Hi Charlotte,

It's strange. A year ago, it seemed like people were clamoring for me to write a follow-up post to my one about meditation. So yesterday, I wrote a really detailed post titled "How I Kept Up With Meditation For An Entire Year," which explains in very minute detail all the self-disciplinary/motivational steps I took to turn me from a non-meditator into a meditator. When I posted it on Reddit and Hacker News, I got barely a blip of a response.

I guess to me, the how of self-improvement is more interesting than the what of self-improvement. We already know what we need to do to improve our lives, rarely do we know how to put that into practice.

So, here's how I did it:

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post titled, "Eight Changes To My Life After Just Four Weeks of Meditation." The post generated a lot of traffic, but many people wanted to know how I motivated myself to stick with it. Some even doubted I would stick with it beyond my initial honeymoon.

Well, one year and 28 days later, I am proud to say that I've meditated every single day since I started. All the changes I mentioned in that post have been permanent. What follows are all the stages of self-motivation I went through to install meditation into my daily routine:

The Background (1 year before meditation)

I had tried meditation twice before. Both times I did it because I read articles describing the mental health benefits of meditation. I had struggled nearly my entire adult life with bouts of neurosis, but I was also very reluctant to get hooked on anti-depressants. Meditation appealed to me, because it offered a way to stop myself from over-thinking without any extra bodyload, side effects, or chemical dependency.

However, each time I tried meditation, it was always touch-and-go. In the first week, I meditated about three times for twenty minutes. The initial sessions were eye-opening, and I promised myself to meditate everyday. But then after my fifth session or so, I lost that initial glow, starting to hate the practice, and I gave up.

So I'd say there were two important elements to my background: 1. My past failures with meditation made me realize I had to try something completely different if I wanted to get into it again. I wanted to only meditate if I could guarantee my commitment. 2. I believed I really needed something like meditation to stop the reign of terror my mind had been causing me.

The Lure (2 weeks before)

At the start of 2011, an article popped up on my radar titled, "Mindfulness meditation training changes brain structure in 8 weeks". It described a study of non-meditators who were given meditation training, told to meditate for 45 minutes a day, and were given MRI scans before and after. The subjects were told to keep a journal of how often they meditated and the results were astounding. After just eight weeks, with an average of 27 minutes a day of meditation, the subjects showed increased activity in parts of the brain associated with stress-regulation, anxiety-control, self-awareness, and empathy.

This specific study, and the way it was structured, was crucial to me sticking with meditation early on. This was the first time I had ever seen the mental health benefits of meditation laid out so specifically. This kind of set up (measurable inputs, measurable outputs) is a key feature for achieving flow, and it provided me with a straightforward program. If I didn't stick with it for eight weeks at 27 minutes a day, then I couldn't blame meditation for not delivering. I could only blame myself.

The Pact (1 day before)

I forwarded this article to my friend Ricky, who loved it and also noticed the same flow-like characteristics of the study. He then asked me, "Why don't we try to duplicate the study ourselves?" I initially hesitated, given my past stumbles with meditation, but I eventually warmed up. Ricky wanted to create a spreadsheet where we could keep a log of every day we meditated. This would add a layer of competition to the program. Plus, the study was very concrete and specific about what you had to do and what you could expect. While I didn't have a MRI machine, I could pay attention to see if my anxiety levels went go down or if I noticed any other changes to my life.

Finally, I promised myself that I was going to proactively motivate myself this time around. I told myself not to meditate unless I could, everyday, commit at least some time to make sure that I was committed to meditation. Call this a meta-commitment.

With my meta-commitment, the pact with Ricky, and the perfect structure of this study, I felt like this time would be significantly different than all the other times I meditated. And so I agreed to meditate everyday for eight weeks, 27 minutes per day.

The Attitude Shift (2 weeks after)

The first meditation sessions were similar to the other times I tried to meditate. The sessions were eye-opening, and I remember in those first couple days, laying on my back after meditating, in awe of life. This feeling faded quickly though, and I then hit my first motivation hurdles with meditation.

Before each meditation session, I often sat there, seeing if my body naturally wanted to meditate. If it didn't, I'd then talk to myself until it did. My conversations in those first couple weeks were all about changing my attitude toward meditation. Why was it that it didn't require any effort to do physical exercise every day, but I struggled with meditation? Theoretically, I argued, my mental health was more important to me than my physical health, so I should be even more motivated to do it.

I then realized that part of why it's easier for me to go jogging is because our society encourages it. Especially living in Austin, I see beautiful people jogging and biking every day. I told myself that while physical exercise has a very public component, millions of Americans meditate in private. And of those who don't meditate, they have other routines like daily prayer that feed their soul. I then Googled around for famous people who had meditated, and found out that Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison both were into the practice.

These thought exercises helped re-condition me to not think of meditation as something exotic or weird. I started to think of it as something fundamental, essential, and more importantly, normal.

Observing Results (4 weeks later)

I think I have a special skill at describing my inner mental state, and I think this was key in solidifying my commitment to meditation. A key aspect of flow is having measurable inputs and measurable outputs. While I didn't have an MRI machine, I paid special attention to see what changes happened to me psychically and emotionally, and writing these things out in a blog post helped reinforce the practice.

If you can see concrete results, even if they're incremental, you'll become more confident about your inputs.

After the Pact (8 weeks later)

The spreadsheet that Ricky and I used worked marvelously. Our natural competitiveness forced us to meditate every single day. One time he sort of "missed" his meditation, or as he describes it, had a split-meditation, where he had to meditate a little bit in the morning and a little bit later in the evening. He voluntarily put an asterisk by his entry, and I ribbed him about it later. This motivated him to get a perfect streak for the rest of his sessions, and I had to also bolster my streak, lest I get an asterisk like him.

