Step 0: relax!

At every corner there’s someone who wants to help you meditate, for a small fee. Surely that’s an efficient time saver, right? So, you might decide to check that out. What you’ll get is tracks with maybe soothing noise, laidback music, possibly someone talking you through some sort of experience. And maybe that appeals to you, and you decide it’s worth the money.

Or maybe you’re a cheapskate like me and you’d rather not have to pay for something like that. Instead, you try to relax your mind, all by your lonesome, and then kind of drift along in whatever state that results in. Maybe you succeed in doing that, and then it kind of feels nice. Or maybe you find that you have no clue what relaxing your mind is like in the first place, and anyway nothing you do seems to get you any closer to that.

Perhaps relaxing your body will help? So you look into stuff like progressive muscle relaxation, visualization exercises, maybe even something as fancy as yoga. And maybe it helps, or maybe it doesn’t. What gives?

What matters about this step

The thing is, most forms of meditation are not about relaxation, and specifically they are not about just drifting through some sort of pleasant experience. This applies to mindfulness too. Don’t get me wrong, relaxation and drifting are nice and can have all sorts of benefits, but they’re entirely separate from what we’re trying to achieve here.

What I can tell you is that mindfulness creates certain mental skills, and listening to guided meditation tracks does not. They might help you relax a little more, and (if you’re receptive to the way they try to help you do it) you might get better at having that kind of experience, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Relaxation is nice… and it’s healthy in many ways.

When to not relax

Relaxation is just one thing, though, and it’s not a panacea. You’ll often see the notion that people are stressed out and the solution is to relax. I beg to differ, sort of: yes, ideally you’d fix stress… but does relaxation fix the “cause” or just the “symptoms”? Of course, relaxation is the opposite of the overactive state of the central nervous system that we call stress. What causes stress, though? Psychological factors, usually. In broad terms, there’s a level of psychological tension and pressure (deliberately vague terms) and this, in turn, creates the elevated activity level in the nervous system. Now, if you “just relax”, that elevated activity level will be counteracted for a bit. But will it also deal with the psychological tension/pressure that created it in the first place? It’s a possibility, I suppose, but there are hardly any guarantees. The worst case might be that you get good at putting yourself under pressure in a seemingly ”relaxed” way but ultimately something still gives. Maybe it will affect your blood pressure, maybe you’ll start having trouble sleeping, who knows. It’s impossible to predict but there are many ways it could go.

I’m not just saying this, I experienced something similar myself. I got pretty good at using mindfulness principles (or at least so I thought) to sort of delete negative emotions. This worked decently well (though not for everything), but at some point I noticed that I’d started having a range of diffuse issues (with muscle tension and sleep, for instance) that had no obvious medical cause and that I couldn’t magick away with my “mindfulness skills” (or so I thought at the time). When I did get stressed out, dealing with that failed completely too, and in the same way. Me trying to relax deliberately (which I have a decent bit of experience with) didn’t really work, either.

I realized that I’d been trying to use this stuff as a quick fix: just remove the symptoms (bad feelings in this case). I had to completely rethink mindfulness to start undoing the “damage”.

There’s another hidden danger of depending too much on tricking yourself into relaxation: it has a chance of masking issues in your life. It’s easy to not notice that something is going really wrong when you feel good and have no reason to take stock of where you’re at. It happens again and again that people succeed in convincing themselves that there is no problem but anyone else can see that there absolutely is. Sometimes, admitting that there is an issue is a difficult step to take. It’s much easier to just, you know, try to relax. It’s also part of what will make it easy to stay stuck.

Relaxation vs “relaxed alertness”

Mindfulness is quite different from relaxation: you’re not going to drift along lazily or anything. Instead, you stay fully aware and in the present moment, and the only way in which you’re “relaxed” is that you let things happen and don’t try to interfere. If you’re new to mindfulness that might seem like a crazy approach to change, but bear with me. I hope I’ll be able to convince you that there’s something to this. It takes a bit of practice until you first start seeing true evidence of this, but I’ll do my best to explain why it’s a reasonable expectation to have. Later, though… after all, we’re not even at step 1 yet.

The lure of guided meditations

I know, just switching off your brain and listening to some meditation tracks seems like a simple way to change your life with very little effort. Just keep listening to relaxation stuff and that stress will be gone, etc. Right? (Well, no. At least not in my experience.)

Selling guided meditation recordings (or, better yet, subscriptions to guided meditation recordings) is a very profitable way of helping people: create content once and then sell it hundreds of thousands of times. That’s not to say that they are categorically useless. In fact, I know some people benefit a lot from them. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to predict if that will be true for you as well, or even if it will be true for any given recording. For instance, a recording designed to help you deal with stress, more often than not, will simply have a bunch of ideas in there about relaxing and letting things go. That might work, but the person who recorded it hardly knows your specific situation… and even if you described it to them, they’d just get the same ideas that you already have, and putting them in a recording wouldn’t fundamentally change the fact that you already know all this stuff and so far it hasn’t done anything useful for you.

If you want to try out something like that, don’t let me stop you. It totally can work. Only one way to find out. Personally, though, I’m not a fan of outsourcing this sort of thing, because I could be using the same time to practice mental skills that will take me even further and apply more broadly in my life.

In mindfulness terms: how do you relax? By “resolving” everything that causes tension that you don’t need. Again, I’m being a bit vague on purpose. How mindfulness truly works is hard to understand until you start experiencing some of it. So, I’ll work my way up to a full explanation throughout this.