Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives by Gretchen Rubin Page A

ambitious new habit: meditation. Meditation is the practice of focusing attention on the present moment—on our breath, or an image, or nothing—in a non-analytical and nonjudgmental way. Though it’s particularly associated with Buddhism, meditation has existed in various forms in many traditions. Because of the evidence of its mental and physical benefits, increasing numbers of people practice a secular form of mindfulness meditation; according to a 2007 survey, almost one in ten Americans had meditated in the previous year.
    I’d resisted meditation for years; it never appealed to me. My most important Personal Commandment is to “Be Gretchen.” “Be Gretchen,” I thought, “and skip meditation.” I became intrigued, however, when in the space of a month, three people told me how much they’d benefited from it. Their firsthand accounts carried more weight with me than everything I’d read in the literature.
    Maybe I should try it, I thought. After all, was I going to let my sense of identity, my sense of Gretchen, congeal in ways that kept me from trying new things? Happiness expert Daniel Gilbert suggests that a useful way to predict whether an experience will make us happy is to ask other people currently undergoing the experience we’re contemplating how they feel. He argues that we tend to overestimate the degree to which we’re different from other people, and generally, an activity that one person finds satisfying is likely to satisfy someone else. I half agree with Professor Gilbert. As my oft-invoked Secret of Adulthood holds, we’re both more alike than we think, and less alike. What finally made me decide to try meditation was someone telling me, “I know people who tried meditation who haven’t stuck with it. But I don’t know anyone who thought it was a waste of time.”
    To learn to meditate, I did what I always do, and headed to the library. After reading books such as Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness and Sharon Salzberg’s Real Happiness , I came up with my plan. Though Salzberg suggests starting with twenty minutes of meditation three days a week, twenty minutes sounded like a long time, so I decided to make meditation a daily five-minute habit.
    When scheduling a new habit, it helps to tie it to an existing habit, such as “after breakfast,” or to an external cue, such as “when my alarm rings,” because without such a trigger, it’s easy to forget to do the new action. An existing habit or cue works better than using a particular start time, because it’s so easy to lose track of the hour. Instead of “meditating at 6:15 a.m.,” therefore, I inserted “meditate” into my schedule right after waking up and getting dressed.
    When I woke up that first morning, I felt unusually tired, even though my handy sleep monitor reported that I’d slept for six hours and fifty-two minutes. “Maybe I should wait to start meditating when I’m more energetic,” a devious part of my brain suggested. “It will be tough today, when I’m sleepy.” Hah! I knew better than to believe that . The desire to start something at the “right” time is usually just a justification for delay. In almost every case, the best time to start is now .
    So right after getting dressed—I was already wearing yoga pants, because I wear yoga pants every single day—I set my phone alarm for five minutes (the alarm sound of “crickets” seemed suitable), pulled a pillow off the sofa, and put it down on the floor.
    I settled myself in the lotus position with my hands palms up, right hand cupped inside left, and the tips of my thumbs forming a triangle (very specific, but that’s what the book said to do). I checked my posture, then remembered that my knees should be lower than my hips, so I hopped up to get another pillow.
    After a few minutes of squirming to