The spreadsheet also contributed to the flow-like aspects of the program. Seeing a column of "Yes"s grow was like watching a progress bar in a video game:

Afterwards, Ricky and I agreed to move beyond the spreadsheet. But since I liked the device so much, I fashioned a similar one in the from of a calendar. I then crossed off every day I meditated. Here's my calendar from last year:

Like the spreadsheet, crossing off days on the calendar was incredibly satisfying. Plus, there was a fear of having an empty spot in the calendar. If you do the calendar method, I actually recommend doing exactly what I did, and use a physically printed calendar, as opposed to an app. With the physical calendar, you can keep it right by your meditation area, serving as a constant reminder. Also, every mark you make on the calendar isn't going to be exactly the same, so visually, this makes for a much more interesting thing to look at instead of a never-ending series of the same symbol on a screen. Thirdly, when you finish a whole year, the calendar can serve as a wonderful artifact. I've laminated mine which serves as a kind of trophy commemorating "The First Year I Meditated."

Cultivating Natural Motivation (20 weeks later)

Those early phases of self-talk, when I tried to change my attitude toward meditation, achieved their goal. At this point, I felt like I valued and prioritized meditation very highly in my life. However, after eight weeks, I was no longer in awe of the changes I was experiencing. Plus, I couldn't summon any more new arguments to myself about meditation, because my attitude had already become very positive.

I'd sit there, waiting to meditate, hearing myself think, "Yes, meditation is really good for me, but for some reason, I don't want to meditate." I then realized that I could no longer rely on my attitude toward the idea of meditation to push me forward. Instead, I would have to rely on a natural real-time interest in the activity. My motivation for meditation had to become as natural as my motivation to play video games. I had to want to do it for its own sake, not because of some external benefit, like improving my health.

This is where some key passages in Mindfulness in Plain English came in handy. Gunaratana suggests that it's when we don't want to meditate that we really need to meditate. This coincided with my experience. I found that when my motivation to meditate had been low, I was also usually in a neurotic or pre-neurotic state-of-mind, (i.e. I had woken up on the wrong side of the bed).

So then I asked myself, "Okay Phil. So you don't want to meditate for 30 minutes. What do you want to do instead for the next 30 minutes?" I would then outline what I would likely do next. In those neurotic mindsets, I imagined myself surfing Reddit or Huffington Post for thirty minutes while munching on something someone said to me in the back-of-my-mind. Or I imagined myself working and re-working my business plans, trying to forever optimize my career choices. When I presented myself with such a dreary picture of the 30-minute alternative to meditation, I immediately pushed away from my desk and went straight to meditating.

This eventually became a habit, and I only occasionally need to do this thought experiment now.

Dealing with Schedule Changes (30 weeks later)

Inevitably, life will throw wrenches at you, and you will find it difficult to meditate because you're on a 3-day road-trip with your family or you live in a college dorm. The first family vacation I went on posed some major challenges. My parents didn't know I meditated, and so I was initially apprehensive about saying, "Hey guys, I need thirty minutes by myself, and I can't be disturbed." So I tried to sneak in my meditation whenever my parents took a gym-break.

When you go someplace new, the first thing you do should is designate a sanctuary. I've found that stairwells in hotels are the best places to meditate if you have other guests staying in your hotel room.

Buy noise-canceling headphones. These have been an indispensable tool for me. They block out lawn-mowers and they let you meditate on an airplane. In other words, they give you more options and opportunities to meditate.

At the start of your day, you should always know when you are going to meditate. I have a normal routine: first exercise, then errands, then meditation, then lunch, and then I go to work. But sometimes, due to sleeping-in or appointments, it's not convenient to meditate in the morning. When this happens, I immediately look for the next most convenient time in my schedule. If I anticipate there are potential interruptions to the new plan, I find back-ups, and I cancel some other commitments. (i.e. If you can't find room, make room.)

Oh, and I finally told my parents I meditated. They love the idea of it, primarily because they see how much it's improved my life. Now, whenever I meditate at their house, I put a little sign on my door that says, "Please do not disturb for the next 30 min. Thanks!" and everybody in the house respects it.

My Current Meditation Setup (now, 56 weeks later)

I meditate for 30 minutes every morning before I start my day. I follow the vipassana practice of monitoring my breath. My techniques come from Mindfulness in Plain English and Wherever You Go, There You Are. I fix my attention to a spot under my rib cage where I can feel my chest expand and contract. If I get distr acted by thoughts for more than 5-15 breaths, I follow these five steps: I estimate how many breaths I missed because of the train of thought, I notice the content of my distraction, I observe my mental state, I observe my state of distractedness dissipate, and then I return my focus back to my breath. I try not to switch to counting my distractions too often, so as to keep the primary focus on my breath.

I sit upright in a chair, but I don't force my posture, and sometimes I lean against the backrest. I use the Clock app on my iPhone (which is on mute), and I set a count-down timer to 30 minutes with a harp sound to finish.

It's taken me a year to get to this specific setup, and I still tweak my process every couple weeks. Those books should help you with your personalized progression.

Charlotte, nearly every aspect of my life is being turned upside-down because of meditation, and it's a bit overwhelming. I've been biking all over Austin during SXSW¹, hawking my new site, 3D Porch². I'm like a one-man mobile marketing machine. I have with me two 3D cameras holstered to my hips, along with a pouch for a hundred red-blue 3D glasses. I stopped by the mobile Apple Store, where there was a line wrapped around the block with nerds waiting for the iPad 2. I then just went up to random people and asked, "Have you ever had a 3D photo taken before? Would you like to?" I then hand them a pair of 3D glasses and a business card.

It's the kind of stunt I would've never imagined seeing myself do before meditation. I put the whole site together in just a month, and now it's on CNN. In the run-up to the convention, I was really anxious and nervous, and I almost pulled the plug on my product launch. But I just meditated all those issues out.

