Ten Thousand Minutes?

Late this spring, I was meditating in my bedroom when one of my kids busted open the door to get something. I gently opened my eyes as she saw me, said "oh," and told me what she was there to borrow. I told her where it was, she rummaged through my closet, shuffled out and closed the door. My brain treated it like any other interruption: I noted it, acknowledged it, let it go, and returned my attention to my breath.

Not for a million dollars could anyone have convinced me seven years ago that I could do that. Or eight years ago that I would be meditating at all.

Meditation didn’t just change my life. It changed who I am. If you conjured an image of a stressed out, high-energy perfectionist whose nervous system was always on high alert, that image was once me.

I began meditating as a requirement in a grad school class. I hated it. My mind was too busy, I reasoned. I argued with my professors that I should be able to do it while running or biking. Every time I tried, I fell asleep. I got through the assignment, then avoided it for another year until work stress brought me back. Out of desperation, I committed to trying it again. This time, I found an app to help and I felt a little more at ease when I practiced, so I kept up with it.

About six months in, Rod was shot on a SWAT operation. When I heard, I didn’t freak out or collapse, which surprised people who knew me well. They reflected that I’d changed and started asking if I could help them. The problem was I did not know what had changed or why. I had to connect the dots. When I did, I realized it was meditation. I had initially kept up with it because it helped me feel more at ease; meanwhile it was creating real neurological change in the background that I didn’t even notice until others pointed it out to me in a crisis. Pretty amazing.

So I took some training and started bringing it to others. Just as I had learned it in grad school, I made it an assignment for my FBI National Academy students. Every week for three weeks, they practiced ten minutes most days and journaled with me once a week so I could coach them through their challenges. Every class started with a meditation.

At the end of three weeks, I heard story after story. People who didn’t react the way they would have before to a trigger. Families who noticed something different when they came home. Someone who breathed through turbulence on a flight that would have previously led to panic. And this, which I heard in some form from nearly every class: "When we got this assignment, I thought there’s no way I’m doing this. Then I thought there’s no way I can do this. Then I marveled: I can’t believe I’m doing this."

The day of that interruption this spring, I hit 10,001 minutes on my app. A pretty cool milestone, even for a recovering perfectionist who is not a fan of gamifying her stats. That app (Headspace) does not capture all the meditation I do, but I thought it was a neat number.

Until I remembered that Malcolm Gladwell's rule for mastery was 10,000 hours.

Well, you don’t train mastery in meditation. Nor do you need 10,000 hours or 10,000 minutes. All you need is consistent practice and you’ll likely start to notice a difference in a few weeks. The people around you will, too.

Here is what meditation does and why it works.

Your autonomic nervous system has two branches: the sympathetic, which activates your fight-or-flight response, and the parasympathetic, which governs rest, recovery, and clear thinking. Most of us in high-demand roles spend the majority of our time running on sympathetic activation. We are wired for threat detection, and our nervous systems are very good at it. When your nervous system is in a state of sustained threat or high stress, prefrontal cortex functioning can become less effective, making it harder to access perspective, judgment and self-regulation.

Meditation trains the parasympathetic side. Specifically, meditation has been associated with increased engagement and functional changes in prefrontal regions, reduced amygdala reactivity in some studies and improved ability to notice thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations before automatically reacting to them. Over time this may increase your capacity to pause between a stimulus and your response.

This helps you to stay regulated under pressure, to think clearly when it is hard, and to be present for the people in front of you.

That’s what changed in me. That is what my students were describing. It was not magic. It was neuroscience.

That’s what took me from being the perfectionist, anxious pleaser to someone colleagues described as “zen” at her retirement reception (which, frankly, still blows my mind).

If you want to start building a meditation practice, here are three things to do this week:

1. Commit to a trial before you judge it.The first few sessions will feel uncomfortable, frustrating, or pointless. That’s normal. Your mind is busy because you have been training it to be busy. Give it three to four weeks of ten minutes most days before you decide if it’s not for you. You will figure it out on the way.

2. Find "good enough" and stay there for a while.Do not optimize too soon. Find a meditation style, a time of day, and a location that are good enough to sustain, and practice that same routine for a couple of weeks while you learn the skill. Let your brain learn the process first with a consistent practice. Then you can change the variables later.

3. Start with five minutes if ten feels like too much.The goal is not duration. The goal is showing up and practicing consistently. Three to five minutes of focused practice is more valuable than ten minutes of frustration. Start where you can start.

Ten thousand minutes is not mastery. It’s just evidence that I kept showing up. Some sessions were great. Some were not. Some got interrupted by a kid looking for something in my closet, a doorbell, a knock on the car window, colleagues talking outside the office, and the millions of little thoughts that come and go. The practice does not require perfect conditions. It just requires you to return your attention, again and again, to an anchor.

This teaches you to return your attention to what matters most in any moment.

Build the life you are working for.

— Sarah

P.S. I have a full beginner's guide to mindfulness meditation that I share with my clients, including videos, audio scripts, and practical tips for getting started and staying with it. If you want a copy, reach out and I will send it your way.