I Meditated Every Morning for 30 Days: Here’s What Happened

I’ll start with a confession: I’ve had the Headspace app on my phone for years, willfully ignoring the bright orange logo calmly smiling back at me from my home screen. Occasionally, I’d open it, complete a session, and feel pretty great. But I was only motivated to use the app out of some need, like as a last-resort tool to manage stress. Like using aspirin for a headache, meditation got shelved as soon as I felt better.

This “treatment” approach has value, but I knew I was sort of missing the point. I’ve spoken with Dr. Deepak Chopra, MD, FACP, FRCP, founder of the Chopra Foundation and bestselling author of multiple books on mindfulness, most recently Digital Dharma. (Dr. Chopra also put meditation on the mainstream map in the US when we partnered with Oprah on meditation challenges for consumers to participate in.) He has said: “While a single meditation session can bring immediate benefits, such as a sense of calm, relaxation, and a clearer mind, the true power of meditation unfolds through habitual practice.”

Dr. Chopra adds that scientific research reinforces how a daily meditation practice profoundly impacts physical and mental health, reducing stress by calming the nervous system, lowering cortisol, and boosting immune function. “Scientific studies reveal that consistent meditation practice can increase neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself,” he says. “It enhances brain function, increasing gray matter in areas linked to memory, empathy, and self-awareness while alleviating anxiety and depression.”

Those are some worthwhile benefits of meditation—but, importantly, he explains that letting go of expectations (such as what you might “get” from a meditation practice) is a big part of the process. So, while I’d always fallen to the temptation to imagine the ways meditation could up-level my life, this time I reined in any lofty expectations and did my best to approach a daily meditation practice with an open mind.

Ahead, I share what I learned from meditating every morning for a month.

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How to start meditating every day

The first few days of my 30-day meditation challenge went great. I set a 10-minute timer on my phone and followed Dr. Chopra’s advice: Focus on my breath and try allowing thoughts to pass without reacting to them. Then, each day, I added one more minute to the timer.

But within a week, the routine lost its luster. I was no longer getting that “pat on the back” boost from checking off my completion of a new habit. It felt like a chore without very much reward.

It turns out that this is a pretty normal experience for meditation beginners, according to David M. Fresco, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan and the research director of Michigan Mindfulness, a program that examines treatments informed by both neuroscience findings and mindfulness exercises. “There’s sort of a window—usually the first two or three sessions—where people are giving it an honest try,” he says. “But this is where they’re going to struggle because they notice that their minds are wandering, or they might fall asleep, or they’re having a hard time letting go of some emotionally difficult memory.” As a result, meditation motivation often fizzles out. This described my experience to a T.

“The trick,” Dr. Fresco told me, “is to normalize that experience.” Just like you can’t run a 10K or lift the heaviest weight as soon as you start a new fitness routine, training your brain takes time. “I use this muscle metaphor all the time,” Dr. Fresco says. “[Meditation] is like a gymnasium for your brain—those people who are able to get past the initial challenges and make it a habit in their lives achieve the best results.”

Some days, I felt worse after meditating

With Dr. Fresco’s advice, I hung in there. But I didn’t always feel awesome after my meditation session.

One day, I set my timer, closed my eyes, and tried to focus on my breath. It felt like the alarm rang after mere seconds—I hadn’t even noticed how I’d let my thoughts race and take over. I felt deflated and frustrated. What’s the point?

But, Dr. Chopra assured me: “This very resistance is a part of the process of growth,” he said. “The mind is naturally conditioned to constant activity, distraction, and restlessness.” Returning to the gym metaphor, he says the only way to strengthen your ability to let go of this attachment to thoughts is with patience and persistence.

As for my deflated feeling? According to Dr. Fresco, that’s a result of my own unmet expectations. “I think people come with a story that they need to be like the Dalai Lama, a chill monk,” he said. “But the truth is you just need to be aware and less judgmental. Don’t bring a preconceived notion of what it ought to be, or give yourself a report card for the quality of a meditation practice.” Instead, he says, focus on the quality of your ability to notice your mind, even if it’s restless.

Meditation changed my anxiety

Though daily meditation didn’t cure my anxiety, it did changed my relationship with it in an unexpected way. I realized it’s like a part of me could see anxious situations more neutrally. Observing anxiety in this way didn’t stop it from playing out, but it did take more and more of its power away.

Dr. Fresco explained how neuroscience has identified what’s called the “default state” of the brain. He says this default circuitry is active when we’re under no task demands—such as solving a problem or figuring out instructions. Naturally, this makes sense. “That’s when [our mind] is more likely to wander, drift off, not be as attentionally sharp.”

Here’s something fascinating: Dr. Fresco says there’s a relationship between the strength of this default state and chronic conditions such as depression and anxiety. “One of the things that meditation seems to do is reduce the dominance of that circuit.” Eventually, he says, meditation can “quiet the default state.”

A few weeks into my daily meditation routine, that seemed to align with my experience. “I say this to people a lot: Let’s see if you can be actor and observer of your life at the same time,” Dr. Fresco says. “Can you sit in your lived experience but also observe what’s happening? With that extra perspective, you tend to make more thoughtful choices and you’re less emotionally reactive to what’s going on.”

Meditation helped me progress toward a long-term goal

“I would say that in the broadest sense, meditation is a practice that sharpens your ability to attend to things,” Dr. Fresco says. “It strengthens your resolve.” He says that in everyday life, this could look like following through with a commitment to eating better, being more mindful of your relationship with alcohol, getting less flustered at your children or partner, or sitting more comfortably with a loss such as a relationship or job.

I’m a flying trapeze artist, and I’ve been working on achieving one goal for almost two years—that amounts to hundreds of failed attempts, if not more. The skill is solid, but fear of failure, performance anxiety, self-doubt, uncertainty, the expectations of others, and strong emotions cloud its execution.

Meditation didn’t all of a sudden turn me into a super-athlete. But as my daily meditation practice continued, I started noticing a quieter focus when I was training—a stronger ability to remain present in the moment—with the volume of negative self-talk turned way down. I looked at failures with less judgment and slowly became less emotionally reactive to them. I went up to try again because I wanted to—not because I felt it was what was expected of me. This mindset shift wasn’t totally black-and-white (I reverted back to old patterns now and again), but it broke me out of a burnt-out plateau. I noticed that meditating considerably improved my trapeze performance.

Finally, I’m sticking with my meditation practice

A month of daily meditation didn’t change my life. Nothing extraordinary happened; my flaws and anxieties are all still here.

But the subtle, quiet changes to my mindset across different areas of my life were more meaningful than I had expected, even in such a short time frame. Meditation won’t solve all your problems, but Dr. Fresco explains that sticking with it delivers cumulative, aggregated effects that scientists have been able to physically measure. “For people who do commit to a meditation practice, there seems to be a cortical thickening of certain regions of the brain associated with your attentional abilities, and there are blood flow differences to regions of the brain that matter for this kind of emotion regulation capacity,” he says.

Dr. Chopra adds that studies have shown meditation even reduces the size of the amygdala, the region of your brain linked to stress and fear. “So one [effect of meditation] is more structural, building the muscle; and one is more functional, which changes the circuitry that you recruit to confront your day-to-day life,” says Dr. Fresco.

For more wellness updates, subscribe to The Healthy by Reader’s Digest newsletter and follow The Healthy on Facebook and Instagram. Keep reading:

• I Tried Hypnotherapy for Anxiety—Here’s What Happened

• 10 Tips for Understanding and Managing Anxiety and Panic Disorder

• Deepak Chopra’s #1 Meditation for Happiness