How meditation changed my life (SunnyK)

REPLYING TO ALL COMMENTS, SAY ANYTHING!
Meditation didn’t change my life the first time I tried it, and it didn’t the last time I did it.
But when I look back at the 500+ sessions I’ve done over the last 4 years, I can truly feel and see the impact its had on my life.
The biggest one so far is the lack of stress and anxiety I feel throughout the day.
I have this memory from high school 5 years ago when I was sitting in physics class at a table of 6 people, and then I felt the need to blow my nose. So most people would just get up and grab a tissue from the box. In my case, I got in my head, I would start thinking about what all these random ass people I barely knew would see me as someone who got a tissue. It sounds crazy now, but I fully believed that I would be seen as weak or weird for doing it, and so I avoided getting a tissue for as long as possible. I would allow myself to feel pain, to feel uncomfortable because I was so anxious about an imaginary opinion from someone.
I was in a state of anxiety that made me overthink all my actions and worry for hours every day for multiple years straight.
It led me to binge-eat, to binge-watch, to get into drugs and alcohol in order to cope with the feeling.
It wasn’t until I discovered working out that I started to feel gaps of time where I was anxiety free. and then it wasn’t until I found meditation that I started to feel my stress and anxiety lift during my entire day.
I remember seeing my progress with this
Around a year and a half ago
I was studying in barcelona, a city in spain, taking some classes at a university there. A huge difference between the spain classes and my U.s. unviersities classes was that Spain classrooms were filled with 20 people which was more similar to my high school classes, but my U.S. college had 400 people in most of my classes.
It felt more like online school, I was just watching a lecture, but in Barcelona, I had the feeling of highschool back, I felt like I had another chance to re-write my old anxious self’s way of doing classrooms.
So in class, I would raise my hand, I would say fucked stuff, I would feel so loose and just let go. I was considered the class-clown more in that class than I did for years.
It felt like I re-wrote my story, I also felt like the time I spent meditating for a long time added up to an actual result I could see.
Operating from a stress-free and anxiety-free state of mind compared to a fear filled mind is night and day for social interactions. I have so much more fun and am more entertaining, charismatic, and fun to be around when I lifted anxiety and stress out of my mind.
I can fuck around with my boys so much more now than I did before, its so fun.
You don’t want to just do any normal meditation practice. I just made a video about the absolute focus method where you practice focusing on one point like the pressure in your fingers, or your breath. I still think everyone should build this skill first, so set a timer for 1 minute, not like the 5 minutes or 10 minutes you’re used to or heard of, and then just practice focusing onto that point over and over again, bring yourself back to it, the entire feeling of this meditation is bringing your attention back to the point. Don’t increase the time until you can do that entire meditation without thinking.
After you can do that for 5 minutes, I would experiment with guided meditation online, breath-work, and no control meditations where you allow yourself to think whatever and feel whatever with zero control.
Both are useful, the focus is especially useful for tasks, conversations, enjoying a place, you’ll see the fastest results and change in your life with that type of meditation.
ideally, you mix in a bunch of different types, there are thousands of guided meditations online, I highly recommend breathe with sandy.
How much should you meditate, I feel great at 20 minutes a day, and more definitely helps, but not as much as going for 0 to 20 minutes. Especially if you are barely thinking. So you can do 5 minutes of absolute concentration, and then 15 minutes of regular meditation daily. I have found that to be best for eliminating stress, anxiety, and building a strong ability to focus.