Breathe.
Meditation is a powerful tool for training attention and increasing your ability to focus.
The greatest benefits of meditation will come from practicing for extended periods each day over the course of many months and years, but any amount of meditation is valuable.
Just as weightlifting is good for your body even if you cannot bench press twice your body weight, meditating even for ten or fifteen minutes can have great benefits for your mind.
Read this post and decide if you want to incorporate meditation into your bar exam studies.
Why does training your attention matter for bar exam prep?
It matters because life is a constant series of distractions, with all sorts of people, events, and thoughts pulling us in all directions. If we lack the ability to concentrate or prioritize, we can get overwhelmed very quickly.
As Sharon Salzberg puts it in her wonderful book, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation, “Distractions waste our energy; concentration restores it to us.”
When we strengthen our ability to concentrate, we can focus on tasks at hand and accomplish them more quickly and more successfully. Obviously, this can be very helpful for bar exam preparation.
Scientific studies have shown that meditation strengthens the areas of the brain involved in memory, learning, and emotional flexibility. Meditation has been shown to decrease the size of the amygdala, which correlated with lowered stress levels.
At least one fMRI study has shown that experienced meditators are much more efficient than non-meditators at dropping extraneous thoughts and focusing on tasks at hand even while bombarded by stimuli. This study suggests that meditation can help with anxiety and depression and other conditions characterized by “excessive rumination.”
How Do I Start Meditating?
If you want to try using meditation to increase your concentration, then you can start with the classic breath meditation. You will want to budget at least fifteen minutes for this.
First, sit or recline in a comfortable position and relax. (You can close your eyes or just try gazing at a spot a few feet in front of you.) Now, as you relax, your breathing will settle quickly into a consistent pattern.
When your breath has fallen into a regular pattern, you can proceed in one of two ways.
One way is to simply notice a particular sensation in your body related to your breath. For example, can you feel your ribs pressing against your skin? Do you notice your belly moving in and out? Feel the breath moving in and out of your nostrils?
The other way to go is to use a verbal reminder and say something to yourself like, “Breathing in. Breathing out.” Or, “one” during the in breath and “two” during the out breath.
The purpose of focusing on a particular bodily sensation or following the breath or saying a word is to keep the mind focused exclusively on the breath. You want to train your mind to focus on a single thing.
Of course, many thoughts will arise as you are trying to focus on the breath. Thoughts like, “I have so much reading to do, why am I wasting my time just sitting here?” or “I wonder what’s on TV tonight?” or “I really like chocolate” or “I hate so-and-so.”
When these thoughts and distractions arise, just notice them and let them go. Do not belittle yourself for being unable to concentrate perfectly on your breath. Perfection is impossible!
The Purpose of Meditation
The purpose of meditation is not to blank-out your mind but to train the mind to concentrate on what is important at that moment. So, you are training your mind to focus on something elemental and natural: sensation or breath.
The idea is that you are training your mind to acknowledge distractions and then let them go so that you can return to the task at hand.
This is the practical application of meditation to bar exam preparation (and to life): You will get distracted; what matters is how you respond to the distraction.
Additional Benefits of Meditation
Beyond the benefits for learning to ignore distractions and stay focused, meditation provides your mind with a rest break.
During the hours and hours you are studying for the bar exam, you are using your discursive, logical brain. It gets fatigued.
The meditation I’ve described, when done consistently, gives that part of the brain a break from its constant thinking and chattering. By learning to “turn off” or at least quiet that part of our minds, we allow it to recover and be stronger because it has rested.
If you would like more information about meditation, I highly recommend reading Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation, by Sharon Salzberg. Salzberg’s book teaches you many different meditation techniques and comes with a CD of guided meditations that are very useful for beginning meditators.
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