Mowditate
You would really like to meditate regularly. Perhaps you have decided to sit for ten minutes every morning. It works quite well for the first few days. Then a stressful morning comes along. The next day, you do not feel like it. In the evening, you plan to take a quick look at your phone, and suddenly half an hour has passed. At some point, you realise that you have not meditated for a week.
It can quickly seem as though you simply lack discipline. But it is not quite that simple.
Our brains are remarkably good at learning behaviours that pay off. And that is precisely one of the problems with building a meditation routine: many things around us can very quickly deliver something that feels interesting, pleasant, or at least worthwhile in the short term. Meditation, especially at first, is rather bad at that!
Meditation, Especially at First, Is Not Particularly Rewarding:
An important part of our learning and motivation system works with the neurotransmitter dopamine.
Dopamine is sometimes called the ‘happiness hormone’. That is a considerable oversimplification; it does not simply make us happy. Among other things, dopamine is involved in learning which actions, situations, and cues are likely to lead to a reward. What is especially interesting is not only the reward itself, but also the expectation of it.
When something is better, more interesting, or more rewarding than expected, it can reinforce learning. Put simply, our brain remembers: that might be worth doing again. In this way, we learn not only what feels pleasant. We also learn which cues announce a possible reward. The sound of a notification, for example, may already cause us to reach for our smartphone before we even know what is waiting for us there.1
There is nothing inherently bad about this. Without learning mechanisms like these, our behaviour would be rather inefficient. Looking for food, maintaining social relationships, discovering new things, and pursuing goals have to feel worthwhile somehow. The problem is that our modern environment offers an extraordinary number of ways to engage these systems.
A smartphone contains more potential rewards than a person a few generations ago probably encountered in an entire day.
A new message, a new video, an interesting post, a like, music, a game, a product, an article, another video… Not all of them even need to be particularly good; the uncertainty of what comes next can itself keep us going. Perhaps the next video will be boring. Or perhaps it will be the one that makes us laugh. So we watch one more. And one more. Social media is particularly good at serving this mechanism.2
Then there are other things that can be immediately rewarding: tasty food, sweets, shopping, computer games, alcohol, or other drugs.
This does not mean that all these things have the same effect in the brain or that they simply ‘release dopamine’. The biological processes involved differ considerably.
But they can have something else in common: there is often very little time between the action and a possible reward.
You reach for your smartphone and see something new within seconds. You eat something sweet and taste it immediately. You buy something and instantly get the feeling that you have made a choice or treated yourself.
And then there is meditation. You sit down and breathe. You think about what you would like to eat later. You notice that your mind has wandered. You return to the breath. Suddenly you remember that you need to buy laundry detergent and return to the breath again. On a good day, you notice the wandering very quickly and come straight back. You push through and do this for 30 minutes. And after ten minutes, there is not even a firework display above your head?
From the perspective of immediate reward, this is not a particularly convincing offer at first. You can praise yourself for following through, but especially in the beginning, meditation does not necessarily provide a reward as fast or as clear as an interesting video or something sweet.
Another Effect Does Not Exactly Make Meditation Easier:
People tend to give immediate rewards more weight than rewards that lie further in the future.
In psychology and behavioural economics, this phenomenon is known as ‘delay discounting’. Put simply, a reward loses subjective value for us the further away it is in the future.3
That is why choosing between five minutes of social media and ten minutes of meditation can feel rather unfair.
One option promises: ‘Something interesting could happen in about two seconds.’
The other: ‘If you practise this regularly over a longer period, you may eventually notice that you can deal with your thoughts and stress more consciously.’
The second offer is more valuable in the long term, but the first is available immediately. We make choices like this all the time, not only with meditation:
- Stay on the sofa now, or exercise and become fitter in the long term.
- Buy something now, or save for a bigger goal.
- Watch one more episode now, or go to sleep and feel better tomorrow.
Short-term and long-term goals are therefore often in competition with each other.
Meditation is often compared with exercise. The comparison actually fits rather well: nobody goes to the gym once, looks in the mirror afterwards, and is surprised to find that every muscle is suddenly fully developed. Many effects of physical training arise only through regular repetition over weeks, months, or even years.
Even so, exercise has one small advantage over meditation: a single workout can make itself felt immediately. Your pulse rises. You get warm. Your muscles work. Afterwards, you may feel pleasantly tired or more satisfied. Movement can affect mood and various neurochemical systems after just one session. Among other things, physical activity changes the endocannabinoid system, which is involved in processes including mood, pain processing, and reward. So you can notice that you have done something long before any muscles become visible.4
Of course, exercise does not feel good to everyone, and a strenuous workout may simply feel strenuous. But the immediate physical signals are usually fairly clear.
Meditation is considerably subtler. After ten minutes of sitting, nothing has changed on the outside. And sometimes the meditation even feels more difficult afterwards than it did before. That may sound strange at first. If meditation is meant to be good for me, shouldn’t I automatically feel better afterwards? In short: no.
Among other things, meditation means noticing more closely what is happening right now. And perhaps that allows you to notice for the first time just how restless or tired you are, how tense your body is, how many thoughts are moving through your head at once, or how much something is occupying you.
All of this may already have been there. You were simply occupied at the same time by messages, work, music, conversations, or your smartphone and distracted yourself with brief ‘dopamine hits’.
