When you hear about meditation, sometimes the benefits can sound idealistic.

Calmer, more peaceful, more relaxed. More present, better relationships, more grounded (whatever that means).

Sounds so great…

“How come I don’t get that when I meditate??”

That was me when I first started.

After weeks and months of meditating, I was ready to throw in the towel.

I wasn’t feeling the calm and composure that people were talking about.

I wasn’t getting that grounded feeling that people said meditation would bring.

I mostly just felt frustrated that I was spending 20-30 minutes a day, doing this meditation thing and not feeling any calmer.

Over time, I found that there was one shift that could not only get me to keep meditating but also get me results.

That shift?

Using it in my day.

It sounds simple, doesn’t it?

But it’s something that so many people forget when they first start meditating.

They sit down in the morning (or at night), put in their 5 to 10 to 20 minutes of focusing on their breath (5 minutes on the lazy days), and then when the bell rings, they get up and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. 

Repeat this for a few days or weeks with no progress, and they start wondering what all the meditation is for (and they might even give up on it too). 

You gotta use it IRL.

Over the years, I’ve found that finding ways to apply meditation practices to my day was more important than practicing at home.

Once I saw myself using meditation to respond differently to situations that used to bother me (e.g. getting frustrated at people at work or worrying excessively about how I worded an email), I started wanting to meditate more so that I could handle those situations even better. 

If you want some ideas on how to use meditation in your day, here are 3 situations you can play with, different from the usual instructions you might get from apps and articles (e.g. “Sit down…focus on your breath…and when your mind wanders off, bring it back”) and things you can use today:

1. Neutralize emotional triggers like anger
2. Deal with impatience better
3. Work with difficult people more easily

Wait…I thought meditating was about sitting in silence and focusing on your breath.

Well…kind of.

Meditating is like working out.  It’s exercise. There are a bunch of ways to do it.

The breath stuff is one way, but it’s not the only way.

It’s about fitness, and for meditation, it’s mental fitness.

Fitness for what benefit?

Wasting less mental energy on useless stuff. Directing your time and energy towards better things. Managing your emotional states. Presence and focus.

The key is just remembering to use your practice when these situations come up in your life.

Practical Use #1 – Deal with emotional triggers

One of the first times I saw my meditation practice change me was around family.

I was picking up my dad from the airport, and we hadn’t talked in a long time because he’d been traveling. Naturally, we started catching up.

After talking about the usual things (work, hobbies, relationships), the conversation eventually turned to my brother. He asked about my brother’s weight.

“He’s getting big, isn’t he? He always eats so much. If he keeps this up, it’s not good for his health.”

Whenever my dad did this in the past, I always took it as him furrowing his eyebrows at my brother, looking down on him and scorning him. This usually ended up with me either snapping at my dad, secretly resenting him, or both. I’d then get angry with him or shut the conversation down, and things would be uncomfortable between us for awhile.

This time, before the emotional storm blew up in my head, I noticed the frustration bubbling.

I felt my breath getting shallower and faster. There was a deep sinking feeling in my stomach. My face was getting hotter. This was anger coming.

So I paused.

In that pause, I saw the anger before it made me snap at my dad. And just by watching it, the anger softened.

I took a kinder approach than I normally would have.

“Dad, he’s actually pretty good with his health. He goes snowboarding all the time and does more physical exercise than I do.”

He seemed to think for a moment — maybe even confused at the lack of impatience in my voice.

“I see. I guess you’re right. That is pretty good.”

We had a civil talk the rest of the way home.

I surprised myself that day. That moment showed me that our old habits don’t have to be habits forever. That what we learn in meditation can be used in our daily lives — for positive changes in our own behavior.

Seeing changes like these in myself keeps me practicing.

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Tipi: an emotional regulation technique

When you come across one of your emotional triggers, use this technique to decrease its effects on you:

1. Stop.
2. Remove yourself from the trigger (if you can), and close your eyes.
3. Bring your attention to any strong physical sensations in your body. It can be any combination of sensations on your body — chest, stomach, arms, face, neck, etc. Pick 2-3.
4. Watch them, without trying to take control of them or change them.
5. The sensations will keep changing. Let them change.
6. They’ll evolve. Let them evolve.
7. With enough focus and enough time (no longer than 2 minutes), the sensations will dissipate, along with the strength of the emotion. At a minimum, you’ll give yourself a little mental space to respond in a more calm and composed way.