And that's just my work life. Wait till you hear how my social life is going. I've been going out nearly every night for the past couple weeks. All the energy that used to be set aside for neurotic over-thinking has been freed up. When friends text me, "Do you want to check out the new wine bar?" or "Do you want to check out the new food trailer?", I don't think twice before responding, "Yes!"

This new "yes-to-everything" attitude has extended to my love-life, and I've been going on date after date, bridging small threads, like a friend-of-friend tagging along at a bar, into potential flames. I think that any day now, I will have broken my streak of being single.

This is all overwhelming, but I know it's a good problem to have.³

Hi Charlotte,

The most amazing thing happened to me yesterday. You know how I've been blogging for years, sort of seeking to "make it" as a paid/star-blogger? Well, my website traffic went through the roof randomly yesterday when I posted about my latest progress in meditation. The title of my post is, "Eight Changes To My Life After Just Four Weeks Of Meditation," and well, I'll just paste it for you and see for yourself. It's all been pretty incredible, and hopefully I can put together a follow-up post soon explaining how I kept up with meditation:

Last month, I read a study showing that just eight weeks of daily meditation leads to increased grey matter densities in areas of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress-regulation. I shared this with some friends, and we immediately formed a meditation group, committed to meditating for eight weeks straight in order to duplicate the results.

In just one day of meditation I saw improvements, but I feared writing about them due to possible placebo effects. But now, I'm becoming more and more confident in the power of meditation. I'm four weeks into the program, and here's what I've noticed:

1. I've obliterated arbitrary rules from my life. I used to fall into routines, such as needing to sleep at a certain hour or eating meals at a certain time. Meditation has made me appreciate the pacing and natural flow of my emotions and thoughts, and I've come to believe that we go through multi-day cycles of needing attention to one dimension of our life more than others. My new state of mind reminds me of a talk at Stanford, where a businesswoman said, "Forget trying to achieve balance. Living life is more of a real-time readiness to pivot as your life demands. If you haven't been spending enough time with your kids, go home. If you haven't been spending enough time at work, stay longer. There is no perfect set amount or schedule that will keep you happy all the time."

2. The time I spend worrying about small personal problems has shrunk from one week to one day. Minor negative events, like seeing my bank account lower than expected or noticing that a relationship hasn't progressed like I've wanted it to, used to bog me down for whole weeks. I'd see my Mint.com account balance summary on Sunday, then fret about my financial situation Monday through Wednesday, then Thursday through Friday analyze the heck out of my responses, and on Saturday, maybe come up with a plan to remedy the situation or realize I got over-worked for no reason. Now, with daily meditation, I have an opportunity every day to reset. Meditation separates you so far from your present struggles that you are hit with a reminder of Life Before The Worry, which then reminds you that your life goes on just fine without you being so focused on a singular issue.

3. As a consequence of having only day-long issues, I feel like I'm better equipped to live out the motto "Carpe Diem." Having the security that comes from believing that all the crap that's bothering you today, won't bother you tomorrow, is liberating, and frees you up to smell the roses. The past four weeks have been some of the most fun of my life. I've been going out a lot more, but oddly enough, also working harder and more passionately.

4. Larger personal problems, while not instantly solved by mindfulness, have been transformed into more manageable games and projects. For example, I've had some long-standing personal problems when it comes to relationships, and while I don't think these have been solved, I feel more centered in my approach to them. I feel like meditation puts me at the top of a mountain so I can see all my thoughts below, rather than being consumed by the pedestrian hubub at ground level. Whereas before, I approached my relationship issues from only a couple discrete perspectives (i.e. "I need to work on commitment issues" or "I need to work on self-confidence"), I approach them now from a continuous synthesis of maybe hundreds of perspectives, like little dots forming a Pointillist painting.

5. The new pictures formed of my personal problems include newfound, significant amounts of self-acceptance. You know the old adage, "To a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Well, I'm a problem-solver, and so everything tends to look like a problem that I can solve with just the sheer will of my introspection. Meditation, by distancing me from my problems, has turned everything from nails into more unique and nuanced objects. I now see many alternatives to problem-solving, including letting go, coping, seeking support, relaxing, or simply embracing my flaws.

6. I waste less time on mind-rotting activities, like surfing reddit or junky news sites. Meditation reminds me everyday of what a sane, mindful mind feels like. By having that as a daily reference, I can more clearly see how "insane" a lot of my former activities are. I noticed this right after my first meditation session. I was about to go to reddit, and then I cringed at the thought of flooding my mind with random information highs and funny pictures. After abandoning reddit, I was about to check out news sites, including the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post, and again, I cringed. The thought of those large, bold headlines hitting me with inflammatory content seemed insane. I've now come to believe that meditation is one of the best responses to modern information overload. I keep reminding myself of this quote from David Foster Wallace, "There are four trillion bits coming at you, 99% of them are shit, and it's too much work to do triage to decide. So it's very clear, very soon there's gonna be an economic niche opening up for gatekeepers... Because otherwise we're gonna spend 95% of our time body-surfing through shit." Why can't that gatekeeper be you?

7. I feel more emotionally intelligent, and I'm able to catch myself more quickly in social situations. Meditation sort of puts your ear to the ground, and lets you hear the low-volume murmurs that are going on inside you. Once you have a daily reminder of their existence, it's hard not to hear them during the rest of the day. For example, I listen better to others now, because when I'm going off on some rant, I can hear a little voice inside warning me about my ego, and I'm able to dial myself down. While as before, I'd usually be consumed by the volume of my own speech or the emotional bursts that come from self-expression.

8. I feel mentally and physically sharper. Reducing anxiety and stress removes a major energy drain from your life. I feel like there's all these endorphins swirling around me that I didn't have before, and as a result I feel healthier and more alert. I also feel like I've learned how to snap out of hangovers, by simply removing all the noise that's pounding my head the morning after.

