🧘 300 hours of meditation: why do I keep going

Waking Up recently told me I’ve passed 300 hours of practice across just over 2,000 active days. That works out to about 10 minutes a day for five years, which is a small commitment that has compounded into something I care about.

So, why do I keep going? The most honest answer comes from the times I’ve skipped a couple of days: I feel more distractable and less centred. That’s the counterfactual and it’s more persuasive than any in-session feeling.

Beyond the functional benefit, I’m genuinely fascinated by consciousness—what it is, how it relates to experience, and whether attention can be trained in ways that matter. Waking Up is excellent here. The app has dozens of quality series with practitioners who take these questions seriously, and Sam Harris draws from both contemplative tradition and people doing rigorous philosophical and scientific work on the nature of mind.

The harder question, though, is whether any of this carries over. A couple of years ago, I went through some challenging work experiences and found that the equanimity I’d cultivated in practice didn’t transfer reliably. I found I was getting frustrated, saying to myself “but I meditate!”, which really just made the point that equanimity in a quiet room is not the same as out in life.

Over the past year, I’ve been deliberately working on that gap—paying attention to how I respond to frustration, pressure, and distraction in daily life, not just during a morning session. It’s slow going, but I’m noticing a real difference. This work connects well with my ongoing effort to be less distracted by technology, which also requires noticing when attention has been captured.

Everything seems to be coming together. Slowly, ten minutes at a time, but it is. That’s why I keep going.