A YouTuber who meditated for 1,000 days straight says it’s transformed his mental health. Thomas Brag is part of the Yes Theory gang on the platform and is continuously advocating for embracing challenges that push you out of your comfort zone. In a recent video, he explained how one of his biggest obstacles in life has been trying to find inner peace, and what helped him was beginning to meditate every single day for the last three years.
Thomas takes on a lot of challenges on the Yes Theory page, but meditating wasn’t something he initially thought of turning into a video. For him, this was a way of seeking methods to help him manage the anxiety of his busy lifestyle.
“I think my learning disability probably taught me that if I wasn’t always preparing for working, then I’d either be falling behind or about to fail very soon,” Thomas told Men’s Health.
When a friend gifted Thomas a year’s subscription to the Headspace guided meditation app, things changed for him.
“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.” When he eventually gave it a try, he says he began to notice his own thoughts. His first session felt like a lifetime. “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.”
Thomas kept trying to build this meditation practice into his daily lifestyle, and over the following months, he had some positive outcomes in his career. But those outcomes didn’t produce the fulfillment he assumed he would feel – leading to a realization that external success doesn’t 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.”
When the pandemic hit last year, and the world went into lockdown, Thomas said it brought some of the panics that he hadn’t felt in years. “I once again fell into the trap of trying to use meditation to ‘get rid’ of these negative emotions, because I just didn’t want to experience them anymore. The problem that happens when we try to suppress emotions is that we get anxious about being anxious.”
Something that he has learned from this experience is that negative emotions don’t just “go away,” and there will always be things that are inevitable. “But there are things that 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 said.
