To be perfectly honest I kinda cringed at the thought of writing yet another SEO-optimised long-form blog article on the oversaturated cliche niche of meditation. These days every halfwit with a keyboard & a ponytail will virtue scream from the rooftops about their ability to silently with their legs crossed & eyes closed for 15 minutes.
To bury one's head in the sand & forget about life’s problems sounds no more advisable than ignoring your belly rumbling after a Thai curry.
Even though I renounce any association or affiliation to mystic cult leaders, enlightened gurus or dudes in leggins, sadly I must admit I also dig a 20 minute date with the void as much as the next vegan.
A person's stress tolerance is similar to a bottle of coke, throughout the day the bottle gets rocked, knocked & shaken, by midday...
the pressure inside will be uncontainable & will either have you swan diving from the nearest office window or sitting in a clock tower with a sniper rifle.
Either way, the pressure cooker of a demanding career can lead to self-medication, sleep deprivation, chronic health problems, loneliness, isolation & compulsive restroom masturbation breaks.
The front-line artillery barrage of slack messages, email chains, alerts, notifications, doc mentions, spreadsheet reminders, Tinder matches & Instagram DMs all ricochet around inside one’s skull like a pinball machine, all before you even start your actual job. Add to the situation energy drinks, coffee runs, office snacks & working through lunch breaks…no wonder by noon most people have developed motor ticks from burnout.
Even writing these words I feel my teeth grinding & blood pressure rising, but sadly the haunting days of full-time employment only get worse when you save enough runway to make the leap to freelancing or entrepreneurship.
Without the security of a steady paycheck, you’re now on a rollercoaster of white-knuckle solo hustles, competing for side gigs while you pour your heart & soul into that online business that’s not getting traffic yet.
The old saying goes if you don’t have time to meditate, you need to meditate.
With the inescapable backbreaking demands of an adult existence on planet Earth it’s no wonder people turn to vices, shortcuts & quick fixes to get them through the day.
So, let’s cut to the chase. How would even Jack Nicolson handle this much daily pressure without flying over the cuckoo's nest or needing a lobotomy?
Until the day the markets recover & the crypto Gods shower me with decentralised FU money, I keep 3 handy survival ‘tools’ up my sleeve for treading water under the demands of entrepreneurial start-up pressure. (Please note the sarcastic use of the word ‘tool’, turtle-necked art directors that drop this word to describe anything that doesn’t actually plug into a wall, need a firm kick in the baby maker. Read on).
Dave’s ‘tools’:
1. Meditation
2. Nootropics
3. Stoicism
1. Meditation
Firstly, I won’t bore you with a bland, generic & forgettable step-by-step guide on ‘how to meditate’. There are countless yoga serpents & YouTube chodes that’ll welcome you with loving arms into their click funnel should you wish to learn something pretty simple for ‘free’. This article presumes you don’t live under a bridge & have at least flirted with the concept at some point within your undeleted browser history.
To learn to meditate simply close your eyes & stop thinking. That’s it. Class over, invoice in the mail.
I personally visit ‘the void’ at least twice a day every day for literally only 15 minutes each session. This is enough to switch off & reboot with a completely clean slate & flatline my stress levels. I begin around 7.30am when the sun rises & again after lunch to reset after a carb crash.
If you’ve never tried to meditate, learn dude, it’s an investment into your mental health that’s like recharging your iPhone after leaving your apps running in the background all day. This instant reboot will totally change your life if you integrate it into a consistent daily routine & as with any new skill, it requires constant practice to get the hang of, afterall you are teaching your brain a new trick.
2. Nootropics
Again, I know I’m biased here as I’m a medicinal mushroom supplement slinger, so I’m gunna do you a solid & recommend the goodies I take & don’t actually sell (these are not affiliate links either). These 3 bad boys I literally cannot live without, I have all on subscription so I never run out, all affordable, easily available anywhere online & completely safe to take long term.
5-HTP
L-Theanine
Lion’s Mane
As a PTSD recoverer who suffers with chronic anxiety problems, panic attacks, seizures & sleep problems I lean heavily on nootropic stacks that reduce stress, promote calm, give a quiet sense of peacefulness. To be honest all these feel pretty similar, they reduce stress & help me focus when I’m trying to work. I combine these guys together at set times throughout my day to keep me mentally, physically & emotionally balanced.
