Am I really suppose to find calm in that device that stresses me out the most?
There is something incredibly ironic and paradoxical about using your phone — the biggest cause of distraction in your life— to help us become more mindful and self-aware.
Meditation apps tend to tote the misconceptions that mindfulness meditation is both hard and easy at the same time— and can lead to people becoming disillusioned, discouraged and ultimately giving up on the practice.
While meditation is challenging for sure, it is not complicated in theory or practice. It really comes down to 2 main steps:
- Pay attention to your breath
- If you find yourself distracted, gently return to your breath.
Of course there are other details about posture, duration, finding a quiet place, etc. But mindfulness meditation is just a simple method for training our minds to focus on the present. But most of us don’t know it’s that easy. For whatever reason we tend to assume that meditation is complicated and mystical and we feel like we need a guide to show us the way — even if it’s a little cartoon on our phone.
With all these options and upgrades, most mindfulness apps make the whole idea of mindfulness meditation seem much more complicated than it really is.
- What’s the best meditation for sleep?
- I’m feeling so anxious – should I listen to a Raindrops on the Windowsill or Birds in a Forest soundtrack?
- Should I do this 30 day challenge or 10 day challenge?
- How many meditation streaks badges do I have now?
These options actually encourage a complicated mindset around meditation and this is a problem because, when we inevitably struggle in meditation, the tendency will be to believe that its due to a lack of knowledge about meditation rather than the simple fact that’s meditation is hard. So we download a couple new apps, fidget with more settings, and when our practice continues to be difficult, we get discouraged and give up, assuming it’s just too complicated for us or that we’ll never understand it.
And I have a hard time with these apps because they are also masters of upselling. Mindfulness apps are part of a massively lucrative industry at roughly $130 million. But meditation is not a mercenary endeavor. The road to enlightenment should not be peppered by upgrades to premium content and $95.99 annual subscriptions costs.
Two apps, Calm and Headspace, claim nearly 70% of the overall market share. These apps cater to a wide audience, which includes religious consumers as well as the growing number of Americans who consider themselves spiritual but not religious.
These apps are always going to be adding more features and tracking our data. Phones have a range of purposes—the whole point of your phone is to help you multitask. But the road to enlightenment should be leading you away from the source of bombarding emails, meetings Instagram, selfies, etc.
Listen, I am not saying that these mindfulness apps are a bad idea for everyone or even to use once in a while, I just think that they have unintentional negative consequences especially for those new to meditation. How? When we inevitably encounter difficulty or frustration in the early stages of this practice, our assumption that mindfulness is as easy as downloading an app can lead us to believe that we are struggling as a sign that we aren’t cut out for this mindfulness thing. Then we get discouraged and give up.
My break up with my meditation app (Headspace) wasn’t an easy one. (See my breakup letter here) but I did feel it was necessary if not at the very least to save the $95.99 a year for an app I kept forgetting to use. Smartphones are just the latest trend in the mindfulness game. And I call it a game because that’s what these apps are doing—gamifying meditation with reminders, rewards and streaks. That really isn’t the way to enlightenment. The road to calm should lead you away from your phone and back to just being in this moment with yourself. After all meditation isn’t about the past, the present, the future, what you did or didn’t do. It’s about helping you find your way to inner peace.
And here is a 7-day Meditation Challenge I created for those looking to begin or continue on their meditation practice.
