The streak.

On most mornings as soon as I wake up, I’ll go to my study and meditate for ten minutes. I’ve been doing this for about ten years now, ever since I discovered mindfulness as a way to improve self-regulation.

I wouldn’t describe myself as having an explosive, volatile personality. But when I was working in some of my previous corporate roles, I noticed myself becoming overly frustrated with the bureaucracy, unhelpful behaviour and politics involved in management and in running big programs.

The goal wasn’t to eradicate the frustration, but to become more mindful of when it started to rear its head. That way I could manage it constructively, and navigate challenging situations more effectively.

It’s certainly not a quick fix, but I’ve noticed that mindfulness meditation has definitely helped me become more aware of my emotions and bodily sensations, which has in turn helped me to quickly identify what state my mind is currently occupying, and how that may be impacting my behaviour.

Obviously you can’t stop emotions from arising, but you can raise your awareness of them to the point that you can attempt to moderate your behaviour. I’m still a work in progress, of course.

You can’t meditate without an app, you know.

You’ve probably heard of monks in caves meditating for years on end, aiming to achieve enlightenment. But they weren’t really meditating – they were just trying to invent the first meditation app.

Of course you don’t need an app to help you meditate, but it’s always helpful when you’re starting out. I began by using Headspace many years ago for guided meditations that walk you through the process.

Then I found out about Sam Harris and his app, Waking Up. I’m a big admirer of Sam’s work and podcast, and the Waking Up app takes a more cerebral approach to meditation than some others. Sam has learned from many of the prominent meditation gurus, and he tends to go into a little more depth than other sources that I have tried.

After a few years of listening to Sam’s guided meditations I wanted to diversify my sources, and have more recently been trying out the Insight Timer app. It hosts literally thousands of teachers, publishing everything from meditations to breathwork techniques to sound healing sessions.

But one thing that I noticed was that this app includes an interesting feature: the streak.

Meditation, gamified.

Gamification has been used for years in software and app development. Essentially, it’s a way of engaging users with a platform by introducing fun game-like features such as scoring and competition.

One way that this is done with some apps is by using the concept of the streak. The streak is simple – essentially each time you meditate, a number increments and your streak gets longer. The first time you meditate, your streak is one. If you meditate again tomorrow it becomes two, and on it goes. But of course if you don’t meditate on a given day, your streak resets to zero, where it begins again.

It’s a compelling feature, because it’s tempting to want to keep increasing your streak. So you keep opening the app and meditating, to maintain the streak. And you might say – like I do – that the streak doesn’t mean anything to you. But I still notice that little flutter of satisfaction when the streak number increments at the end of a meditation.

The cynical among us will say that the streak only exists to keep you coming back to the platform, to ensure the dollars continue to roll in from various monetising features. But others will say that the streak is a way to keep you coming back, so you will keep meditating while you grow your streak. And therefore, you’ll continue to reap the benefits of meditation and increase the chances that you will be able to build a habit.

I can see the merits of both of these arguments, and maybe they are equally valid. It keeps users glued to the platform and increases revenue, while helping them meditate more often.

But should this type of gamification be used when it comes to meditation? I’m not so sure.

The result vs the process.

I’m not a meditation expert or guru, and don’t pretend to be. But one challenge that I feel meditation has always had is its association with the pursuit of enlightenment. The idea that if you meditate enough, you will achieve a state of bliss, or a mental state that allows you to rise above negativity or unpleasant emotions.

And if you go to many popular meditation websites, you’ll see that they try to attract new users by offering enticing benefits. Benefits such as improved sleep, reduced stress and the ability to manage anxiety. They don’t mention enlightenment – which is often associated with many long years of meditation in a cave – because this is probably out of reach for most of the people looking at the website, and it’s a fairly intangible benefit.

Research appears to support the benefits of meditation relating to sleep, stress and anxiety. But I think one of the major downsides of meditation is that it is sometimes positioned as a means of damage control.

That is – I’m stressed, so I will meditate now. I’m feeling anxious, so it’s time to meditate. Or I haven’t been sleeping well, so meditation is what’s required. This type of thinking chases a benefit, rather than seeking to engage in the process for its own sake.

To me, meditation is a form of preparation. You meditate to gain greater awareness of your mental state and the way your body feels. Not in any particular moment – but all the time. You are essentially training your brain to become better at noticing – noticing when your mind is distracted by thought, or swept away in a current of strong emotions.

The streak feature in the app is once again encouraging us to chase a result. The result of one more number added to the streak. So are we meditating to increase (or not break) our streak? Or because we want to meditate?

The benefits of meditation accrue over the long term. Gamification features like the streak encourage us to focus on short-term satisfaction.

What’s wrong with wanting a benefit?

I think it’s natural to want to achieve a benefit – a return on investment for our hard work. But the challenge I see with chasing benefits is that it focuses us on a short time horizon.

When I first started, I remember doing various mindfulness activities and meditations for six months before I even noticed any difference. One day I realised that I had noticed my shoulders becoming tense in a meeting – a signal that I was starting to get frustrated. This might not sound like much, but it was the type of sensation that I had never really been aware of previously.

The focus on short-term targets can be destructive, and I notice this a lot when it comes to the corporate world:

“We need to hit our quarterly numbers!”

This sort of statement is often followed by a flurry of dysfunctional activity as people work later, longer and harder to hit the target by the end of the quarter. The funny thing is that if you actually hit the target one day later than the end of the quarter it would make no practical difference to the organisation, except for in the numbers presented in the quarterly report. And what you have really done is simply robbed the following quarter of a better result.

The meditation streak is similar to the quarterly target. The difference between 180 days of consecutive meditation and 179 is trivial. Wouldn’t it be ironic to become stressed at the prospect of not making it to the 180 mark?

And what would happen if you meditated on your own, without using the app? The process of meditation would still be occurring, even if the number went back to zero. So it may be that the number isn’t necessarily an effective proxy for what the meditation is doing for your mind.

The real danger is that we start chasing an external target, rather than realising that the activity in itself is doing good things for us. And if we’re not careful, we may find that aiming for that external target eventually replaces the purpose for engaging in the process in the first place.

The real problem with the streak.

There is something I find quite perverse about having a streak feature in a meditation app.

Over time, meditation helps us to become better at noticing things. We become more observant of thoughts, emotions and physical sensations. And when we start noticing, we become aware of the impact of our environment on how we function. This means we can take steps to improve.

Essentially when we meditate, we start to have a greater awareness of the forces that pull our minds into distraction, increase stress or that influence us to take an action. The streak is one of these influencing factors. It’s designed to influence people to keep using an app. But the more we meditate, the more aware we become of these types of techniques and how they shape our responses.

Where I struggle is that the app is using a manipulative gamification technique to encourage you to do something that raises your awareness of the technique itself. In order to keep people on the platform, they are relying on one of the techniques that promotes the reward-seeking behaviour that meditation can help to notice and help us become less reactive to.

So when that small number increments at the end of my meditation and I notice that little flutter of satisfaction from achieving a new record, I start to resent the fact that the streak is there in the first place.