Ten Minutes to Change My Life – An Update

I’ve been keeping up my Ten Minute Regime for a few weeks now. (If you haven’t read that post, go read it now, or else nothing I’m talking about here will make any sense.)

Here are some things I’ve learned from it:

• Two minutes at a time just isn’t enough for the meditation. By the time I find myself getting into a meditative state, the alarm is already going off. So I’ve increased the meditation to four minutes in the morning and three minutes at night. That’s turned this regime into thirteen minutes a day instead of ten, which isn’t quite so snappy a name. But it’s more important for this to be effective than to fit into an arbitrary number of minutes.

• I’ve found sitting down in the morning to think about the day is very helpful. And I like giving myself stars for what I achieved. But I’m not finding it effective to think about what I could have done differently. The problem is that when I don’t do an item on my list, the reason is pretty much always either because there wasn’t enough hours in the day, something happened outside of my control, or I didn’t have enough willpower/chose to prioritize something else. I can’t do anything about the first two, and for the last I explicitly decided I wasn’t going to beat myself up about it, so I’m not getting much out of this.

• I am getting a lot out of the gratitude.

• I don’t feel like I’m getting much out of the affirmations. I’m tempted to cut this out of the process, which would get it back down to eleven minutes a day. But also everything I’ve read about affirmations say it takes a few months before you’ll notice anything, so I’m going to stick with it for now.

• The red Xs to keep me from breaking the chain has been very helpful in keeping the habit. There have been times when I was about to go to bed, suddenly remembered my regime, and probably would have blown it off except that I didn’t want to lose the streak I had going.

I’ll post updates about this every so often.