The Meditation Tips You Need to Create a Practice IRL
To start and sustain regular meditation practice may feel impossible. Sitting still for even one minute, much less quieting your thoughts, may seem like a feat of herculean strength.
If this has been your experience of meditation, you are not alone. This is a common challenge and we hear about how others struggle with the same frustrations at almost every workshop we teach:
“I have a lot of trouble quieting my mind. The thoughts, they just keep coming. Makes it impossible to meditate.”
“I get overwhelmed at the thought of sitting still for 10 minutes or more.”
“I can’t seem to get my mind to calm down. Maybe I’m just doing it wrong.”
The good news is, despite how challenging it may feel, it’s totally possible for anyone to create a meditation practice IRL, even amidst your growing to-do list, the pile of unfolded laundry and a thriving career that demands both mental and physical energy from you every day.
Yes, it will take work. No, it won’t happen overnight. But, if you stick with it, our meditation tips will make it possible to create a regular practice, IRL, once and for all.
What’s In It For You?
Set clear intentions.
Here's the thing. We can give you all the meditation tips we’ve ever learned, but unless you're truly and authentically invested in reaping those benefits, you’ll always struggle to get started, and even more challenge, to keep going.
Before you can ask questions like...
Which meditation should I do?
How long should I meditate for?
What if I can't sit still?
Where should I do it?
What if I do it wrong?
… you need to know the answer to this question: Why do I want to do it in the first place?
Setting an intention, in this way, and getting clear on why creating a consistent meditation practice matters for you personally—how it can benefit, transform or guide you—is a form of meditation itself.
Yes, we said it.
By setting an intention, you're already meditating. (Tweet this!)
This is because asking yourself this question shifts your mind from autopilot—"I'm doing it because everyone else is doing it"—to awareness—"I'm committing to meditation because I want to X."
More importantly, the personal motivation helps you commit even in the face of the most common challenges, like having no time or being easily distracted. With a distinct why, you’re anchored in the value of the practice, which makes it easier to push past the usual resistance.
Start Small and Simple
One minute, one technique, one day at a time
The first step to creating a meditation practice IRL is to start small and keep it simple. This helps you overcome the overwhelm that’s often associated with meditation. If you search the phrase “How to meditate” on Google, you’ll find 439,000,000 results. With so many people telling us how to do it right, what to avoid, and what to do better, it's easier just to give up before ever trying. The information overload is real.
Instead of letting this stop you, however, we want you to take it back a step and start with one technique, like a breathing meditation, mantra meditation, or body scan meditation. Find one that feels good to you and do it for just one minute. Don’t think about doing it tomorrow, or next week when you have a hectic schedule, just today, just for one minute.
At a recent workshop, we got participants to count how many full cycles of breaths they took in one minute. After the exercise, one of them had a big grin on her face. She shared: “That was awesome! I could never get my mind to be quiet and the counting totally helped. It gave my mind something to do, to focus on.”
Master one minute, with one technique, one day at a time, and you’ll be well on your way to creating a meditation practice IRL.
Use Context to Turn Meditation Into a Habit
Same time, same place
Repetition helps create a habit. Just look at the classic case of Pavolv’s Dog, where the repetition of ringing a bell, immediately followed by food, led to salivation, even when the bell rang, but the food was no longer being presented. Repetition is a powerful tool for teaching our minds to do something on a regular basis, but to stick with a consistent meditation practice, it takes more than this.
To get your calm on without it feeling like it’s a chore, take your efforts one step further and leverage contextual behavior repetition. This science-y word just means that the context in which you meditate is the same every time you do it. For example, you’re not just meditating each day, but you’re doing so in the same spot in your home or at the same exact time. As Phillipa Lally and Benjamin Gardner explain in Promoting Habit Formation:
“Habits are automatic behavioural responses to environmental cues, thought to develop through repetition of behaviour in consistent contexts.”
