Do You Have Structure To Your Meditative Walks?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:03.360 | All right, we got a question here from Ian,

00:00:08.320 | who asked about meditative walks.

00:00:12.320 | As I am walking around, I want to try and solve

00:00:14.720 | specific problems.

00:00:15.520 | I'm curious to know, do you set a specific question

00:00:17.800 | for a specific walk?

00:00:19.600 | Do you let your mind wander?

00:00:21.520 | Or do you return to the same question as distractions arise?

00:00:24.920 | What does thinking look and sound like?

00:00:28.540 | Well, this is productive meditation.

00:00:31.880 | It's an idea that I included in deep work,

00:00:34.800 | and I often talk about when I give keynote addresses

00:00:37.080 | about deep work.

00:00:38.600 | It's my term for exactly what you're talking about,

00:00:41.520 | working on a professional problem

00:00:44.240 | in a preambulatory state.

00:00:48.560 | I'm going to use some unnecessary words.

00:00:51.560 | Let me use another unnecessary word.

00:00:53.040 | This is a peripatetic productivity maxim

00:00:58.200 | that I call productive meditation.

00:01:00.200 | So I give rules in that, based off of just hard one

00:01:02.780 | experience.

00:01:03.920 | And the rules for productive meditation are one problem.

00:01:09.040 | So you come back to it.

00:01:10.720 | When your mind wanders, come back to the original problem.

00:01:15.000 | When your mind wanders again, notice, don't judge,

00:01:20.160 | but come back to the original problem.

00:01:22.560 | That's where the meditation piece

00:01:24.260 | of productive meditation, that phrase,

00:01:25.880 | comes from, when I was doing a lot of this.

00:01:28.680 | So I really got into productive meditation

00:01:31.040 | during my postdoc years.

00:01:33.320 | During those same years, for whatever reason,

00:01:35.240 | I went on a big Jon Kabat Zinn kick.

00:01:38.240 | I was reading Full Catastrophe Living

00:01:40.200 | and the various other books that Zinn had written.

00:01:43.480 | He's really known for basically bringing

00:01:46.560 | a secularized mindfulness meditation

00:01:49.120 | practice into the formal medical world.

00:01:51.560 | That's what Jon is known for.

00:01:54.600 | And so I had a lot of Jon Kabat Zinn going in my head

00:01:57.280 | when I was thinking about productive meditation.

00:01:59.360 | And what I borrowed then from him in mindfulness meditation

00:02:02.080 | more generally was the nonjudgmental noticing

00:02:06.400 | of your attention wandering, but bringing it back consistently.

00:02:10.600 | That's usually what I do.

00:02:11.800 | Now, what happens is you're going to notice a lot,

00:02:13.920 | and bring it back a lot, notice a lot, bring it back a lot.

00:02:16.840 | There is actually a function, a training function in that.

00:02:20.160 | And meditation people hate this type of terminology.

00:02:22.400 | So they don't like me calling what I'm talking about now

00:02:25.360 | something with the name meditation.

00:02:26.760 | But it's true.

00:02:28.960 | It helps your mind practice sustaining focus,

00:02:32.080 | because it doesn't get the reward.

00:02:34.160 | It wanders over to an email that you have to write,

00:02:36.320 | and you pull it back.

00:02:37.640 | It wanders over to a conversation

00:02:39.460 | you had that you're worried about,

00:02:40.460 | and then you pull it back.

00:02:41.200 | It doesn't get the shiny treat at the end of that distraction

00:02:44.160 | path.

00:02:45.000 | And so the urge to do so reduces,

00:02:47.920 | and you get better at sustaining your focus.

00:02:49.880 | The other thing you get better at when

00:02:51.500 | you're doing productive meditation

00:02:52.920 | is facility with your working memory.

00:02:56.360 | You can hold things in your working memory,

00:02:58.920 | pull one of those items out, do some work on it, put it back in,

00:03:03.400 | take out another element.

00:03:05.080 | That is what you have to do in order

00:03:07.600 | to keep making progress when you're just on foot,

00:03:10.520 | and you get better at it with practice.

00:03:12.920 | So productive meditation is pretty hard at first.

00:03:14.920 | I usually describe it as cognitive pull-ups,

00:03:17.640 | because pull-ups are an example of an exercise that's hard,

00:03:20.600 | especially if you haven't been doing them.

00:03:21.860 | It's just really hard.

00:03:22.700 | You're heavy, and you're trying to lift your whole weight up.

00:03:24.860 | But if you do them on a regular basis,

00:03:26.740 | it does work a lot of muscles.

00:03:27.940 | It's very effective.

00:03:29.100 | That is what productive meditation is like.

00:03:30.780 | It's very hard at first, but if you do it consistently,

00:03:33.140 | you get a pretty big leap pretty quickly in your ability

00:03:35.820 | to keep your mind's eye focused more or less on one thing,

00:03:38.500 | and actually do pretty good progress on that one thing.

00:03:41.740 | I will now do a fair amount of writing in my head.

00:03:44.180 | I can make a fair amount of progress

00:03:45.380 | on math proofs in my head.

00:03:47.380 | If it's a long walk, I'll bring a notebook with me

00:03:49.380 | to record things at a couple milestones along the way.

00:03:52.500 | Like if I'm in the woods, I'll sit by a creek and do it.

00:03:54.940 | If it's in my neighborhood, I'll just wait till I get home

00:03:56.820 | to take notes on what I was thinking about.

00:03:58.980 | So read the productive meditation chapter in Deep Work Ian.

00:04:02.380 | I think you'll like what you come across.

00:04:04.820 | (upbeat music)

00:04:07.400 | [Music]

Do You Have Structure To Your Meditative Walks?

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