A Year and a Day with the Headspace Meditation App

[This article was originally written January 8th, 2018.]

It hasn’t been 517 days in a row. Headspace oddly calculates how days are counted. If your second meditation of the day is a certain number of hours after your first (eight hours? twelve?), you will end up with 2 “days” occurring within a single 24 hour period. I assume there is some logic behind this, but I can’t figure it out for the life of me.

I started using the Headspace meditation app on January 7th, 2018, so it’s actually been a full year (and a day). While I’ve used meditation apps before, this is the first time I have been this consistent with the practice. There are few things I have noticed in the year I’ve been using Headspace.

I do find myself being more present and noticing small visual things more often than I used to. I’m more apt to notice kitchen cabinets and drawers and the like being left open. I did a “walking meditation” exercise which causes one to walk outdoors with more mindfulness. For the first time in years of walking where I live, I realized I can hear the sounds of the highway nearby.

I don’t know if it’s related but I seem to be more present when driving. For the first time in my driving life I notice that I consistently keep my hands at the correct “ten and two” position (as opposed to one hand on the wheel and the other leaning on the arm rest) without having made a conscious decision to do so.

As far as mental focus goes, I’m not one hundred percent sure that my ability to focus has drastically improved. However, what I am more sure of is that I am much more able now to notice when I’ve become distracted and bring myself back to whatever it is that I want to focus on. This noticing seems to happen much earlier than it has in the past.

I now notice the effects of caffeine much more. I don’t think that caffeine has more of an effect on me, more than I am better able to see how much more quickly and frantically the thoughts fire off in my head. It’s interesting, but it does mean that I’ve cut down on how much I consume in an average day. This is probably a good thing in the long run.

Yesterday, I had a very interesting 20–30 minutes while driving where was very aware of every emotion/mood I was experiencing as it began, continued and ended. I noticed becoming content, happy, anxious, relieved. It was fascinating to be able to be more of an observer than a direct participant. I’d heard Andy Puddicombe speak about this kind of mindful awareness but not experienced anything like it until then.

Here’s to another year!