Meditation can reduce external distraction and make inner processes more visible. That is not necessarily pleasant.
This creates a curious problem: while entertainment can provide something interesting within seconds, meditation may initially show you how much restlessness is already there. In the long term, that very act of conscious awareness can be valuable.
As an advertisement for your next meditation, however, ‘You may notice even more clearly how stressed you are’ is only moderately effective. It becomes even more difficult when we may be looking for progress in the wrong place.
After a few weeks of meditation, you may expect your mind to be quieter. But that is not usually what changes directly. Instead, perhaps you notice a little earlier during an argument that you are becoming angry, or recognise an unpleasant thought before spending ten minutes caught up in it.
You may notice more quickly while working that your attention has been somewhere else for five minutes. Or, in a stressful situation, you may manage to breathe out consciously once before reacting.
At first glance, these are not spectacular moments. No screen lights up, and nobody congratulates you. You may not even notice that this has anything to do with your meditation.
The effect of the practice may therefore already be appearing in your everyday life before you feel that you can meditate particularly ‘well’!
Another misunderstanding can make building a habit even more difficult: we often judge meditation by how pleasant it was. Calm = good meditation. Lots of thoughts = bad meditation.
That makes intuitive sense, but it is not true.
If your thoughts wander a hundred times today and you notice a hundred times, you have practised the exact process at the heart of many meditation techniques a hundred times: noticing and returning.
This may feel less satisfying than a calm meditation. But it is no less valuable. That is what makes meditation unusual: a difficult session may still have been good practice.
If we regard only the pleasant feeling afterwards as the reward, however, we overlook much of what we are actually training.
Fortunately, our learning system is not only the problem; it is also part of the solution. If we regularly repeat a behaviour in a similar context, the situations themselves can increasingly become triggers for it.5
Eventually, brushing your teeth after getting up is no longer renegotiated every morning. Our parents and what we learned at school have helped establish this habit so firmly that we generally no longer spend five minutes debating with ourselves whether brushing our teeth really makes long-term sense today. We just do it! Meditation can develop in the same direction. It helps to connect it to a trigger that is as clear as possible.
For example:
- After brushing my teeth in the morning, I meditate for 10 minutes.
- After my first cup of tea, I sit down on my meditation cushion.
- When I get home from work, I meditate before sitting down on the sofa.
This means the decision does not have to be made from scratch every day.
With enough repetition, ‘Should I meditate today?’ can increasingly become ‘Now it is time for my meditation.’
This does not happen after a magic number of days. The time it takes to form a habit varies greatly and depends, among other things, on the behaviour, the person, and the context.5
If a new habit does not yet offer a strong immediate reward, it also makes sense to keep the barrier low. That is why five minutes of meditation may be more helpful at first than an ambitious plan to meditate for thirty minutes every day. Not because five minutes is the perfect meditation duration in principle, but because a habit has to happen before it can become stable.
If you plan to meditate for thirty minutes every morning and regularly do not meditate at all as a result, you are unintentionally training a different routine: ‘I could meditate in the morning. But today it does not fit.’
Five minutes that actually happen can therefore be more valuable for building a routine than thirty minutes postponed until tomorrow. You can always meditate for longer later.
A visible record can help too. A tick on a calendar, a streak of regular meditations, or your meditation history makes something visible that is otherwise difficult to observe: you came back.
That is precisely why Mowditate now includes streaks and statistics, which can be motivating.
Mow’s badges also provide a small and immediate response to a behaviour whose real effects often become apparent only later.
Of course, the streak itself should not become the most important part of meditation. A broken streak does not mean that your previous meditations are lost. A streak measures how many days in a row you have meditated, not your ability to be mindful. That is why Mowditate’s streak reward stops at seven days. You should not feel bad simply because you miss a day. In seven days, you can have the Mow app icon again. At least Mow thinks that is absolutely worth pursuing.
It is therefore not particularly helpful to promise yourself every evening: ‘Tomorrow, I simply need more discipline.’
Instead, you can change the conditions:
- Make meditation easy to access.
- Put your cushion out in advance.
- Connect it to an existing ritual.
- Start with a duration that takes hardly any effort to begin.
- If possible, meditate before you immerse yourself in something that is difficult to put down again. Ideally, before doing anything else on your smartphone.
- Do not expect a special experience every time.
This is not about removing every other reward from your life or avoiding dopamine; neither would be possible or sensible. Dopamine is not an opponent you need to defeat. It is part of an important system through which your brain learns what deserves attention and which behaviour is worth repeating.
A regular meditation practice therefore does not arise when you finally have enough willpower to give your brain orders every day. Instead, you can help it learn something new—‘trick’ it, if you like. Once you understand these mechanisms, you can use them deliberately to change something.
Conclusion
- Make it as easy as possible at first. Choose a short meditation duration that you can genuinely maintain, and connect it to a fixed trigger in your daily life.
- Whenever possible, meditate before social media or other readily available distractions get your attention.
- Do not expect every meditation to feel immediately good or special. Pay attention to small changes in daily life instead: do you notice thoughts earlier? Do you sometimes respond a little more consciously? Do you notice more quickly when your attention wanders?
- If you miss a day, simply begin again. A habit does not form because you never interrupt it, but because, just as in meditation, you keep returning.