How meditation killed my creativity and made me more stressed | Hacker News Reader

How meditation killed my creativity and made me more stressed

medium.com

22 points_nh_10 comments

I think this is where learning from meditation from an experienced teacher compared to an app would probably be more likely produce a beneficial result.

It's hard to say without actually talking to this person about his experience, but it seems like he fell into a trap that many fall into (include me) about meditation in that the goal or ideal state is to clear your mind of thoughts. Forcing your mind not to follow your thoughts and interpreting the presence of extraneous thoughts as negative will not be pleasurable or helpful.

Our minds wander all of the time, and if you tell yourself doing that is bad, you're going to be feeling bad a lot of the time.

If you are trying to meditate and you notice your mind wander, you let the thoughts you have go, without any penalty. If you notice your mind hasn't wandered, you don't give yourself kudos, but you just let that thought go too. The core of meditation is the just the practice of that action.

If you're just beginning meditation, you're taking a shower, and you often spend your shower time brainstorming, you should definitely not be penalizing yourself for that. Just because your meditation app told you that the end goal is to spend your life fully in the moment does not mean you can just decide to do that today.

An experienced meditator in that situation might decide that they would be more effective focusing on showering, and then dedicating separate time to brainstorming. OR, they might decide that "brainstorming in the shower" as a whole is very beneficial experience and decide they are doing it just right for them.

Meditation is a practice in awareness and focus. The goal is to become more aware of your own thoughts and emotions, and by doing so, wield more conscious control over them. Feeling less stressed and all the other benefits associated with meditation are merely by-products of having more awareness. Having more awareness is not mutually exclusive with having a racing mind. Simply be aware that your mind is racing, and by so doing, you are more capable of quieting the mind when necessary or desired.

You can also achieve control over thoughts and emotions without using meditation at all, simply by having an understanding of the detrimental effects of negative emotions on your physical and mental health, and stopping yourself when you identify a situation where you have an emotional response. (I think this is similar to what CBT attempts to do).

In my experience of dealing with depression/anxiety/burnout, having lots of thoughts and ideas isn't the problem. The problem is negative emotional reactions, excessive responsibilities (which itself likely boils down to a negative emotional response), and not feeling in control.

In fact having a racing mind can be helpful in dealing with stress in some ways, by engaging in flow activities.

Ultimately, there are certain patterns of thought that are both instinctive and harmful. (For example, ranting about a problem without solving it.) Becoming aware of when you in one of those patterns , via meditation or CBT or listening to your life partners, can help you think in a more helpful way.

I discussed this very issue with a friend who is massively into his meditation and quite skilled at it.

He needs to be creative for his work, and he said that he stops meditating when he knows he needs to be creative. He gives it a day or two, says that's all it takes and he's back into the swing.

He's much more productive and focused the rest of the time, while he is meditating. He doesn't go on a cycle, he just recognizes when his business is facing a specific problem and he needs to find a creative solution, he stops meditating until he finds the solution, then gets back to it.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

What does he do where he needs creativity some weeks and not not other weeks?

He runs a weather website.

The creativity that is generated by just thinking, and reading, and thinking, and trying to see how what you read can apply to other parts of your life, now just got completely lost. This led to a very stressful state, which was made even more stressful by the fact that I did not know what I was stressing about! My life did not change much, and I was even meditating!

I read this post hoping to learn more about what is described in these three sentences. How did meditation affect him, and why was that effect perceived as harmful.

Meditation is a set of practices. You can use different meditations practices to practice different habits. You will have different results if you practice paying attention to your thoughts versus thinking about love for those around you.

If you want to spend your life frantically thinking about your next business idea, and less time smelling the roses then spending 15 minutes a day practicing smelling the roses is probably a bad idea.

The benefits of meditation such as improved sleep, lower blood pressure, and longer life aren't magic. They are the results of a less frantic, slower paced, smell the roses type of life. It's your body shuffling resources from doing to being. It involves spending more resources on maintenance and less on keeping your body and mind going 24/7.

Yes, discovering new areas of life you are inexperienced at (and maybe, like it seems to be the the case for this man, spent your life evolving away from), can make you feel powerless. Unfortunately this blog post doesn't even try to touch on the "How" the title suggests it does.

"How" and "Why" in headlines are standard clickbait tactics, just like "7 Ways". HN bans the latter, and should ban the former too.

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