Will these sentiments last? I believe so, so long as I stay committed to daily practice. I may not be as excited later about these changes to my life as I am now, since this is all new to me, but I believe it's worth capturing and sharing my state of mind so as to get more people meditating. Even if for whatever reason I stop meditating, there is so much scientific evidence backing the benefits of meditation (not to mention thousands of years of tradition), that it's worth the risk of possibly hyping it up.

If you're interested in getting into meditation, I recommend reading Mindfulness in Plain English. It's often recommended on Ask.Metafilter for people who are depressed or anxious, and are looking for an alternative to therapy. I like the book because it cuts through a lot of the frills and stereotypes associated meditation, and reduces it to a very simple exercise.

Hi Charlotte,

I've been developing a new tradition on my trips to Southern California. I like to take these two-hour drives to visit my uncle and cousins out in Palm Springs. I borrow my parents SUV, crank up the Sirius XM, and let the music and my mind mix and project onto the rocky desert mountains that line the route to the desert. I think I'm a hundred times better than I was before I got back into cognitive therapy, and I probably wouldn't have been able to enjoy with these drives without my newfound calm, but I still have a nagging problem. I'm still an over-thinker.

Do you think there are limits to cognitive therapy? I don't really have the same epiphanies I had a year-a-half ago, mainly because all the baggage that it was supposed to destroy has been destroyed! But what if its possible to use cognitive therapy against the raw, mechanical process of thinking too much?

So, I opened my cognitive therapy journals, and went through the step-by-step of cognitive therapy. I started by attacking my inner-academic. When you think of the faults of academics that are commonly bandied about, one is that they can be arrogant know-it-alls. So I told myself, "Look Phil, a theoretical understanding of things is so easily abused, that your inner-academic misleads you to over-estimate how much you actually know." I then attacked my inner armchair philosopher. "Look Phil, 90% of true learning is in the application of knowledge, not in the theoretical circumscribing of it. All your thinking is preventing you from acquiring actual/meaningful experience."

The epiphany I had from this was very calming. Normally, after my Palm Springs road trips, I need another one-to-two hours to unravel all the thinking and meta-thinking that had occurred during the drive. But this time, when I closed the door to my parent's SUV and greeted my cousin, I smiled a full smile, one unencumbered by the burden of neurotic bruises. Instead of my internal mental chatter bleeding out and turning me into a semi-obnoxious chatterbox, my cousin and I just got up and drove to the hills to do sandboarding (snowboarding on sand dunes). There were no breaks, no need for pause, just activity.

Maybe I've finally destroyed over-thinking, just like I've destroyed every other internal barrier through the use of cognitive therapy.

Or maybe it's just a placebo effect.¹

Hi Charlotte,

I've been taking some interesting walks throughout this city. The other day, I walked up and down the hills south of Chevy Chase Dr., and as usual, my mind was free-associating like crazy. I have a way of guessing when a city had it's boom based on the prevalent architecture. The homes I saw had carports and plasticy-looking white-painted walls, which clearly indicated having been built during the 1950s-1960s Hollywood era. I imagined that the support network for the movie industry lived out here. Cameramen and production assistants must have lived out in the hills while working on sets for Marlon Brando. Now they are all retired and rich because their property values have increased twenty-fold since then.

But the darkside of these curious digressions is that I get completely exhausted and distracted by a lot of other things. I obsess about little arguments I have with people. I start forming and discarding, forming and discarding, business plans for the apps I want to create. My mind gets into monotonous, repetitive loops that drone on for hours.

So I Googled, "How to stop over-thinking," and I came upon the suggestion to overwhelm your senses with external stimuli. Then I remembered how much I liked listening to radio stations that play eclectic music. There's certain stations, like Radio Paradise, that have the most perfect song lists. Eclectic music is tricky, because you can easily overwhelm listeners with too much novelty. If done right though, you can listen to these stations all day, living in the sweet spot in between dullness and over-stimulation.

So I bookmarked a few stations on my iPhone, and set all my car radios and stereos to them as well. Now I'm drenched in a total wall of sound. It's enough stimulation to take me out of my thoughts, but not enough to completely zap my ability to think. That's the problem I had with talk radio. I could only listen to it in bursts, because eventually there'd be something I needed to think about.

So on my walk this morning, I turned on the radio and listened to some pleasant new post-punk song. I had no worries about myself nor about what I was going to do next. Instead, I was left with the pleasant daydreams about classic movie stars walking about, shining in the California sun.¹

Charlotte, my world is being turned upside down because of cognitive therapy. I'm dizzy with how fast my life is changing.

The biggest change has been to my work situation. I've finally snapped out of that never-ending fog of semi-work. You know those long stretches of weeks or months I mentioned, when I burnt through my savings while watching TV shows day-in day-out? I've snapped out of all that. It's so surreal for me to be out-and-about at 2 p.m. in my dress shirt, driving to a meeting with a client, then at 3 p.m. driving back to the bank to deposit a check. Banks are nearly empty at that hour, and this one time when I was weaving through the rope lines, it occured to me that I hadn't deposited a check in more than six months.

And it's all because of cognitive therapy. In one of my sessions, I asked myself to be brutally honest. I told myself to pick a number, between zero and ten, representing how much of a failure I really thought I was (10 being a total failure, 0 being not at all). After stewing on it, I picked the number "3". And as I hit the "3" on my keyboard, I felt like I had just swallowed a bitter pill. It's like I couldn't accept the truth, which is that I haven't really been a failure after college. And just by the act of speculating that I might be okay, my mind felt liberated.

In another session, I asked myself a bold question, "Since you hate your life so much, why don't you list out exactly what you like and dislike about it?" In one column I put down likes, and in another I wrote out dislikes. After five minutes of doing this, the likes column had become three times as long as the dislikes column. I had my health, I wasn't broke, and there was a bright side to my non-employment. I liked that I could wake up whenever I wanted, and I genuinely enjoyed all those episodes of The Sopranos I watched over a short period of time. This may sound like I was encouraging myself to be a bum, but it actually encouraged me to embrace life, with all its imperfections.

