SDS 242: Meditation

And before we get started I wanted to say a huge congratulations to all of the women in the audience listening to this because today is International Women’s Day. A huge congratulations ladies and I think I’m speaking on behalf of all of the male audience of this podcast when I say that we love you, we adore you and we want to and we will support you in your careers and your journey into Data Science. We want you to be super successful and really, really empower the world with Data Science. Once again, congratulations on International Women’s Day and let’s dive into the podcast.

Welcome back to the SuperDataScience podcast, ladies and gentlemen, super excited to have you back here on the show. Today is a rainy day and I’m in Tasmania. It’s a very, very lovely, beautiful island at the bottom of Australia. If you haven’t been here yet, highly recommend coming, checking it out. Lots of places here are untouched by humans and they look so spectacular.

And what I wanted to talk about today is meditation. So, many of us have already tried meditation, including myself. And I think it’s an important topic especially for us as data scientists because we use our minds a lot and generally we are mostly analytical type of people. We, we think a lot, we process things a lot. And what you might find is that a lot of the time you get, you just keep thinking.

And one of the problems that I have, one of the biggest challenges I have always faced in life and I’ve only become conscious about in the past couple of years, is actually switching my brain off. Actually finding how to stop the thinking process. I am very grateful for the fact that I’ve developed my analytical capabilities to a strong level that’s helped me a lot of life and many situations, whether it be data science or business or analytical games like chess. And I used to play computer games and just solving problems in life. But at the same time it becomes exhausting if your brain, if your mind is always working, even when you want to relax and switch off, it continuously keeps thinking and analyzing every single situation, every little detail or every little action, conversation, you tend to be overly analytical and it becomes exhausting. And that’s, it’s part of the reason I think why analytical people tend to be more introverted.

That’s because when you’re thinking about everything, you get tired and you want to go and just be by yourself for some time to, to make it easier to relax. Because when there’s other people around you tend to analyze a lot. So with that said there is, I hope this demonstrates the importance of knowing how to use your mind. Actually I really like the idea, which I think is shared by Eckhart Tolle in his The Power of Now, I might be mistaken where this originates, but the idea is actually that your mind is like another part of your body, like your arm for example. You use your biceps for instance, when you need to, you use it to lift boxes or do certain things and so when you need it, you use it. When you don’t, you don’t use it.

The same thing goes for the mind. We should be able to use the mind, our minds, our brains when we actually want to. And so it’s a very alien concept to many of us, including myself. And it takes a lot of getting used to. But ultimately I think everybody will agree it’s a good idea. It’s a good… You feel good if you can control when you want to analyze and when you want to just relax and maybe use your heart or just not think about anything at all. At least having that option would be great. And this is where meditation comes in very handy. This is where meditation, meditation is the practice of us actually getting to better control, better understand and control our own mind so that we don’t have these monkey brains that are just rushing into thought all the time and that are actually controlling our lives.

We want to want to live our lives and use our minds and our analytical capabilities as a tool when we need to and when we want to use them, not let them overwhelm us. That’s what meditation for me is about anyway. So why today? Well, because I’ve dabbled in meditation quite a bit over the past couple of years, on and off. I can’t say I’ve been consistent. So I think the first time I tried was at the end of 2015 or at the end of 2014, I tried for the first time to meditate and really helped me. It was very interesting. But then somehow you need to keep consistent. Somehow I lost track and stopped doing it. So recently I’ve come back to it. And today in the morning, what I use is I use these apps. There’s two apps.

One is called Headspace. Wonderful app by Andy Puddicombe. Hope I’m pronouncing his surname correctly. Very popular worldwide. I used that one originally. Now I’m using a different app called Calm. Also wonderful app. Both of them have free versions. Then they have trials. Headspace has a 30 day trial, Calm has a seven day trial, and of course they have paid versions. By the way, there’s no affiliation. I just have used these apps and I can speak about them. I love them both. They’re both great but not affiliated with them in any sort of way. So they’re, they’re guided meditation. So it’s not just like you sit down, close your eyes and you don’t know what to do. Here you put your earphones in and there’s somebody guiding you through the meditation. And, in the headspace app it’s Andy. In the Calm app so far has been a lady, I forgot her name, but they guide you and they tell you what to focus on.

And every session is different. For instance, today in the Calm APP, so I’ve already done the seven day challenge and I’m doing the 21 day challenge. I think I’m on day five or day six of the 21 day challenge. And today what I learned about is the usefulness of thoughts or mental activity as an addiction. So basically what we find is that we have thoughts going through our mind all the time. And for myself, I kind of feel that or I kind of get into this pattern as if I have an obligation to develop any thought that enters my mind. For instance, let’s say I send somebody an email and then you think that that’s where it ends. And now you have to wait for the reply.

But actually what happens next is I started thinking, okay, how are they going to read this email? How they’re going to possibly respond, or what are the options or how they can respond? What are the actions after that? What if this happens? What if that happens? Then I start thinking through all these scenarios. Whereas actually, probably the right thing to do is to let that go and move onto something new and just wait and see what the reply will be and go from there. Like cross that bridge when you get to. So what the recommendation was in the app today was to actually ask yourself, whenever you have a thought and you, your brain, your mind catches onto it and you start thinking about it more, stop yourself and ask yourself, is this useful? Is this going to be of any use to me or to the project, to the business, to my intentions. Thinking about if there’s going to be any use.

And if it’s not, you just stop thinking about it. I know it’s easy to say it’s much harder to do and even more more difficult it’s to find, to remember to ask yourself is it useful or not? And that’s what meditation is about. It’s about being conscious of your own thinking and observing a thought. Not getting caught up in them, observing them from the side and letting them flow through your mind. So not completely getting rid of thoughts, but letting them flow through your mind and only reacting to the ones that you want to react or developing the ones that you want to develop. That’s kind of like the starting goals of meditation. Then, of course it gets even more interesting from there. So yeah, that’s one take away from here. So even if you’re not going to jump into meditation at all, if that’s not something you were interested in, maybe take this and take this idea and try applying it in your day today or tomorrow and see whatever you catch on to a thought.

Remember this podcast and ask yourself, is this useful? If it is useful, if it is going to be useful for you to think about whatever it is, whether it’s what you’re having for dinner or somebody’s going to react to something or how some, you got hurt in the past week or something that you’re looking forward. If it’s useful, then continue to think about it. If it’s not, then try to move onto a new thought and that will be a huge winner, will be a first step towards controlling your own mind. On the other hand, if you are interested in meditation, those two apps are fantastic. 

Again, they are Headspace and Calm. I’m sure there’s plenty more apps. Usually they come with like a challenge. Usually for instance, a free, the free version has a five day challenge or a seven day challenge or 30 day challenge that you can do and see for yourself if meditation is something that you’d like to get into because if you’re finding yourself getting overwhelmed with thoughts, if you are being overly analytical all the time, don’t worry, you’re not alone. There’s plenty of people who find themselves in exact these situations.

And the good news is that a lot of people have worked very hard on this, both from, their mindfulness states and from science to develop ways to overcome it, to take control of your own thinking. And it is possible to do, I’m on that journey myself. So, hope this podcast is useful for you and I highly encourage you to check out meditation. On that note, thanks so much for being here. I look forward to seeing you back here next time. Until then, happy analyzing.