It was in Marilyn Nelson’s college course on Poetry that I first meditated. I sat in the back, next to the stoned kid (there’s always one), on the first day of the semester. About five minutes after the class was supposed to start she suggested that we try meditation. I didn’t want to. That was for hippies. I was in the middle of a contrarian phase; “you can’t tell me what to do.”

She asked the class to close their eyes and just quiet down before we jumped into our poetry lesson. Everyone else closed their eyes, the stoned kid may have fallen asleep, and I, begrudgingly, closed my eyes.

For five minutes I sat with my eyes closed. Prof. Nelson gave directions to guide students new to the practice. “Imagine your breath entering your lungs. Think of the word ‘in’ when you inhale, and ‘out’ when you exhale.” I resisted, and with my eyes shut I didn’t think of a thing.

That semester was the last of my meditation in College. Most people meditate to manage stress, but I was already self-medicating with marijuana; what did I need to meditate for?

It wasn’t until this past Sunday (Feb. 11) that I re-considered my long-standing abstinence from the practice. Like most people, the winter months get to me eventually. On top of that, I’ve been writing consistently throughout the winter working on a book proposal (seriously), a screenplay (for fun), and the posts here on Medium. So, I’ve been working from home, on my computer, living almost entirely in my head except for that brief reprieve I get from exercise.

And I can feel it. My brain can feel it. As Adam Gopnik put it in a recent New Yorker article, “laboring in your head, exclusively, does feel unnatural; whatever else we might have been doing, back out there on the primeval savannah, we weren’t sitting and moving the ends of our fingers minutely on a stone surface for six hours at a stretch.”

He states elsewhere in that article that it’s a bore to hear how writing is hard work. It isn’t easy to describe what it feels like to write for long stretches of time, but it is mentally straining. Seamus Heaney does writing the most service in his most famous poem “Digging” when he compares the digging of his father to the digging of his pen. Bob Dylan said it more succinctly; “I need a dump truck, baby, to/ unload my head.”

I was struck with a case of mental fatigue, the lobes of my brain as two tired arms from digging the peat. I started turning into a mindless puddle of meat, cell phone in one hand, laptop in front of me. Checking Twitter every five seconds. Clicking links to meaningless slideshows. Watching clips on YouTube. Looking for something to watch on Netflix. Facebook.

It was when I turned on a Jerry Seinfeld stand-up that I reached my wits end. I was messaging a friend, watching the video, looking him up on Wikipedia, then his wife, then his wife’s book… I was fried. And it was a link on sidebar of YouTube that made me realize that I had to do something.

Apparently Seinfeld has been meditating for forty years. I, of course, knew that he meditated, it’s right there on his Wikipedia page. But I took it as a sign.

It was time to start meditating again.

Unlike Dylan, I don’t need a dump truck to unload my head, I needed the gas to get the truck going. And what Seinfeld described sounded perfect. It gives you a mental boost.

I did some research that same night. I was already familiar with Transcendental Meditation from The Beatles and the David Lynch Foundation, but I decided that while it might have an elite base of promoters (people whose creativity I admire), I did not want to pay for my chance at mental harmony.

I read about Mindfulness Meditation, which has been making the rounds in Business and Academic Circles (including Twitter and Medium founder Ev Williams). And while I like the idea of positive thinking, I cannot drink the kool-aid. Something about the idea that you have to be non-judgmental does not sit well with me.

It was the next day that I decided that I would meditate on my own. I prefer to be unaffiliated with any organization, and especially organizations with hazy religious affiliations. About ten in the morning, I sat in my bed, straight up and closed my eyes for ten minutes trying not to think about anything. I repeated this again in the afternoon, and again this morning.

Shockingly, I already feel better.

This is one of the big grey areas of Meditation, whoever it’s affiliated with. Does it actually help you, medically, to reduce stress, to reduce pain, or to some possible mental advantage?

Studies from Yale and Harvard suggest that there is, indeed, a benefit to meditating. One result from the Yale study seems to suggest that even the suggestion that Meditation works, helps reduce feelings of pain. And while I would not call my three attempts at meditation a miracle turnaround, I still feel noticeably better than I did before.

The most interesting thing that occurred when I was meditating was the quick realization that I had a brain at all. As crazy as that sounds, I think there’s a very reasonable explanation for this. When I was watching the Seinfeld video that started this journey, I was so entwined with technology that I couldn’t discern what makes me any different. It’s the singularity here already.

But buzzing up there in my head isn’t a motherboard, it is flesh and blood. While trying to quiet my brain, it was trying to remind me not to forget it. And that is an important fact to remember sitting here in a dimly lit living room, computer screen the only source of light outside of the setting sun, with little red and green dots lighting up the room letting me know my devices are there when I need them. (Ironically, I use my iPhone to time my meditation).

If we want to keep up this kind of relationship with our devices, we need to spend some time away from them. We need to give our brains a rest during our waking hours. And meditation might be the answer.