I've worked an average of eight hours a day every weekday for the past month. Is the work I'm doing perfect? No. Have I found out what I want to do in life? No. But I'm no longer sitting around waiting for some magical total salvation.¹

Despite how much I'm working, I now have so much more free time. I've redeemed between between two and four hours each day that I used to spend lying on the futon, staring at the ceiling, over-analyzing my life. I now use this extra time to reach out to my friends, even friends I haven't seen in months. I see people nearly every day now, whereas before, I socialized in person about five hours a week.

Ironically, cognitive therapy has caused a new problem in the form of change stress. I've had to limit the frequency of my therapy sessions, because of how overwhelmed I've become. For example, I'm considering buying a condo, and there's a stack of paperwork sitting on my table that I know is going to be a challenge to fill out given how patchy my work-situation has been in the past couple years. But I know I can get through it. I believe in cognitive therapy. And I believe that the changes this past month haven't been a fluke.

Out of all the things I've ever tried, cognitive therapy may just be the one thing that sticks.²

Hi Charlotte,

This week has been really bad. I don't think I've done a single productive thing. My sense of day-night cycles is all messed up again because of my media-consumption binges. The other day, I decided to watch all the Kubrick films I hadn't seen yet, including Psycho, The Shining, 2001, and Full Metal Jacket. I watched them on one computer monitor, while on the other monitor I played video games. Drowning myself in this multimedia bonanza is pretty much the only soothing thing I can do to cope with my otherwise debilitating neuroses. It's either that or spending the whole day thinking about my lack of direction in life and my seemingly endless stretch of being single.

But I haven't given up hope. You remember my New Year's Resolution to quash my neuroses, right? Here's what I've done since the start of the year:

Spiritual practices:

• reading The Purpose-Driven Life and getting all religious
• daily prayer
• meditation

• Kava Kava
• St. John's Wort
• Valerian Root
• 5-HTP

It seems counter-intuitive the way I'm explaining this. You'd think I'd actually be more depressed considering that I've tried so many things that clearly haven't worked. But this list proves to me how determined I am to fix my issues. When I hear a minor suggestion like, "Prayer has been proven to increase happiness levels," rather than writing it off, I look for the original study, I find cross-referencing articles, and I develop a plan to self-experiment. I then keep a log tracking my day-to-day well-being in response to the treatment. After I feel satisfied that I've truly understood something about myself and the treatment, I put it in one of these four categories:

• Things I've tried that had a major impact
• Things I've tried that had some impact
  
• Things I've tried that are not fine
  
• Things I've tried that are questionable

I recently bumped into a meta-analysis¹ on cognitive therapy, which concludes that cognitive therapy is that it is just as effective as Lexapro in reducing levels of anxiety, decreasing depression, etc. And the best part is that it has no physical side effects.

The premise of cognitive therapy is simple. It's that depression is caused primarily by negative distorted thoughts. For example, you might think, "I'm going to get fired." But that's a very black-or-white perspective, and so in cognitive therapy, you would try to "gray" it up. You would ask yourself, "When, exactly, will I get fired? Will I get fired today? Will I get fired in a week? Or is it more like something that will happen in two months? What if I don't even get fired, but rather transferred?"

Even just talking about cognitive therapy makes me feel better. I have plenty of dire thoughts about myself like, "I'm going to be broke," "I've been a failure since college," or "I'm doing nothing with my life." If cognitive therapy is as good as the meta-analysis says it is, then then this could be my ticket to achieving peace-of-mind without destroying my liver or getting other nasty side-effects from a drug like Lexapro.

Or maybe this thought process, this search to free myself is all part of the problem :-) I wonder some times.

I have really negative associations with driving cars as a result of over-thinking. The weather's perfect around this time-of-year, and what's supposed to be a pleasant fifteen-minute drive through the streets of Austin instead turns into a pounding drumbeat of problem-solving about my non-employment situation. When I turn through a bend, and the shade of the oak trees rifle through my sunroof, I should be thinking happy thoughts. Instead, I find myself evaluating the pros and cons of picking a random temp job on craigslist. Instead of smiling when I catch the light reflect off of a stream in the greenbelt, I find that my face is scrunched while I ponder how horrible my life will be when my savings run out before I settle into a new job.

But Charlotte, what if there's a simple solution to all of my problems? What if I just need to make a few behavioral modifications, and I will then cease to be a neurotic person? These questions hit me recently while reading The How of Happiness¹. Of the handful of "Hows" the author discovered in her research, one of them was being able to keep your mind distracted from too many thoughts. She found that people who were less stressed, less neurotic, and less depressed, often had the ability to find activities that stopped them from over-thinking.

So I looked at my life and made an inventory of all of my recent episodes. I then looked for patterns, and found that three recurring situations were party to these episodes:

• Showering
• Walking/Running
  
• Driving

Whenever I do any of these activities, my mind nearly always goes into a downward spiral of anxiety. For a while, the causes remained a mystery, but now I think I figured it out. During each of those activities, there's some basic hum of stimulation. While showering, there's the patter of warm water hitting your back. While driving, there's the rhythm of street signs and cars gently tapping your consciousness. The stimulation is enough to get your mental gears spinning, but not enough to completely engage you. As a result, there's this gap of uncaught mental activity that is liable to turn into neurosis.

I've always attacked myself for thinking too much, as if over-thinking was a character flaw. I've also tried to just will myself to be clear-headed. Sometimes, before turning on the ignition in my car, I'll promise myself, "don't think to much, just relax." For two minutes, I'll be clear-headed, but then after that, like a rubber-band I'll bounce back into a typical Woody Allen style conversation with myself.

But what if the solution is a simple as a distraction device? Do you know how many hours of misery I'd eliminate if I could go through those activities in peace? So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to attack my mind with distraction bombs. For the shower, I bought a waterproof radio, which I then preset to a bunch of talk radio stations. After all, it's hard for me to think while listening to someone talking. For driving, I did the same thing and set all of my presets to talk stations. And finally, for running, I bought a Walkman with an AM/FM tuner.

