A Beginners Guide to Perfect Meditation

Source: Hannah Rasmussen, used with permission

This guest post was contributed by Hannah Rasmussen, a graduate student in the USC Psychology Department's Clinical Science program.

By now, we’ve all heard from blissed-out celebrities clad in yoga pants that meditation can change your life. I know, I know...*eye roll*, but if you’re reading this, you might be curious about starting a meditation practice. So you might be wondering, “How often and how long should I meditate? What’s the ideal amount of time and when’s the best part of the day?” I mean, why meditate if you aren’t going to do it perfectly...right? Wrong!

These questions may seem like harmless “How-to” inquires, but it’s possible they are getting in your way of achieving life changing Zen! But knowing that you clicked on an article with a headline about ‘perfect’ meditation—has exposed something quite useful. You might be a perfectionist. Maybe you already knew this. Maybe you even like this about yourself, but just because it is a fun answer to the interview question, “What’s your greatest weakness,” doesn’t mean it isn’t still a weakness. For example, Peter Slade of Doctors and Others in the United Kingdom and David Coppel and Brenda Townes from the University of Washington examined how perfectionism impacted peoples’ performance on intelligence tests. They found that perfectionism helped performance when tests required extra mental effort (e.g., producing words that start with F), but it hurt performance when tests required people to balance accuracy and speed (e.g., match as many symbol pairs as quickly as possible without making any mistakes). The authors suggest that perfectionism can direct you toward the achievement of positive consequences, but it can also cause you to behave in a way that helps you avoid negative consequences, i.e., going slower on a test so you don’t make any mistakes. The take home: While perfectionism can be motivating and push you toward success, persistent thoughts about needing to be perfect can make you more stressed, cause you to focus on your failures, and predispose you to poorer mental health.

Source: Nickolai Kashirin, Creative Commons license

So what does perfectionism have to do with meditating? For starters, it might be the reason you haven’t tried meditation yet. If you are anything like me, phrases like, “only 10 minutes a day,” “daily practice,” and “every morning” make you want to run the other way. It isn’t laziness that causes the aversion. It is the failure implicit in those descriptions. To translate for any non-perfectionists still with us: Missing one day would be a disaster. Perfectionism can drive you to achieve due to fear of failure, but that same fear can also lead you to avoid trying. Why does this happen? A study by Joseph Ferrari from DePaul University and Dianna Tice from Case Western Reserve University may provide some clues. They conducted a study to research what makes us delay or avoid starting a task (a.k.a. procrastinate), and found that a simple manipulation in the description of a task had an effect. When they described the same exact task as evaluative, versus fun and pleasurable, people were more likely to put off starting the task. And what do you think the research says about who is most likely to procrastinate? You guessed it: perfectionists!

Dan Harris, a New York Times bestselling author and self-proclaimed “traveling evangelist for meditation,” interviewed his wife, Dr. Bianca Harris, on his 10% Happier Podcast. When asked why she resisted starting a meditation practice she said, “Because of my own idiosyncrasies and being a perfectionist. If I’m going to do it, I’m going to really do it. If there is no chance I can do it as well as I would like, or others expect of me, I’m just not even going to go there.” So what’s the cure for the avoidance caused by perfectionism? Appropriately enough, a few principles from meditation can offer some guidance. Spoiler alert: learn to imitate an accordion and you’re halfway there.

Mindfulness. Meditation can help cultivate mindfulness—what Harris calls, “The ability to see what’s happening in your head at any give moment, so you don’t get carried away by it.” Clearly, if you’ve been avoiding meditation, you haven’t started cultivating mindfulness, but you can still apply the principle. Awareness of your perfectionism may be enough. When your brain says, “I’m not a morning person, I don’t have 10 minutes, and daily is too much,” you can take a step back and recognize these thoughts for what they are: Your perfectionism protecting you from the pain of failure by telling you ‘don’t try.’ What’s more, when you notice yourself putting evaluative labels on your practice like should, ideal, best, perfect, and right, knock it off! Remember the research on procrastination and make meditation enjoyable. If you want to do it lying down, by all means, please lie down. Okay, mindfulness, so then what?

Let go. You’ll find almost identical advice from any number of meditation sources. Let go of the need to achieve something. Let go of the idea that meditation will fix you. Let go of the need to be perfect. In his new book “Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics,” Harris suggests that failure is necessary and inevitable. His advice, “Give yourself permission to fail,” and commit to meditating “daily-ish.” In other words, it’s okay to miss one, two, three days in a row. Let go of daily, and embrace “daily-ISH” as the new standard.

Maybe at this point you’re thinking, “This is all well and good, but there’s got to be right answers to my original questions.” While it may be difficult to accept, there is simply no proven standard of meditation frequency and duration. In their research, Philipp Keune, from Eberhard Karls University, and Dóra Perczel Forintos, from Semmelweis University, studied a sample of students with wide-ranging experiences with meditation. They found duration and frequency of meditation were related to positive emotion. More meditating, i.e., more frequent and longer duration, meant higher emotional well-being, which was especially true for those that tried to practice mindfulness in daily life. In a recent study from McGill University, Julien Lacaille and his collaborators further examined the role of mindfulness in daily life. For 49 days, participants in a meditation program provided daily information on their meditating behavior (frequency, duration), their stress level, their positive and negative emotion, and the degree of mindfulness they practiced in their daily life. They found that the greater the frequency and duration of a person’s meditation practice, the more mindfulness they applied in daily life, and the less stress and greater positive emotion they experienced. In addition, the longer someone meditated, the less negative emotion they experienced. What’s more, meditation behavior (frequency, duration) impacted how much participants used mindfulness in their day, which in turn, affected their emotions and stress levels. Meaning applying mindfulness in daily life was the key to deriving positive benefits from meditation practice.

This is great news for all you mediation newbies. Why? Because it suggests the more frequently you meditate and the longer you meditate, the better the results. Now, wait, hang on! This doesn’t mean everything we’ve covered previously goes out the window. While your perfectionism may interpret that news as being the best gets you the best, what it really means is a little bit works and you can only go up from there. More is just more.

So start with one minute—it counts. Dan Harris says if that’s how you get to daily-ish then you do you (not an exact quote, but you get the gist). Even if your goal is to do 5 or 10 minutes a day, one minute of meditation is still extremely valuable. He dubs this the “accordion principle.” Rather than skip a day, just do one minute. You know, flexibility, like an accordion: sometimes it’s small and sometimes it’s big, but it’s always there. You may be laughing to yourself in disbelief at how silly “one-minute” sounds but that’s just your perfectionism talking (mindfulness...boom). Andy Puddicombe, the voice of Headspace, a guided-meditation smart-phone app, adheres to the idea of “little and often” and suggests that what’s more important is consistency. So if fewer minutes means more frequent meditation, then less is definitely more. And as we already know, more means more mindfulness and more happiness.

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Be aware of how your perfectionism talks to you, let go of the fear that you will fail, begin your daily-ish practice, start with one minute, and apply the accordion principle. The only way to meditate perfectly is to meditate.