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Comment by tapan_k | Hacker News Reader

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tapan_k

Excellent list. I would like to add a couple of things that have worked for me:

1. Ensure sufficient sleep (varies for each individual)

2. Identify and manage sources of stress

3. Practice mindfulness meditation

Doing the above ensures that your willpower is stronger and you are able to stick with new habits.

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Ironically, mindfulness meditation is exactly the habit that I'm struggling to build. :)

Perhaps you should start with something less subtle? Like "transcendental meditation", that will have the effect of "making it" and motivate you to dig further?

If this is really important to you, I'd suggest starting first thing in the morning to make meditation easier. Aside from the basic difficulty of turning any task into a habit, meditation itself will be more difficult should you start say, mid day. When the mind is already wide awake, the inner chatter can be overwhelming, whereas in the morning it's much more peaceful. Making a task more difficult will compound the difficulty of forming a habit of that task. Hope that helps!

can you start with just 10 minutes every morning? try to use a timer that has a subtle sound, not too jarring. I made for myself a few silent mp3s of 2, 5, 10 and 20 minutes in length (easy enough in Audacity), put those in a playlist with a subtle sound (a bell, some ambient track, mantra singing or whatever you like), just on my phone it's not a hi-fi thing that's important here. so if I feel like doing more than 10 minutes I can easily queue the 2 or the 5 in front of it, you get the idea.

what also helped me was joining a meditation group for a weekly session, if you like, check wkup.org see if there's one near you, they're good people :)

like most things, the amount of benefit (clarity, focus etc) you get stepping up from about once a week to 2 or 3 times, is pretty huge. maybe that helps with motivating?

last thing, I like to tell myself, the time you spend is basically free. as in you easily get it back in ways of rest, focus, ease for the rest of the day.

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