After trying this for a day, I realized I did not have a single neurotic episode. I just woke up, turned on the radio, and went about my day like a normal human being. I dusted up my resume and considered some job opportunities, but I didn't sit around debating with myself. This saved me a lot of time, and I left for lunch around noon, with the sun high up in the sky, as opposed to leaving at my typical 2:30 p.m.

While driving to the restaurant, I turned the radio on to Rush Limbaugh. I found him in the middle of a rant about how Obama was going to destroy America with his radical left-wing socialist policies. The talk incensed me, and I kept imagining myself at a round-table debate with Limbaugh, humiliating him with counter-arguments. By the time I got out of my car, I realized I had been arguing during the whole drive. But instead of arguing with myself, it was all projected onto that troll of a conservative, and for once I felt good about driving.²

The last 48 hours have been one of the mo st insane experiences of my life. Right after I emailed you a couple days ago, I took one pill of St. John's Wort¹. Thirty minutes later, I slipped into a nearly waking coma. I had hours upon hours where my mind was empty. All the thoughts that had been racing around my head ceased to exist. I remember simply sitting down and staring at the paint on the wall. I remember lying face down, listening to every song on my iPod. Nearly every sensation I had came in loud and clear because there were no thoughts to get in the way. Small sounds, like that of a plate being set down, echoed like a giant tunnel. And even though I couldn't form conscious thoughts, I had an awareness of myself and my surroundings. The contrast between my heightened sensory experience and my inability to form thoughts felt like I was in a straight jacket.

Having dinner with my parents was interesting. I tried really hard to seem normal, but I was unusually quiet. I simply didn't have the motivation to form words. Plus I was really irritated anytime they said anything. After awhile, I could sense they noticed something different in me, and so I had to come clean and tell them what I was up to.

I told them that I had been battling neuroses and depression for years, and that only up until recently was I finally taking appropriate medical steps. Initially they denied my condition. My dad said something like, "Are you sure you're not just stressed out?" I realized I wasn't going to make them fully understand, given that they grew up in a time period and culture that had no concept of depression or therapy². So I tried to repackage my explanation by comparing myself to Woody Allen, who in his movies, is a constant chatterbox, always over-analyzing and over-thinking his life. And I was careful not to mention ever having thought of killing myself.

Nonetheless, my mom got tears in her eyes. My explanation overwhelmed her, and so instead of dwelling on my condition, she talked about herself. She described how she was depressed after giving birth to my brother. She remembered taking Valium, and being in a funk, bed-ridden nearly for an entire year.

In order to turn the mood at dinner around, I spoke confidently about what I was doing next. I told them how I had a plan, and how I had a series of herbal remedies I was going to try first, and that my Plan B was to maybe re-consider seeing a therapist. This seemed to cool them down, and we quickly moved to other topics of conversation. Looking back now, I'm glad I came to the table with my own plan and determination to fix myself. If I hadn't, they would've felt helpless and this short talk could have stretched on for days and weeks, possibly including frantic referrals to therapists or even priests. 

After dinner, I went into my room, closed the door, and stared at the wall again. Another 24 hours of near catatonia passed, 12 hours of which I slept through, I gradually came back to normal. The transition took about three hours, and it was a very blissful time. I felt like I had one foot in the void of St. John's Wort, and another in my old introspective self, which allowed me to pivot back and forth with ease between thinking and non-thinking. But then I returned to my normal self, playing video games to block out thoughts and anxieties about my career and direction in life.

When I reflected on the conversation with my parents, it struck me as weird that I had never talked to them about it before. I'm pretty comfortable sharing my life with my parents, so this surprised me. I wonder if this is similar to why gay people wait so long to tell people they're out of the closet. Half of the process involves the years in which you gradually come out of the closet to yourself. It took me ten years of roller coaster emotions and neuroses before I got the nerve to embark on what I'm doing today. Such is the nature of human denial, I guess.

As for St. John's Wort, I have mixed feelings. The near-coma state I was in wasn't exactly ideal, and so I may grind up another pill and try smaller portions. But what I am excited about is the fact that I'm proving to myself that I can and will attack my problem head on. I feel like I'm now at the beginning of a war, and that this was my Fort Sumter, a strong first battle and rallying cry. If I can keep up this self-experimentation and willingness to try new things, then maybe 2009 will be the year I bury my emotional-mental troubles once and for all.

Hi Charlotte,

I don't know why I came here. My parents really gave me no choice. It was either spend Christmas alone or spend in half-way around the world with them. (I don't see why we couldn't spend it at home in San Diego, like we've always done). When I'm not in spinning in neurosis, I spend nearly the rest of my waking hours in front of my computer playing video games. I bought a fancy headset, and now I spend more time talking to my squadron via voice chat, barking orders about who to shoot on what floor of which burned-out warehouse, than I do talking with people in real life. My parents tell me, "Come meet such-and-such person who holds such-and-such position in the Philippine government," and my stubborn resistance kills them, which in tandem hurts me back somewhat too.

This whole pattern hasn't been good for my mental health. There's a new fancy, sprawling mall nearby, and I meander into it, buy a coffee, and just sit outside by the water fountain, thinking over-and-over again about what I'm going to do about work when I get back to the United States. I haven't worked on any new projects for the past two months. This was supposed to be my dream job¹, and so if I can't hack it, then I have nothing. On the walk back to my parent's condo, I have the most intense, self-destructive, introspective sessions, mostly wondering about why I spend so much time thinking about thinking.

