If you need more guidance on how to start, I highly recommend the free Medito app. It has a great introductory course, and I still use the app as my meditation timer.

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