How to Make a Meditation Habit with Heartful

Experts say that habit is more powerful than motivation. Motivation can wane over time. So one technique of behavior change is to use moments of high motivation to make changes that will serve you when motivation is low.

You might find the behavior of meditating important, but you may still fail to practice. Most apps attempt to prompt you with a reminder. But how many reminders do you already have? And how many of them do you stop and respond to?

A practice schedule is more likely to be followed if you actually schedule it. In the beginning this may require daily commitment. This means your motivation to repeat must be high, so that when you complete a practice you can commit right then to return to the cushion again.

The schedule is merely the trigger telling you to engage in an action. There are other factors to consider, namely person, action, context, and reward

Person

This means you. What are your capabilities? What is your energy state? How motivated are you? These are all important factors to consider. Some you may not have moment to moment control over. One that you can control is capability, your confidence with the practices.

Action

Action could be seen as the entire practice of meditating. But we can make this action easier to perform by breaking it into smaller chunks. Habit specialists might tell you to focus on sitting on the cushion or chair, or whatever is the beginning stage of your practice. The idea is to commit to sitting down rather than commit to spending 30 minutes sitting. This is a simple reframing to get over the obstacles of complexity and duration of action.

Context

Context for the action includes where you perform the behavior. So setting aside a dedicated space for practice and having this space available to you when the scheduled time arrives will be important.

You can also include tools or other things in your environment to assist you with the action. This may include the Heartful app which simplifies the action by providing you with guidance. You may have an altar or items like statues or pictures or bowls or bells.

Reward

Rewards help increase your likelihood of repeating an action. For meditation there may some intrinsic reward to feeling like you are doing something for yourself, a loving act of self-care. For a Buddhist monk their reward may be helping to alleviate the suffering of all living beings. This points to purpose, something that creates reward and motivation.

Other rewards may come from seeing change over time like finding gratitude for a difficult experience you handle well.

An important component of reward recognizes something you might take for granted. Giving thought to it is what gives it power.

How Heartful Helps You Build a Habit

You might simply see an app for meditation as something like Netflix, a library of content. But Heartful considers building a habit through both the design of the app as well as the guided meditations.

The app itself aims to simplify the mediation process, but this is not enough. So the design of Heartful focuses on developing capacity, rewards, commitment and reducing boredom.

First, we start out simply to build capacity. We guide you through simple short exercises that start with an explanation of the meditation. We remind you of the good you are doing for yourself and for others. You build capacity and capability over time, through the introduction and then deepening of topics and practices as well as the cornerstone skill of concentration.

One thing that can ruin a new habit is boredom. The antidotes to this are reward and change. You are never listening to the same instructions. Even when core concepts do not change, the instructions change to keep things fresh, and to offer you different ways in.

After each practice you are invited to schedule the next. Rather than setting a reminder on repeat this is an act of commitment to the next step, the next session of practice. This is optional and you may find that you do not need it once your habit is strong.