Hey guys, this is Eric from DubsLabs and welcome to another episode of Sleep Hacks. Today, I wanted to talk to you about meditation. Now, I'm not going to go into all the benefits, the nitty-gritty science behind meditation and why it's good for you. I feel like that topic has been covered in a ton of other videos and articles all around the internet for the past few years. One thing I can say is that I have been meditating for the past at least I'd say 12 years now, and it had a drastic improvement on my sleep and my just day-to-day life really in every single capacity. Every single facet of life has been improved by meditation.
The hardest part about meditation is developing the habit to meditate regularly. What helped me a lot in the beginning was to listen to guided meditations through my Bedphones or to go to actual meditation groups and sit in on that. It is really helpful to meditate in a group, in a room full of other meditators. For some reason, you feel their energy a little bit, everyone's relaxed and you kind of know that you're supposed to meditate while they are. It kind of helps you keep on track. It stops all those thoughts about doing your taxes or picking up groceries and all those thoughts like that from entering your mind when you're in another group of meditators.
I would say one of the biggest things that has helped me meditate on a regular basis and one of the biggest hacks I've discovered is to actually just sit up in bed and do it. That seems kind of obvious, but what I used to do was I would wake up, I would brush my teeth out, I would go upstairs or maybe make myself a cup of decaf coffee and then I would sit down cross-legged and try to begin my meditation. What I found was I'm a little bit lazy in the morning. I don't really want to go through all that. Sometimes I go through that whole routine and when I actually get to the meditation, I start checking my email, I start cooking a big breakfast or I start cleaning the kitchen. I start doing anything other than meditating because meditating is hard. It takes a lot of energy and willpower to just focus on nothing for 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes at a time.
So here's what I do. As soon as my alarm goes off, I snooze it, sit up in bed against my backboard, and I start meditating right away. There's no excuses. There's no getting out of bed to brush my teeth, go to the bathroom, do any of that, no getting ready for the day. I don't do anything until I start meditating. Ideally, I'll just completely turn off my alarm because the meditation actually in a weird way helps me wake up and often times, I wake up thinking about work or I won't actually dream about work, but I'll wake up and the first thing I think about is work. So it's really great to wake up and kind of turn that switch off and just focusing on my breath and sitting up in bed. It's a lot easier if you're sitting up so you don't fall back to sleep. I'll typically grab my phone, set an alarm for 15 minutes, meditate, and then I can get out of bed and get on with the rest of my day. It feels really good knowing that in a sense I've gotten meditation over with so I can then get ready for the rest of the day in a very, very relaxed and calm state.
I've also noticed, as you probably have heard about meditation, it really increased my productivity at work. I've heard other people talk about meditation increasing their productivity by 30%. I totally agree with that. When my mind is calm, I'm able to prioritize all my tasks. Basically, there's that whole fallacy of multitasking where you jump from task to task to task, which your brain can't really do efficiently. By meditating, it allows me to focus on one single task at a time throughout the day and I actually end up getting a lot more done that way.
So I hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any comments please leave them below and please subscribe. Thank you so much for watching.
