Did Aman Goel meditate during the JEE preparation?

Social media wasn’t that widespread when I prepared for JEE and so, there was no need to meditate.

What the hell did you just say? Social media and meditation??

Ok, so let us understand why is meditation needed.

Today, we are surrounded by social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Quora, etc. Each of these platforms provides something called a “feed” which shows the latest content. We tend to spend a lot of our time in browsing through the content in this feed. In fact, a lot of us are so much into it, that we just can’t imagine a day without browsing through our Facebook newsfeeds.

What’s the end result?

The result is that the attention span has gone down drastically. We are so used to seeing “new” content at a high velocity that we have lost our attention span. We cannot concentrate for even 5 minutes on a single thing because due to feeds, we have developed a habit of seeing a large amount of content in a given amount of time.

This is where meditation helps - redeveloping your lost attention span, which is very much needed for JEE or for that matter, any mind-intensive activity.

While meditating, you try to concentrate on exactly one thought or object. This helps your mind in forgetting other things and delving deep into that one thought/object. This eventually improves your attention span which may be better called as “concentration”.

Back in 2011 when I was preparing for JEE, I was:

• Not very active on Facebook. I did spend some time but did not do that all day.
• Non-existent on Twitter
• Non-existent on WhatsApp
• Non-existent on Quora

I had a great attention span and I could read and study for hours without getting distracted. As a result, there was no significant need for me to meditate.

Today’s generation needs meditation more than ever before. Here are a few suggestions from me:

• Uninstall social media apps. Apps reduce the access time. If you uninstall them, you are forced to open them on the browser, which is generally slower.
• Don’t keep the apps on the home page. If you cannot uninstall them (for whatever reason), do not keep the apps on the main page of your smartphone. This will increase your access effort because you will have to open the app drawer and navigate.
• Logout of the platform. Force yourself to log in whenever you want to access the social media platform. This will surely increase your access time and thereby decrease your usage.