Does Meditation Help With Laziness?

Meditation can provide a sense of direction for many, helping in many ways of our lives that are many times unintended, but because the meditation closely aligns with our personal goals or subconscious, changes that bring us closer become more evident. 

But some people don’t feel motivated to meditate, and thus, laziness is what makes them put off the meditation practice. 

There’s also the other laziness, outside the meditation, which often pertains to the lack of motivation to do or pursue something, even if said thing is meaningful. 

For this occasion, we explore how meditation can be used as a tool to overcome laziness and whether it’s effective, to begin with. Laziness is quite common, and so is giving up on meditation. 

We are naturally wired to have high expectations and feel like things are in our control, even if they always aren’t, which, not achieving, can contribute to laziness. 

However, does meditation help with laziness? Yes, meditation trains your mind to be more disciplined and live in the moment, as well as boosting your energy and removing the clutter in your mind, which in turn, makes you less likely to be lazy. 

I’ll dive deeper and explain how meditation helps you with laziness, to the point where it almost becomes obsolete.

Meditation Gives You Self-Control

How many times have you surrendered your control to your mind, under the guise of feeling good in the now, but having that good feeling swap away once what your mind was set to do is done? 

It happens to the best of us, and there isn’t a single individual on this planet that’s disciplined one hundred percent of the time, but many have the mindset of all in or nothing. 

The thinking goes like this “If I miss a day of meditation, it’s over and I have to start over again, all the progress I’ve made so far would’ve meant nothing.” Thus, it doesn’t make any logical sense to start over again. 

But it’s okay to have days where you fall back. However, when you cultivate the habit of meditation, you’re naturally gonna want to meditate on your own, and not doing it will make you feel like you’re missing out on something. 

Thus, having self-control becomes easier. Aside from training your discipline with meditation, there’s a pleasant part about meditation. 

When you find the meditation that speaks to you, you no longer have to “try” to meditate, you’re naturally drawn to it. Because of the prolonged good sensations that meditation produces, which is long-lasting. Unlike the mind’s dopamine that vanishes after just a few seconds. 

With self-control, you’re less likely to be lazy, and that applies to any habit. Cultivating the habit of meditation, in the beginning, can be hard, and won’t always be a walk in the park. It’s not so much the practice or doing it that’s hard, it’s the forecast of the mind that often dissuades people from doing anything in general – not just meditation. 

How you think something is gonna be compared to how it’s actually going to be has a major gap, so aside from getting the self-control you need to do a certain thing with meditation, you’re less susceptible to the manipulation of the mind that often seeks comfort. The comfort zone doesn’t allow us to grow. 

There can be some discomfort to meditation, but in the end, it becomes worth it considering we end up mastering a part of ourselves we previously didn’t think possible, because of the fact that meditation expands our mind. 

Meditation Gives You Mental Strength

By meditating, you open your mind up to any type of thoughts. These thoughts are thoughts you shouldn’t dwell on but allow to exist in your mind. Over time, the less bothered you become by it. 

At the start, it can be overwhelming, but not after some time meditating and becoming comfortable with these thoughts. It’s not so much eliminating a negative thought as learning to live with it. 

There’s always going to be some negativity surrounding us, but we control our reactions because of our mental strength. In contrast, a mind that’s weak is more susceptible to laziness. 

Negative thoughts can dissuade us from doing anything or make us feel hindered. By learning to coexist with those, with the mental strength you get from meditation, you’re not as worried about judgment or failure as you were before. 

These thoughts to begin with, often emanate from an uncertain future or a past that we’re subconsciously judging ourselves for. Meditation brings your attention to the now and lets you deal with the present in its raw form. 

With the mental strength that you get from meditation, you push through without the hindrance that comes from negative thoughts. Negative thoughts which often create a lack of motivation or desire can also manifest laziness. 

Having A Goal With Meditation

The more clear your goal with meditation is, the less likely you are to procrastinate on it. But when I talk about laziness, I don’t just talk about laziness in relation to meditation. I also talk about laziness outside of meditation. 

With a clear goal in mind, the meditation feels less purposeful and you’re more likely to continue the practice as you know what you want from it, rather than just meditating for the sake of it because you’ve heard about the general benefits of meditation. 

Even if these general benefits can assist you in very specific goals, having a specific goal with meditation makes you less likely to abandon the practice. There’s no wrong reason to start meditating, as long as you start. 

The more of a sense of direction you have, the less likely you are to procrastinate. Being lazy can often come as a response to a hard situation we have in front of us. 

With an end goal, you can use meditation in a way that makes more logical sense to you, especially considering that meditation allows you to be a better problem solver by expanding your angles in which you can tackle a certain problem or even opening avenues in which you can approach a certain goal, especially because meditation is such a personal experience where you get to know parts of yourself you weren’t aware of before. 

There’s a lot of value to spending time with yourself and listening to your thoughts. And many people underestimate the importance of having a goal while meditating, but just recommend meditation as a solution to everyone’s problem. 

And while it’s fine to practice meditation for the sake of practicing it, (as I said, there aren’t any wrong reasons) in my experience, the more focused you are on what you want, the more you can make of that meditation. 

It doesn’t even have to be a complicated goal. Your goal can be as simple as wanting to live a more stress-free day-to-day or sleep better. To even bigger goals pertaining to achievements and success. 

Not Operating on Autopilot

As you’re aware by now, meditation allows you to experience the present moment to its fullest extent. The practice serves as a way to de-robotize yourself and take awareness of what’s currently happening. 

The more you feel like you are in control of something, the less your mind hesitates to act. Not meditating is like letting life happen to you, whereas meditating is piloting your mind to a direction that serves you to a better degree. It goes hand in hand with having a goal with meditation as it’s one point that complements that. 

A mind free of the burden of worry is a freer mind, able to think beyond the scope of the clutter. 

There’s often a lot of clutter on the mind that helps the mind to think. When you stop living on autopilot, you clean through that clutter and get a sharper vision. Thus, this sense of direction makes it less likely for laziness to remain. 

Now, this is not to say in any way that meditation alone is the solution to laziness, but it certainly can be, considering its characteristics and considering that laziness often comes from sources that meditation is supposed to eliminate. 

But laziness isn’t always negative. Sometimes it makes sense to be lazy and may come as a way for the mind to find an easy solution to a problem where not much hard work is needed, in that case, there’s nothing wrong with laziness there but this isn’t the type of laziness I’m targeting. 

When I talk about laziness, I talk about the crippling laziness that antagonizes any progress whatsoever. The more you take awareness of what’s happening, as with being on the now and not letting the mind go on autopilot, the more you can do anything about it and the more motivated you’ll be to do anything about it.