Reporting Back on Mindfulness

Peviously I wrote abotu my introduction to midnfulness, and how it struck me as oddly reminiscent of TDD. I had planned on meditating for about a month, and check back in on how it may or may not have helped me. It’s been well over a month since I wrote that article, and with how I time shift this block, it will be longer still until this is posted. Here’s what happened as I meditated during the time warp that is writing this blog.

As of the time of this writing, I have tracked 92 days. Out of which I have meditated 43 times. I’m meditating at least 46% of the time.

Impediments towards meditating

I had a really hard time getting into the habit of meditating from home. When I’m in the office, there’s a wellness room. That dedicated space with a chair, and insulation helped establish an association with a dedicated space. Not having a dedicated space at home made it harder to think about and act on meditating. As can be seen in the following chart, I tended to meditate more on Monday through Thursday when I’d more likely be in the office.

I’ve started the addressing the lack of space at home with a temporal trigger. I try to think of the available time, and then meditate in the space that’s available. That way if I’m working from home on a Monday, then I’ll sit on the couch after stand up and get a quick meditation in. If it’s the weekend and my wife is watching a show on the TV, I’ll go the bedroom and meditate in-between folding laundry and other chores.

I also had an issue where I started with too much time for my meditations. Initially I was trying to do 5 minutes of meditation at a time. That worked for the first fee sessions, but was unsustainable. I had to scale back to a minute and slowly work my way back up to 1 minute 30 seconds.

Noting has also been fairly difficult. When a thought would creep in, I would often spend the rest of the minute fending off that particular thought. It’s gotten better with practice, but noting has been a hard skill to build.

Benefits

The oddest benefit to meditating that I had ever heard of before attempting this experiment was a better sense of smell. I didn’t quite beleive it when I heard about that, but I have now experienced a brief improvement in my ofactory senses after meditating.

I’m still not certain how it’s affecting my stress level. I’ve found myself reaching for meditation on stressfull days when there have been many issues that have cropped up during the day. I’ve also had some pretty severe incidents at work that have been high stress moments. Maybe I should also start tracking a daily stress level to see if I can get better data.

How I’m tracking

Right now I’m using two tools to track my meditation: a note book in GoodNotes, and a spread sheet in Google Sheets. The notebook is a daily tracker that I recreated from CGP Grey’s Theme Journaling System. I set up different items that I want to track: meditating, working on my blog, drawing etc. Then I have a bubble for each day of the week with a line through it (that allows me to give myself partial credit). If I do what I’m tracking, then I bubble it in. I find the bubbling helpful to encourage me to start or keep going with building these sorts of habits. It’s like getting a sticker at school (or when you vote).

Then once in a while when I want to crunch some data, I enter what I’ve done into a spread sheet. I’ve thought about doing something more automated, but I find it’s usually best to start with a spread sheet before writing code. That way if the spread sheet is enough, you don’t have to waste time writing code that doesn’t have enough utility. I might still write some code this self tracking project (maybe it would make good content for this blog!).

Where To From here

I’ll keep recording what I’m doing, and take it one day at a time. Maybe add something to my daily tracker so I have an indication of stress level that I had during the day. I would also like to see if I can visualize this data in interesting ways once I’ve collected it. Next check in will be some time in the future.