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This Meditation Exercise Builds Mental Muscle and Cures Procrastination

Meditation can help solve procrastination—it’s like mental pushups to help you improve your focus.

Imagine always having the strongest mind in the room.

That would mean being smart, sure.

But more importantly, you’d be grounded and unflappable. No emotion would corrupt your judgement. No distraction would diminish your focus.

This is trainable just like when you hit the gym.

What follows is an exercise that comes from my coaching and combines a meditation strategy that Will Kabat-Zinn taught me with a procrastination strategy that Tim Pychyl taught me.

Will is a long time meditation teacher. Tim studies procrastination as a professor at Carleton.

The “I Am Aware” Five Minute Meditation

This meditation exercise is a very simple twist on breath based mindfulness meditation. The twist revolves around the phrase “I am aware that…”

1. Close your eyes.
2. Start counting your breath. Shoot to count 50 breaths. That’s 5–10 minutes.
3. Your mind is going to wander. When it does make a mental note of…