Meditation: how to make yourself sit down and do the damn thing

an article by Oliver Burkeman published in the Guardian

Getting distracted isn’t a problem; noticing when you’re distracted is arguably the point


Illustration: Michele Marconi for the Guardian

In the opening pages, they tend to include some phrase like, “First, pick a time when you know you’ll be undisturbed”, and I never find out what comes next because I’ve flung the book across the room in disgust – although not, to be clear, at the baby.

So it’s a relief to discover Meditation For Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris, the US newscaster whose earlier book, 10% Happier, chronicled his adventures in meditation following an on-air panic attack. This new book isn’t mainly about how to meditate, but how to actually meditate – how to make yourself sit down and do the damn thing; in that sense, it’s really a manual for cultivating any good habit. Specifically, the book makes the case for transforming how we think about “falling off the wagon”. In most approaches to habit change, unsurprisingly, falling off the wagon is seen as a bad thing. (In Alcoholics Anonymous, which has much to answer for here, it’s exceedingly bad.) But Harris argues that sometimes it’s not just excusable, it’s essential.

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