Stoicism
Yet again, there are F tonnes of online resources available that will do a far better job of explaining this ancient Greek philosophy than I can. However, in a nutshell Stoicism is a non-reactive blueprint on how to live a happier, more grateful & peaceful life on earth.
Void of fairy tales, hocus pocus & spiritual dogma it gives practical, level-headed, real-world ‘tools’ to help keep one's sanity together when the world falls apart at the seams.
Being able to detach from situations, observing & fully accepting the reality of the moment without overreacting or letting external turbulence unbalance the inner compass is the key to deep inner peace. Stoicism, like meditation, is a skill that must be continually practised, polished & perfected, this is an ongoing lifetime commitment that will keep you sane, stable & at peace in times of extreme hardship.
Coincidentally the stoics were also advocates of practising a clockwork daily routine. It seems that monitoring, journaling, tracking, iterating & refining ones day with small micro-adjustments has been...
a practice logged at great length by ancient dudes that now have statues & monuments modelled in their likeness.
Despite personally practising a repetitive ‘life by list’ for over 5 years now, surprisingly my daily habit was not modelled or adopted from a single book, mentor or influential podcaster. It was a just the most logical & obvious system I could cobble together during times of extreme hardship to keep myself sane when my life fell apart with suicidal physical, mental & emotional health problems. It was literally only a few weeks ago that I found the ‘Daily Stoic’ YouTube channel, began watching Ryan Holiday’s content & started to connect the serendipitous dots. Without blowing my own horn here, it turned out (totally by accident), I’d been teaching myself a daily practice that some of the most inspiring people in history had lived & died by.
I am living/ surviving proof & testament to the life-changing power of compounding daily tracked micro adjustments, however this topic goes far beyond the scope of this article & I will write a more detailed post on this at a future date.
3. Mushy Meditation
So you’ve successfully beat your alarm to punch, got the blood pumping with some joy of flex stretching, skipped breakfast, started fasting & brought yourself to life with a morning mushy choca-mocha. After surviving a traffic-dodging office commute, you're 4 hours deep into your Monday, but the predictable post lunch carb crash now fills your head with the familiar fog of drowsy dining & a heavy eye’d need for a power nap. If only you lived in Spain, sipped red wine & was allowed a 2 hour midday shut eye… maybe in your next incarnation (if you put in enough overtime).
So for those of us not lucky enough to live on a mediterranean vineyard, how do we grind through the 2nd half of the day without dozing off face first on our apple keyboards, collecting our final written warning from HR? Time to recharge the batteries, refill the gas tank & rekindle the desktop firefighting with a 20 minute transcendental slate cleaning reset - with a twist.
The Void
Each person will have a preferred meditation technique, from mindfulness, guided apps, binaural music or mantra chanting, regardless which vehicle floats your boat, know that they all take you to the same destination - the void.
The dark empty vacuum of noise, responsibilities or flying F’s given. This is a silent oasis of peace, rest & tranquillity for the overworked & underslept hustler.
Introducing the magic midday mushroom meditation, a concentrated reset that squeezes more juice from the same fruit. Here’s how…
Chewing 2-3 gummies before your daily lunchtime meditation allows you to visit the deepest depths of transcendental lucid realms, birthing a reviving rebirth & a reset day. Put a simpler way; eating a few gummies before you meditate will help you zone out, making the experience way more relaxing & calm. Put a more catchy way - Shroom Booms® gives you wins.
Benefits of a daily mushroom meditation practice:
Maintain inner peace & stoic attitude to life's rapid fire problems
Declutter the mind, clean the slate & empty the mental trash can
Gain limitless focus, expanded capacity & mental clarity
Helps awaken from carb comas for a 2nd half of day revival
Lifelong skill to keep up your sleeve whenever you’re stressed
David Rees
Founder, CEO
Shroomstar™
With a forensic eye for aesthetic detail & Navy SEAL operational discipline, founder, CEO & creative director David Rees drives the strategic business vision of Shroomstar™.
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