A few weeks ago, I posted about Amishi P. Jha’s Peak Mind, and the possibility that I would see greater returns from meditation if I sat for the length of time she recommends, as frequently as she recommends.

I’m glad to say I succeeded in my experiment! In fact, though Jha says the minimum is five days a week, I managed all seven for four weeks straight. I also followed the techniques she describes, according to the suggested schedule. There are four basic ones (though the text talks about a few others as well), which Jha uses her own names for, but I’ll discuss them in the terms I’ve seen elsewhere:

1) Focus. This is the bedrock of mindfulness, directing your attention to your breath (or whatever anchor you’ve chosen), noticing when it’s strayed — which it will do all the goddamned time, ’cause brains gonna brain — and directing it back to the anchor.

2) Body scan. You shift your attention verrrrrry slowly through your body, observing all its sensations. This practice is good for seeing how your emotional state registers in your body, and building resilience against discomfort and even pain; it turns out we’re more capable of handling those when we try to observe them dispassionately than when we try to ignore them.

3) Open awareness. Not gonna lie, this is the practice I find hardest. Instead of focusing, you let yourself be aware of all the sensory impressions and thoughts you’re having . . . without getting carried away by them. It’s important because you don’t actually want to be focused at all times; sometimes what you need is the ability to be more broadly alert to your environment.

4) Metta/loving-kindness. This sounds like the most touch-feely practice, and, well, it is. You focus on extending compassion to yourself, to someone you love, to someone you don’t know terribly well, to someone you have difficulty with, to your entire community/country/everybody on the planet. This has not only the benefit of fostering more positive mood, but of helping you see other people’s perspectives, rather than always being trapped in your own narrative.

So I did the above techniques for four weeks straight. According to Jha’s research, if I’d been subjected to neurological testing before and after the four weeks, I would now show measurable improvements in tasks of attention, memory, and so forth. Since I do not in fact have a neurologist and her lab handy, I have to resort to less rigorous evaluation — and on those terms, what’s the result?

One of my challenges with meditation has always been that when teachers talk about its benefits, they often say things like “I used to snap at people more often when I was frustrated, but now I’m able to catch myself before I do that, or calm myself and apologize faster.” But purely as a matter of my own personality and behavior . . . I don’t do snapping. Not on a regular basis. (It has happened, but it takes a lot to push me that far.) Ergo, this is not really available to me as a benchmark for progress in mindfulness.

But I do think I’ve noticed some changes. I still forget my train of thought or what I meant to do when I went upstairs, possibly about as often as before, but I think I’m able to retrieve the dropped thought or mission more quickly than I was at the start. When I catch a thought starting up while meditating, I’m able to let go of it faster; I used to feel a much stronger impulse that I had to “finish my thought” before I could go back to my breath. And, specifically in the last week — i.e. the week that introduced metta to the mix — I genuinely feel like I’ve been more inclined to notice and celebrate the good things that happen, even when they’re little.

I’m not at all sure I got those benefits in the past, when I last had a regular mindfulness practice but was only sitting for five or ten minutes a day, rather than the twelve Jha’s research suggests is the minimum. I do think I’m inclined to keep this up, because of course four weeks isn’t “you have now attained everything available;” if I go on practicing, the benefits I see will likely grow stronger. (I suspect this is particularly true on the metta front and noticing the little wins — which is nice because I actively enjoy metta. Far more than I enjoy open awareness, certainly.)

If you’re at all curious about this kind of thing, I do recommend Jha’s book. She brings the science receipts to back up her claims, and if you’re allergic to the Buddhist talk that often accompanies discussions of this subject, Peak Mind is very free of that. The only thing to watch out for is that if you have a lot of unresolved trauma, mindfulness can make that rear its head quite vividly; then you’re in “stop talk to a therapist if this seems like it’s making things worse” territory. But if that’s not your situation, then I think it’s worth giving this a shot!