• Timed meditation.
• Guided meditation? Could agree them on Insight Timer.
• Need to think about how I learned visualisation and embodied stuff besides just trial-and-error.

Meditation and exercise

AKA "the exercise metaphor"

Meditation is comparable to strength training.

• The people who don't do it, and think they can't do it, need it most.
• It relieves stress and improves well-being overall.
• It seems to be serotonergic.
• You improve quickly at low levels. Diminishing returns at high levels.
• But high performers report similar weird experiences as they get better.
• Too much may cause injuries, but that's no excuse not to do it at all.
• Not doing it leads to a kind of "spiritual obesity" or "mental obesity." Just as obese people cannot handle the physical challenges of life, unless artificially reduced with technology/interventions, spiritually obese people cannot handle the mental challenges of life without protection.
• It involves controlled doses of acute stress followed by rest, to improve stress tolerance, but confers benefits beyond just tolerance to that specific type of stress.
• The theory behind it matters little; the practice matters

The exercise metaphor is not a metaphor

Related to Meditation and exercise.

Today read this article in trying to figure out the number of reps to do. It may be worth revisiting, but the overall argument is that strength is a practice and that most gains, especially early on, are neural. This has all sorts of consequences that I need to think through, but the first is that my analogy between meditation and exercise may not be an analogy at all. It may be one and the same process, mental and physical exercise.

They require different actions, of course, just as learning to dance entails different actions than learning to speak a language, or learning to cook. But methodologically they are similar, requiring attention and other process attributes. And if the article is right, then it's literally the same underlying mechanism. I.e., training your mind is putting it under acute and artificial stress for some duration, which leads to neural pathways being built when you subsequently rest. Result: mental fitness. Training your body is putting it under acute and artificial stress for some duration, which leads to neural pathways being built when you subsequently rest. Result: physical fitness.

It's really interesting that it's not just something like "endurance" (I mostly thought of running/cardio). But actual strength is a question of neural connections, that early strength gains are actually neurological in nature, to do with pathways from motor neurons to muscles. Eventually, new muscles need to be built or expanded (possibly bro science). But initially the changes are neurological, just like the changes in the brain. This means that Barbara Oakley is probably right, that all forms of learning are the same. It also partly explains why rest is needed for learning, the diffuse mode that she describes.

Connects to the Synaptic Homeostasis Hypothesis as well, in the sense that for both physical and mental exercise, the day is for potentiation, for synaptic strengthening, whereas the night is for optimisation, for reduction, simplification, which results in improved signal-to-noise ratios. And maybe even reduces the number/strength of neurons involved in moving a muscle. Someone who is stronger may not have bigger/better muscles, but just better control. And the control might be from a minimisation of neurons involved in moving. In that case, the movement takes less mental energy to do.