As part of the Yes Theory gang on YouTube, Thomas Brag is continually advocating for “seeking discomfort” and embracing challenges that push you out of your comfort zone. And as he explains in a recent video essay, one of the greatest personal obstacles he has faced in his life has been trying to find inner peace—something that meditating every single day for the last three years has helped with immensely.
Unlike many of the challenges that Thomas pursues as part of the Yes Theory team, meditating every day wasn’t something the started with the goal of turning it into a video; he was simply seeking different methods to help him manage his anxiety amid an extremely busy lifestyle.
“I think my learning disability probably taught me that if I wasn’t always preparing or working, then I’d either be falling behind, or about to fail very soon,” he says. “And with how uncertain and stressful YouTube can be… I was not growing in a healthy direction mentally. Eventually my anxiety had become so normal that it just became a part of how I felt all the time… I had this constant fear ringing in my head that everything was going to come crashing down any day now.”
Things changed when a friend gifted Thomas a year’s subscription to the Headspace guided meditation app.
“Although I’d heard of meditation before, I wasn’t really interested. I think I assumed I was just way too agitated a person to sit down and meditate,” he says. However, he eventually decided to give it a try. “For the first time in what felt like an entire lifetime, I noticed my own thoughts. By the end of just one 10-minute session, I felt like I’d experienced true peace of mind for the first time in my life.”
However, he soon found that the mindfulness meditation practice he had adopted was a lot harder to do consistently than he first thought. “A lot like sleeping, it’s about applying effort, but not too much,” he says. “Trying not to think, while also not suppressing thoughts. It’s practicing acceptance, without causing inaction.”
Trying to build this practice into his everyday lifestyle over the following months coincided with some positive outcomes in Thomas’ career, but he was surprised by the lack of fulfilment he had assumed he would feel—which led to the pivotal realization that external success does not bring inner peace of mind.
“I struggle with it to this day,” he says. “I create this illusion sometimes, and I have to catch it, that once I hit this future specific goal, that I’m going to be happy. Postponing our happiness in that way is one of the biggest mistakes that I think all of us make.”
Something Thomas began to do was to adopt a “beginner’s mind” in his meditation sessions; in other words, approaching the process with the same curiosity as if he were doing it for the very first time. “Practicing at that level of openness and curiosity is going to transfer to every aspect of your life,” he says.
As was the case for a great many people, Thomas’ biggest personal challenge came when the pandemic hit last year and the world went into lockdown, with no clear expectation of when “normal” life would resume again. “Every plan, every idea, every hope for the future—taken away,” he says. “Some of the panic that I hadn’t felt in years began creeping back in slowly… I once again fell into the trap of trying to use meditation ‘get rid’ of these negative emotions, because I just didn’t want to experience them any more. The problem that happens when we try to suppress emotions is that we get anxious about being anxious.”
One of the most important things he has learned is that negative emotions don’t just “go away,” and that there will always be things that are completely out of our own control. “Embracing the fact that these things are inevitable, but that there are things we can control, we can control our reaction to these things, and focusing our attention on that, creates a much better environment for peace of mind over time,” he says.
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