But I think there's a silver lining emerging from this. I had a marathon thought session in the shower again, as I typically do, but this time, I was so deep in mental anguish, writhing with teary-eyes, that I think I reached a tipping point. I kept promising to myself over and over again, "Please, do something about this condition." I cried out, "This has to end, I cannot go on like this, there has to be an answer out there." I repeated the call to myself over and over again, like a mantra, while the hot water droplets turned my skin to wrinkles. Never before had I created such a spike in my consciousness about my mental struggles. When I got out of the shower, I felt like I had created a tower in my mind so tall that I would probably be able to see it for miles and miles into the future, potentially guiding real change through my life.

And then, by the very act of this awareness, I immediately felt better. I went to my computer, but instead of logging on to play video games, I researched in earnest things I hadn't looked into in a long time. Maybe I should try seeing a therapist again. Maybe I should give anti-depressants a second look. Maybe I should try yoga, or meditation, or religion.

Each day is now devoted to a deep knowledge dive into any one of the above suggested ways to fix your mind. Today, I read research paper after research paper on anti-depressants. The process threw me for a loop, because I hadn't realized how many over-the-counter, all-natural anti-depressants there were, many supported by rigorous scientific studies. Which makes complete sense. It's not like humans have only been managing psychic challenges for the past 75 years. Shamans and elixirs are as old as time. The ones I'm going to try are Kava Kava, 5-HTP, Valerian Root, and St. John's Wort. Each one of these could probably keep me busy for a week as I study myself like a scientist.

There's a blueprint for me now. A schedule even! It's like I have a real sense of purpose, which I haven't really felt since 1998, when I worked on winning ThinkQuest. I'm almost glad I got so low on this vacation, rather than letting the status quo continue, with my neuroses just chipping away at my soul for years.

Now there's a enemy in my sights. This is my project. This is my Mt. Everest.

Hi Charlotte,

So finally, for the first time in my life, I met with a therapist. And sadly, this confirmed all my negative stereotypes about them. While it's possible I just got the wrong therapist, I kind of doubt it because he's supposedly the "therapist's therapist", coming highly recommended from my friend's mom who herself is a therapist.

The first thing I see, when I walk up to the receptionist to sign in, is a clipboard with the branding of a drug company on it. This is a bit off-putting. I imagine that if I was a therapist, I'd want to create a sense of trust with my patients, and therefore, I wouldn't want to show any conflict of interest or collaboration with the drug companies.

When I meet the therapist, his room is gorgeous. It's a corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a creek with nice trees. The interior is dark and woody, with old books everywhere. And of course, the couch I sit in is very comfortable. It's so quiet in there, that you can't help but feel calm and zen, listening to the rustle of the trees outside.

I then lay everything out for him methodically. I mention that I have on average, every day or so, an hour or two where I just lay on the floor, analyzing issues in my life. I mention that when I'm around people, sometimes they say things to me that I can't get out in my head for hours later on. I tell him that these aspects of my life are painful and that I want them gone. In addition, I explain how I'm an arm-chair psychologist myself, and that in addition to fixing these problem, I'd also like a better understanding of what's going on.

I spent nearly the whole hour just talking, which now seems weird because the paragraph above is all that's really needed to understand my problem. The rest is all filler. I would rather have spent just the first 30 minutes talking and the second 30 minutes listening. I would have liked for him to explain to me the typical paths to resolution, their pros and cons and their success rates. But instead, at minute 58, he clasped his hands, said a few comforting things and wrote me a prescription to Zoloft.

I was floored by this. "Seriously is this the best you can do?" I thought to myself. He said that Zoloft is a good first-pass for most patients and a way to get started. Get started with what though?? Get started on a path of drug experimentation until I find the right one that works? Is that just his formula? I felt like he gathered no real insight into my condition. I could've told him anything, and the answer every time would've been Zoloft. Why not Lexapro? Why not Xanax? Or maybe he just picked one as a random starting point to get started on a tour of all the anti-depressants so that I'd be on the hook for him indefinitely!

I know you can't expect complete answers in one session, but for the cost of therapy, I can't go on a six-month chemical adventure with semi-weekly check-ups. And that would probably just be the beginning. Plus, I don't think it's worth the strain on my body. I repeatedly mentioned that I'm not really depressed. Sometimes, during my neurotic episodes, it's depressing to realize how much time I've burnt up, but I'm still able to go to work and have friends and lead a normal life. I don't think he caught that nuance. I think it makes a world of a difference to know whether you're prescribing to help someone who thinks too much versus prescribing to help someone with a low mood all the time.

The whole business of therapy is frightening to me. I don't want to be on a leash to this therapist. All incentives are for me to keep failing and for him to catch repeat business. Oh, and there's always the possibility of collaboration with Big Pharma lurking in the background too. My friend said that while therapists are not allowed to accept money from pharmaceutical companies, sales reps often bring lunch for the whole office and the therapist's children. And these aren't boring lunches, like Subway sandwiches. They're from Whole Foods or Central Market. The whole thing just makes me ill.

When I got home, I put the prescription in a folder and locked it in my filing cabinet. I haven't opened it since. My only regret now, though, is not having met with a therapist earlier. That way I could've gotten a taste for it a while ago, rejected it, and not have had to worry about whether I was missing out on something the whole time.¹

Hi Charlotte,

The state I'm in is so weird. I pace in the shower, then pace in my room, then shift uneasily in my computer chair, feeling like I have been listening to a theatrical epic unfold with the voices in my head. All of a sudden the Saturday afternoon sunset will creep in through my blinds, with the light beams bouncing off my brown shag carpet, and it will create an orange glow in this box of a studio apartment I live in. It is then, that I hits me I still haven't gotten dressed from the shower I took five hours ago. It's moments like these when it dawns on me that there's something wrong with the way I think.

On one of these Saturdays, in a fit of frustration, I just Googled random phrases like "Why do I think so much?" and "How do I stop over-thinking?" and eventually I found myself reading on Wikipedia about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Through there, I found a page on this one special case of OCD called "Pure Obsession," or "Pure-O" for short, which led me to this book called  White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts.

