The fall chill hasn't set in yet in Brooklyn, so I meditate in Prospect Park most of the time. Sometimes when I get back home from meditating, my wife asks me something like, "How was your meditation?"
She's just being nice, of course, and I often respond with something simple. But the truth is that by meditating, I'm trying to escape self-judgment. If I'm comparing one meditation session to another, I'm doing it wrong — the point is to simply watch each breath, to focus on that breath, and to step behind the waterfall of endless thoughts and feelings.
Whether you're talking about secular mindfulness meditation, traditional Buddhist meditation, or any of the many other types of meditation out there, the goal isn't to go for as long or as many days in a row as possible. The goal — always — is to just to be aware of your thoughts and self.
But Headspace tries to make a game of meditation, tracking how long you meditate and how many days in a row you've had a meditation session. The idea, like all such efforts, is to encourage you to keep coming back to the app to improve your scores or keep your streak going.
However, given what meditation is supposed to be about, that game aspect feels tremendously out of place and counterproductive. My colleague Rich Feloni highlighted the danger after he went far deeper down the Headspace rabbit hole than I did.
"On days when I'm tired or running behind schedule, I've found myself faking a meditation session by fast-forwarding the lesson so the app thinks I actually sat through it," Feloni wrote. "Whatever it takes to keep the streak going!"
This is exactly the kind of behavior that an app for guided meditation shouldn't encourage.