This is powerful because 40 percent of the actions we take each day happen in almost the same situation, according to research published in Society for Personality and Social Psychology. The researchers from the study published in the Society for Personal and Social Psychology reinforce what Lally and Gardner found:
“We find patterns of behavior that allow us to reach goals. We repeat what works, and when actions are repeated in a stable context, we form associations between cues and response.” To turn your practice into a habit, create a consistent context in which you meditate every day to leverage the power of contextual repetition.
Reinforce Your Meditation Practice With Habit Stacking
Connect current habits with meditation
Contextual cues can help you turn your meditation practice into a habit, but so can habit stacking. Since everyone is different, we want to give you this second powerful tool. James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, explains what habit stacking is:
“Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with a current habit. This method, which was created by BJ Fogg as part of his Tiny Habits program, can be used to design an obvious cue for nearly any habit.” For example:
You meditate immediately after sitting down with your coffee.
You meditate during your post-lunch walk at work.
You meditate in bed, right after you brush your teeth at the end of the night.
Habit stacking uses habits that are already part of your routine as tools to prime your brain and body to shift into meditation mode whenever you move into that situation. As Clear explains:
“The reason habit stacking works so well is that your current habits are already built into your brain. You have patterns and behaviors that have been strengthened over years. By linking your new habits to a cycle that is already built into your brain, you make it more likely that you'll stick to the new behavior.”
Return to the Practice.
The reward is in the return.
The funny thing about meditation is that getting distracted, and then returning back to your breath is the practice. That return to the breath is also where you find the reward because that’s when you learn.
What thoughts are pulling me away?
Why are these thoughts coming up?
Which thoughts float to the surface again and again?
Instead of getting frustrated, it’s important to notice these thoughts—allow them to come into view, return to your breathe, and then learn from what keeps coming up. Perhaps you’re struggling to overcome a poorly executed project at work and so you come back to the same critical thoughts again and again. The practice is in recognizing that thought and then returning to the meditation—e.g. focusing on your breath or mantra—and letting meditation guide you toward finding peace, despite frustrations or shame.
Even harder than managing those thoughts, however, is getting back into your practice when you’ve let your practice slide for a few days or weeks. Yet returning to your practice and directing your energies into strengthening it, instead of beating yourself up, is the reward.
For example: When you go to the gym and get sore, you rest for a few days, and then get back into the game… instead of lamenting why you got sore in the first place. Meditation, and sticking with your practice IRL requires the same mindset. The invitation is to simply acknowledge that life happened, and return to the practice
The more you choose to return to the practice, the more reward—peace, calm, happiness, gratitude, etc.—you accumulate over time.
Be Patient
Forming habits takes time
This is one of the most important meditation tips we can share because it’s easy to get discouraged when, even after weeks of practice, meditation still feels like a chore. To create your meditation practice IRL, though, you have to hang on because, in reality it can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days to form a new habit, according to research conducted by Phillippa Lally.
That means, it could take 2 to 8 months to turn your meditation practice into a routine that as automatic as brushing your teeth. In that time, there will be hiccups and missed days, but this won’t totally throw you off track. Lally found, “missing one opportunity to perform the behavior did not materially affect the habit formation process.”
If you’re feeling frustrated, go back to our first meditation tip: one day, one technique, one minute at a time. Don’t worry about getting it done tomorrow, or doing it for longer because you’ve been meditating for the same amount of time for the last two weeks. Take small steps and know that if you’re making time to meditate, the practice is working—and that’s worth celebrating!
Use Our Favorite Meditation Tips to Get Started
These meditation tips are meant to take you from imagining what it would be like to have a regular meditation practice to making it part of your everyday life. If you can give yourself the motivation, opportunity, and encouragement to practice regularly using the tools we’ve shared, you may be surprised to find that meditation becomes a habit you look forward to, rather than an additional chore on your to-do list.
What meditation tips have been most helpful in starting a practice in IRL for you?
📩 Comment below and let us know. 📩
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