Why You Need Meditation More Than Your Mother Did

It isn’t a competition but if it was, our generation would win the Most Stressed Out Award. We focus on wellness, we read about health, we know about risky behaviors, yet our lifestyle is so unhealthy. Why? Because we have no peace.

Meditation is well proven to reduce anxiety, promote a better mood and a healthier body, not to mention loads of other benefits. People who practice it, swear by it. Most of us though, have no time for it … literally no time. Technology has taken away our ability to just be.

From a strictly mediation minded standpoint, compare your life to your mother’s.

• When she drove somewhere, maybe she listened to music or the news, but she couldn’t catch up on phone calls, so she just drove.
• She sat in the car and waited for you … silently. She had no device on which to check thousands of emails and texts. She waited, and could tune out the world.
• In fact, anytime she had to wait, on a line at the bank, on a line at the supermarket, at a toll, at a doctor’s office, she probably just simply waited. She didn’t multitask because she couldn’t.
• Your schedule was set and you brought it to her on a piece of paper. This was the schedule. That’s it. No last minute hectic scrambling for time and location changes. No checking her phone every few minutes to make sure she didn’t miss anything.
• Her social life wasn’t filled with keeping up to date on every event in the lives of every person she knew. If someone had news, they would call her, and if they were lucky and the phone wasn’t busy, she would have a real conversation.
• If she worked, when she came home, she was truly off, not attached to her job through technology.
• Maybe she watched a couple shows on TV. She waited for them and once the season was over, it was over. She did not have the “luxury” of thousands of shows and videos at her fingertips.

I know your mom was dedicated and busy, but she also had a lot more downtime, whether it was forced on her or not. She was alone in her thoughts more, had time to sit and breathe and was not distracted by the constant interruption of screens. Downtime can be, in and of itself, a mediation. I don’t know about you, but increasingly, downtime makes me feel I should be accomplishing something else. I should be working on something or catching up on current events, social media, shows and friends. I rarely just drive somewhere without calling someone. I never sit in a waiting room without staring at my phone. I check my texts the second I hear the “ding” and get back to them quickly even when they are unimportant. Therefore, I have to actually schedule time for meditation and silence, or I will be consumed by technology. Mediation is not new age. People have been doing it without realizing they were doing it forever. The brain wants to quiet itself down, but in our overly hectic, multitasking lives, we don’t allow it this self-protection. Make the time. Save your brain.