This, in essence, is what body scans, Chade Meng Tan’s SBNRR, and Luc Nicon’s Tipi all try to teach you.

The more you practice this, the more easily (and quickly) you can detect emotional reactions in your body, like anger and judgment, allowing you to take a softer, kinder approach instead.

TLDR and super simplified explanation: focusing on sensations is a observation-oriented act that activates the task positive network (TPN) in your brain and downregulates the default mode network (DMN) responsible for fears, emotions, anxiety, etc. Putting attention onto the sensations (and continuing to watch them change) quiets down the DMN long enough for emotional reactions and emotional thoughts to dissipate.

Practical Use #2 – Deal with impatience better

Sometimes, there are situations and people who will give our patience a run for its money.

Hearing a certain coworker talk.

Getting cut off on the road.

Being around certain family members.

There will always be people who trigger us, anger us, throw us for a loop — and the only one affected is ourselves.

Use this technique to help with feeling frustrated and impatient in these situations.

The next time you’re in one of these situations and you’re starting to get impatient, bring attention to your thought(s) and name the emotion that comes up.

For example, “Ah, this is frustration bubbling” or “Oh, here’s impatience in my head.”

Simplified explanation: naming your emotions (called affect labeling) decreases activity in a part of your brain that deals with emotions (the amygdala) and increases activity in a different area instead (the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex). This is a similar mechanism to #1. Study

By naming emotions, we can short circuit the emotional response, which then gives us mental space to respond with composure instead.

It’s just a matter of remembering to do this quickly enough before frustration or anger takes over…

Practical Use #3 – Work with difficult people more easily

Everyone has people in life who stress them out. If you don’t, you might be one of the lucky ones.

Sometimes, these people will trigger us no matter what they do.

When we’re near them, we start feeling angry. Or resentful. Or judgmental. Or all three.

Sometimes they’ll say something that you know is wrong, or they’ll do things that are absolutely ridiculous.

Sometimes we don’t even need to be near them — seeing a post of them on Facebook is enough.

If you had a choice, you’d stay clear of them, but sometimes, there are people you just can’t avoid (i.e. certain friends, family, or coworkers).

The good news: it doesn’t have to be so hard.

There are ways to counteract the stress a person brings you and to flip the habitual pattern that sends you into a rage.

Here are 3 options.

Option 1 

Imagine this person’s past and their background — what it was like to grow up in their family? What was the culture they were exposed to and what was their upbringing like? That upbringing has affected what they value and the perspectives they hold, and sometimes, these values and perspectives will be very very different than yours. If you can understand how a person’s values developed (or even guess at how they developed), their behavior becomes a lot less incomprehensible and might even make sense (not that you have to agree with it).

“It is the mark of a developed mind to be able to understand and accept another’s feeling without agreeing to it.”

– Chade-Meng Tan, Search Inside Yourself

Option 2 

Imagine that someone close to this person just passed away. Maybe a parent, a close friend, or a pet. When we see (or imagine) a person going through something difficult, our views towards a person become less harsh, and instead of some enemy on the other side, we view this person (perhaps momentarily) with less resentment and judgment.

Option 3 

See if you can imagine this person as someone close to you. This person, like all people, has their own hopes, their own dreams, and their own fears. They believe that acting the way that they do will bring them happiness in some way. Whether they’re going about it the “right” way or not isn’t so important. Acknowledging this perspective changes the lens through which we view people’s actions. They might be overlooking important pieces of information, they might be executing poorly, but they’re doing what they think will make them happy in some way.

Sometimes, difficult people are just misunderstood.

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None of these techniques will work just by reading them. You have to go out and use them.

So plan for a time, a situation, a place where one of these methods can be useful for you.

Walk into that situation with your meditation gun ready, and when that situation comes up, apply.

While the methods might sound simple, you might find that the techniques are actually pretty challenging to do. Sometimes our emotions take over before we realize it.

These are practices, and the more you do them, the easier they become.

As an analogy: Working out is easy. Just lift the thing. And then do it again. And again. And Again. The thing is, doing it well requires time and repetition.

With meditation, it’s the same.

If you want to start with the basics of meditation, try one of these:

• 1 Way to Meditate Even If Your Thoughts Never Stop
• Getting Started with Meditation: A Resource Primer