When I think of OCD, I'm reminded of that experiment with the mouse that hits a lever to get a dose of heroin. After the first hit, the mouse is in bliss and he doesn't touch it for a while. When the feeling wears off, he races around anxiously looking for the lever. Once he finds it, he gets another dose and he is at ease again. But the feeling doesn't last as long as the first time, so he has to return more quickly, and maybe hit the lever a few more times to get the same effect. After enough rounds, he smashes and smashes the lever over-and-over again until he finally destroys himself.

This is the similar to obsessive hand-washing, obsessive lock-checking, and in the case of Pure-O, obsessive thinking. For me, I start the day with an unwanted thought like, "I'll never find a career that makes me happy." This makes me anxious, and so just like that mouse, I search for something to calm me down. Initially, I ask myself some questions like, "What kind of tasks do you like?" or "What are you unhappy about at work?" To which, I respond, "I don't like having a boss, or I don't like spending 9-to-5 in front a computer, programming."¹ Initially, this will make me feel good, to hear myself assert my preferences. But instead of me just taking those responses and moving on to initiating a job search, the anxiety returns back, and I think again, "I'll never find a career that makes me happy." So I search for more peace, and I return to problem-solving. I open a spreadsheet on my computer, and I list possible alternative careers, like "Web developer for political campaigns." Underneath them, I then write out epic amounts of pros and cons. When I'm finished and have a mountain of text on my screen, I feel like a champ and think I have my problem solved. But I actually haven't solved anything, and the anxious thoughts return, and so I have to quell them again with more thinking, and so on and so forth, until my brain hurts, my vision gets blurry, and my well-being is in the dumps.

After reading this book, I found out there's hope in the form of "exposure and response-prevention therapy." What this entails is to simultaneously expose yourself to the anxiety-inducing stimulus, while also preventing your response to it. It's kind of like how Ben Stiller's character in Along Came Polly willfully eats dirty food off of the pavement and licks his nasty fingers to prove to Polly (played by Jennifer Aniston) that he's finally conquered his play-it-safe, OCD-tendencies. Like Ben, you're supposed to just roll with the negative stimuli. If you're worried about germs, you just say, "Screw it, maybe I'll get sick and die, maybe I won't. Either way, I'm moving on!"

And so one time I did the unthinkable. While I was lying in bed, on the verge of launching into another Shakespearean inner-soliloquy, I confronted myself, "So you'll never find a career that makes you happy? Well... too bad, you'll never find a career that makes you happy!" and I cut myself from any further thinking. When I said that, I got a really big spike in my anxiety, but I managed to get out of bed before thinking about it too much. As I tried cleaning my room, I began to have a pounding feeling in my temples. A few times, I felt a magnet pulling me to my computer. My body so desperately wanted to fill out another online career assessment survey. But I remembered the therapy, and I yanked the power cord out from my computer, thus preventing a response to my anxiety. I then trashed all the scrap paper on my desk so I wouldn't be tempted to write down a self-analysis by hand in lieu of typing my thoughts out.

And then a magical thing happened: the anxiety went away on its own.

I then took a normal-length shower, dressed up, and went out for brunch at an unusual time for me: 10 o'clock. When I walked out, the sun was shining, beautiful people were jogging around in my neighborhood, and as inhaled the fresh air, I felt like I could finally abide by that maxim Carpe Diem.²

Hi Charlotte. Well, we're nearing the end of our time at Stanford. There's a touch of sadness in me, I think, because the largest chapter of my life—schooling—is coming to an end. Even though the computer lab where I'm writing this is packed with students, it feels empty and alone. There are no seniors here, just freshmen and sophomores intensely working on their finals. There was a lot more camaraderie for us back then, when everybody had to take the same auditorium-sized classes. Now, everybody in our year is off doing their own thing, some of whom have already gone off to New York or L.A., on to their next "Stanford."

I'm generally happy with how my experience has been. But what I find frustrating is that I still have the same problems I had freshman year. I'm still insecure, I still over-analyze the things people say to me, and worst of all, I spend too much time, lying on the floor dissatisfied with my direction in life. And this is not just since freshman year of college. I have had these unsolved problems since freshman year of high school! Why is it that, despite eight years of dedicated attention to self-improvement, I'm still the same person?

But instead of this realization bringing me down, it's given me perspective. I feel like how Edison felt during his struggles to develop the light bulb. As he's often quoted, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Likewise, I now have this huge sample of failed attempts at self-improvement, and as a result, patterns have become clear to me.

When I survey all the things I'm unhappy about with myself, there is a common element to all of them. I need to relax more. For every hour I have spent thinking about why I can't be happy alone on a Friday night, I could have saved 30 minutes if I was a more relaxed person. Or for every time I have gotten sick, I could have cut my recovery time in half if my immune system had been boosted with relaxation techniques.

So here's my goal. Between now and when we graduate, I'm going to throw all my energy into making myself more relaxed. If I can make this one meaningful improvement—one meaningful, permanent change—to who I am, then I will have accomplished something much more important to me than any diploma or award ceremony.

Here's my plan for what I call the "Relaxation Regime"

• Download a hundred relaxing movies to watch every night before I go to bed.
• Keep a spreadsheet where every day, I rate myself from 1-99 on how relaxed I felt that day.
• Take 10-minute breaks throughout the day, wherein I daydream about pleasant, relaxing thoughts, like lying on the beach.
• Keep a journal, where everyday, I write down one new idea to help me be more relaxed.

I've already been applying this for a couple days, and I can see the new Phil emerging. I haven't written any over-analytical thoughts in my journals. I haven't spent my bike-rides to school vexing over what to do after college. What if I had a whole three months like this? How peaceful and awesome would that be?

You are what you habitually do. So, I just need to forget everything else, and turn these relaxation exercises into a permanent, natural part of my being. If I can just do that, then maybe I won't feel so sad anymore. ¹