Tips for increasing consistency?
Hello, I have really bad anxiety and have been meditating somewhat regularly for a couple years now. Meditation has had a profoundly positive impact on my mental health, my sense of self, and my ability to act with intention.
My goal is to meditate every day. Sometimes I am pretty good, I might miss one day a week. Other times, I struggle to maintain consistency and miss like 4-5 days a week. When my consistency is bad, all the anxiety(also other negative emotions) starts creeping back in and I fall back into old coping habits(binging video games).
I'm getting pretty sick of this cycle. Its holding me back in life and making me miserable. Only way I can think to break it is finally solve this consistency problem... but how? If anybody here has been though something similar, what did you do? Is focusing on consistency even the right approach? Feeling kinda lost here tbh.
Ive been trying to analyze what exactly is causing the consistency drops, I'll word vomit some notes here:
Weed. I occasionally like to take an edible(So much fun. Too much) and it almost always puts me in a low mindfulness state and leads me back to my bad habits for a few days or even like a week. 10 days ago was my last usage and it fucked me up pretty bad, still kinda recovering. I've decided I'm done with that and threw away what I had left.
Motivation. When I am actively feeling anxious and miserable, there is a great deal of motivation to get back to meditating. It sometimes takes a few days, especially if I have been having insomnia(more on that later) but I always seem to bounce back once the anxiety kicks in. When I am meditating though, the anxiety becomes much weaker and infrequent... which kinda destroys my motivation to meditate. Leading to more anxiety, which leads to meditating, which leads to... you get the idea.
Insomnia. Sometimes I just can't fall asleep. Unfortunately, I still have to get up at the same time every day for work. So I just get sleep deprived. Which makes it so much harder to meditate. Then when I meditate less, the anxiety comes back, which causes more insomnia! This can spiral out of control sometimes.
Emotional instability. I've been meditating and going to therapy for a couple years now and I truly have made a lot of progress on understanding myself. Though recently I feel like that progress has been creating new problems. Over the last 6ish months I began to curiously and open-mindedly examine some parts of my ego and they kinda just melted away. Parts of my ego that my brain made in order to protect me from emotions it didn't think I could handle. A lot of strange and unfamiliar thoughts and emotions have been bubbling up to the surface ever since. Really intense emotions that I keep losing myself in for days at a time.