etirabys

Background: I started meditating with the app Headspace in 2017, and started using the app Waking Up this past month at the same time I started meditating a lot more. (10h in the past month, vs 30h in the three years before that). I am not an expert, merely an amateur who's seen interesting improvements after relatively little effort. Part I of this post is a comparison of the two apps, meant to justify why I think someone getting into meditation should start with Headspace. If you are not interested in meditation but enjoy thinking about the human mind, the description in Part I of what Waking Up teaches may still be interesting. Part II describes my motivation for meditating and what I think other people can get out of it, Part III gives specific recommendations for meditation. Part I. Headspace vs Waking Up Note before I go on: Headspace and Waking Up are both paid apps. Headspace is $13/month. Waking Up is $100/year, but many redditors in threads I read about Waking Up before buying it assure me that the team really wants people to meditate and will give it to you for free if you produce a good reason, like “I cannot afford this but I find meditation helpful”. I think I’m getting about five times more out of Waking Up because I started with Headspace. Some things that I think are very useful before starting Waking Up that Headspace teaches better: * Being sufficiently good at staying at your breath that you can by default stay with your breath for 3 cycles before you get distracted * Being sufficiently good at noticing when you're distracted that distractions are normally <=1m * Either finding body scan (moving your attention down the body, tuning into signals from different subsections) easy/intuitive to begin with, or being familiar enough that you just 'know what to do' when prompted Headspace teaches you these in a more accessible way. Waking Up asks you to perform new mental motions in almost every session of the introductory sequence, and I think