How Meditation and Mindfulness Help in Hard Times

Truth is, they often don't help at all, at least in the short term

Photo by Simon Godfrey on Unsplash

My situation:
I am still going through the situation with my daughter (whom I wrote about in my last essay), who is afraid, resisting her divorce settlement and payout, and teetering on the edge of homelessness. I know from your comments on my essays that many of you have gone through, or are going through, similar heartbreaking situations. Logical thinking doesn’t help — it’s like a riddle I can’t solve, or a name that’s on the tip of my tongue that I can’t remember.

I’ve decided not to be more specific, as I don’t have my family members’ permission to write about them. I will just say this year has been the saddest, most stressful year of my life.

But I carry on, doing the best I can.

The promise of meditation

As a fervent advocate for meditation and the mindfulness that results from it, I want to write here about how meditation helps or doesn’t help in times of high stress in our lives — based on my experience.

There is a lot of promising research on how meditation can help with stress, anxiety, and worry. But in my writing, I tend to focus most on my subjective experience. I hope others will learn from it.

My sister asked me what I’m doing to take care of myself during these difficult times. And my answer was, I’m just living through it. I meditate, and that doesn’t help much in the moment. I write, and that helps a lot (when I can). It would probably help to see a therapist, and I’m looking into that.

But after this year of stress, I’m learning to temper my enthusiasm for meditation and mindfulness as solutions to stressful situations. Meditation is very helpful with stress, but my advice is not to suddenly grab onto meditation to help when you have little or no experience with it. You definitely should start meditating if you desire, but don’t expect immediate results.

One thing I have learned amid all this stress is the limits of meditation in the short term. It has been ten days since I meditated or published an article. But this morning I meditated for half an hour, let go of my thoughts, and it felt good. It really helped me set the tone for my difficult day. But I couldn’t have settled into the stillness like that without years of meditation practice.

Meditation helps in the long run.

Meditating daily for five years has helped me build a reserve of mindfulness I can draw on when times get tough. It’s like a savings account of mindfulness that you can draw on when you need it.

When I’m mindful, I can concentrate better, focus my attention like a laser, analyze a situation, and home in on the most important thing to do first. Meditation is not only my relaxation technique— it energizes me and allows me to be a more effective human being. And the past 12 months have been a proving ground for this hypothesis.

When I first started meditating daily, there wasn’t much mindfulness in my account. But I kept adding to it day by day and week by week. But at that time, what helped most during stressful times was taking action: making a to-do list, getting therapy, exercising, and talking with friends. And my daily meditation became a foundation for such self-help.

In my experience, over the long term, meditation will give you results you can take to the bank.

Writing down your life

The first piece I ever published online, five years ago, was titled “Six Achievable Ways to Energize Your Meditation Practice.” My first essay was a typical beginner’s effort: it had a boring title, boring text, it got three “sympathy” comments from nice people, and it earned $4.85 over its lifetime.

But it’s the essay I’m most proud of because it was the culmination of a year of fear, which I conquered by publishing it. I was so afraid of putting my writing out in public that it used to take half an hour to make a simple comment on someone’s essay.

The fact that I’m still writing, five years later, is one of my proudest achievements. It has enriched my life by giving me something to hang my hat on — to have an answer to the question, “What do you do?”

I’m a writer, I tell them.

Plus, how would I really know what I think if I didn’t write it down? Writing has given me more insight into who I am than all my hours of therapy or the many college classes I’ve sat through. I’m often surprised at my insights into old age and life in general.

My only regret is that I waited until I was 75 before I started writing. But I began, and I continue five years later. And I’m continually amazed at the comments I get from my readers, who seem to resonate with what I have to say.

And my meditation practice is the invisible, underlying foundation for my writing. One cannot exist without the other. I began meditating daily and yearning to be a writer in the very same month in 2020.

Hopefully, the flavor of the present moment shows up in my essays. I know I have some wisdom to offer people of a certain age. So I’ll keep on writing down my life and sharing it with you.

Gary
January 2026