Meditation Builds Willpower
Hello! I'm Liz Moser, and I’m a Mayo Clinic Certified Wellness Coach.
As a wellness coach, I help my clients to set priorities and implement positive lifestyle changes. For the most part, my clients want to either add a healthy habit or subtract an unhealthy habit from there life. They are seeking from our coaching relationship whatever combination of support and accountability it will take to assist them towards their lifestyle goals.
In addition to the daily coaching calls, texting, and Marco Polo support I offer as their coach, I highly recommend that they add a regular meditation practice, as well.
Our coaching relationship provides the external support they need while a meditation practice builds up their internal support.
A meditation practice is an essential habit that will support the changes in the brain that are necessary to become someone who is steady and stable enough long term to live a life that includes the new healthy habit or a life without the unhealthy habit.
Meditation, combined with coaching, is the key.
Meditation creates the ability to pause between stimulus and response. It allows the possibility to choose your actions despite your thoughts. Meditation grants you the ability to sit with whatever difficult or challenging thought or emotion is present without an automatic reaction.
Or another way of thinking about it, meditation builds up your inner support muscle. Meditation builds willpower.
I've been a daily meditator for over 2 years. I use the Insight Timer app, and I either listen to a guided meditation, or I time my session. My habit is to sit in meditation first thing in the morning in my near-infrared sauna. I meditate for at least 10 minutes each day. Sometimes I sit for 15 or 20 minutes.
Somedays, I add a second 20-minute meditation in the afternoon with my feet up the wall in the yoga position called viparita karani. I like to listen to Everett Considine’s 3-point focus meditation. You can find that on Insight Timer or his website at everettconsidine.com. The combo of the restorative viparita karani with that 20-minute guided meditation is more relaxing to me than an hour-long nap or a bath. It’s phenomenal!
If you think, “who has time for meditation?” let alone 10 or 20 minutes of it, then according to my friend and yoga instructor Lynn, one mindful breath counts as meditating.
And, James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, and the champion of starting each habit in a small way and, or linking it to another more pleasurable habit, writes that he meditates for 1 minute every morning while making his tea. This is an example of Clear's concept of standardizing before you optimize. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist, right?
One of the benefits of meditation I’ve experienced is that since starting meditating, I no longer eat mindlessly. Also, I’ve developed a pause strategy between thought and action I call “imagine my one-hour-from-now or tomorrow-self." This strategy allows me to imagine myself in the future and feel what it will feel like after eating that unhealthy food or skipping that workout. The future-me talks me out of the thought that goes against my goals 99% of the time.
So, let me ask you:
If you currently don’t have a meditation practice, could you perhaps fit in one mindful breath or 1 minute of meditation paired with a current habit each day?
If you do have a meditation practice, what kinds of meditation have you tried, and how has it benefited your life?
Thanks for reading my post, I'm Liz Moser, and if you have any questions about meditation, about your health and wellness, or about wellness coaching, please email me at lizm@lizmosercoaching.com.
Thank you, and I hope you have a beautiful day filled with thought…pause…and your chosen response.
Bye for now!
— Liz
