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Table of Contents

• The Catastrophe of Unawareness

  • The Catastrophe of Unawareness in practice

  • My experience

• Augmented Awareness

  • Augmented Awareness in practice

  • My experience (again)

• How To Stop Feeling Stressed and Improve Your Life …

  • 1. Choose duration

  • 2. Create Implementation Intention

  • 3. Calendarise daily meditation

  • 4. Select app

  • 5. Don’t break the chain

  • 6. Start tomorrow

• Simple Summary

  • The Lesson

  • Cya

Stop feeling stressed all the time and improve your life.

Here are 6 steps for how you can do both of those things, starting tomorrow.

You don’t need to be an expert to do this.

You don’t need to know anything.

All you need is the willingness to change.

If you have this, you can conquer the issue that’s ruining 99% of people’s lives today.

And you can upgrade your brain to improve every single aspect of life.

I thought this was too good to be true.

I was wrong.

The Catastrophe of Unawareness

Unawareness is the enemy.

It refers to not being mindful of your environment, actions or the effects of those actions.

Think: an inability to put things into perspective.

We’re not talking about productive daydreaming here.

We’re talking about being physically present but mentally absent to such an extent that the purity of every moment is diluted.

The most alarming thing about unawareness is that you don’t know you’re a victim of it.

Until you do — and then everything changes (more on this below).

This is the Catastrophe of Unawareness.

It’s the plight of modern society.

Our minds are weighed down by the past and fixated on the future; never buoyant in the present moment.

You know the feeling.

Everyone does.

But the problem is not how many people experience unawareness. It’s how often.

The Catastrophe of Unawareness in practice

Consider these examples:

You’re chilling on the couch after a long day at work, scrolling on Instagram. Your partner just walked through the front door and asked you how your day was.

• You say ‘Not bad,’ while watching a reel of Ryan Gosling singing I’m Just Ken at the Oscars.

• Your partner wanted your attention and a more thoughtful answer, but you were too unaware to realise it.

You’re at work. Your boss just responded to the email you sent her yesterday with a report you’ve been working on.

• You nervously open the email and see she’s pointed out “A few things to fix before the end of the day.”

• Your anxious brain experiences a whirlwind of negative thoughts:

  • “I’m incompetent”

  • “I will never be promoted”

  • “My boss hates me”

• You fall victim to your anxious brain and its reactive thoughts. But you’re too unaware to realise it.

You’ve just published a post on Threads. You keep refreshing the feed to see whether it’s getting good engagement.

• Two minutes pass, and… nothing. You start thinking:

  • “I'm not good enough.”

  • “I should quit.”

  • “People don't like me.”

• You’re too unaware to understand what these thoughts really are.

My experience

Those are three pretty trivial examples.

Unawareness is catastrophic because it can lead you down a path you hate.

I studied law from 2016-2021. The 6-year journey involved a 3-year undergraduate degree and a 3-year postgraduate degree.

In 2019, at the beginning of my postgrad, my depression reached a new level of… well… depression.

So I went on anti-depressants.

They worked.

Too much.

I remember my ex and I called it quits on a Saturday afternoon and going to the library immediately afterwards as though nothing happened.

I couldn’t feel anything.

I didn’t like that.

In August 2020 I came off the anti-depressants.

It was bitter-sweet.

I started feeling emotions again, but I lacked the awareness to understand and control them.

So they controlled me.

This led to having a panic attack immediately before my Corporations Law exam in November 2020.

I was hyperventilating in the passenger seat as my grandma was driving me to the exam venue.

We arrived at the car park. I looked at Gigi — what I call my grandma — and said,

“I can’t do this.”

So we drove straight to the GP, got a doctor’s note, and deferred the exam until January 2021.

A lot went wrong in the second half of 2020. And I knew I had to make a lot of changes to right those wrongs in 2021.

I just didn’t know what those changes were.

Unawareness is the enemy.

Augmented Awareness

Presence is the greatest present.

To yourself, and others.

When you’re present with yourself, you observe your thoughts instead of becoming your thoughts.

For instance, you observe you’re feeling angry instead of becoming angry.

See the difference?

When you’re present with others, your mind turns outwards.

For instance, you’re not ruminating on the passive-aggressive email from your property manager at dinner with your mate. Nor thinking about what you’re going to say next while they’re talking to you.

Your attention is simply on your mate. You’re appreciating the perfection of every moment, unaffected by the past or future.

The goal is to recapture awareness in as many moments as possible to augment our life experience.

The goal is Augmented Awareness.

It’s like augmented reality, but you don’t need new hardware.

Your brain is the hardware.

You just need to update its software.

What happens if you do the update?

Augmented Awareness in practice

Let’s return to our earlier examples and take a look.

You’re chilling on the couch after a long day at work, scrolling on Instagram. Your partner just walked through the front door and asked you how your day was.

• Two options here:

  1. You say, “Hey honey, I want to be present with you. I’m just watching a reel. It’s got 30 seconds left. Do you mind if I finish watching it? Then I’m gonna put my phone away and tell you all about my day.”

  2. You put your phone down and out of site immediately, and you start telling them all about your day.

• Your partner wanted your attention and a more thoughtful answer. This time you had the awareness to realise it.

You’re at work. Your boss just responded to the email you sent her yesterday with a report you’ve been working on.

• You understand this very moment has been anxiety-inducing in the past. So you take a few box breaths (4-second inhale through the nose, 4-second hold, 4-second exhale through the mouth, 4-second hold, repeat 🔁) to relax your nervous system

• You calmly open the email and see she’s pointed out “A few things to fix before the end of the day.”

• Your mindful brain has the following thoughts:

  • “I can’t improve without feedback.”

  • “Good feedback will help me get promoted.”

  • “It’s great that my boss has taken the time to give me such feedback.”

• Your mindful brain always had the capacity to have these thoughts. This time you had the awareness to realise them.

You’ve just published a post on Threads. You refresh the feed to see whether it’s getting good engagement. A few minutes pass, and nothing. No likes, comments, replies, reposts. Nothing.

• Then you remember:

  • Thoughts about not being good enough or liked are precisely that. They’re thoughts, not truths.

  • Anything meaningful in life is the result of a process (e.g. 10,000 posts), not an event (1 post).

  • Pixels on a screen don’t reflect your worth as a human being.

• You’ve always had the ability to zoom out and see the bigger picture. This time you had the awareness to actually do it.

My experience (again)

I realised similar things after my panic attack.

But it didn’t happen overnight.

Shortly after the incident, the summer uni break started here in Australia and I went on a short holiday with my partner.

One of my best mates has a beautiful holiday house — a 3-hour drive from my home — and let Han and I stay there for a week.

Shoutout to Francis’ <3

The house has nature all around it.

One morning, I saw Han sitting down in the backyard overlooking all the trees and shrubbery. I asked,

“Watcha doing?”

“Just about to meditate. Wanna join?”

Given “the incident” and my eagerness to sort my shit out before my final year of law school, I thought,

“Why not!”

I meditated daily for 2 minutes each morning for 3-4 months in 2017 when I was on an exchange in Sweden, but I never continued the practice when I came back home.

That first meditation with Han during our holiday changed my life.

During the 10 minutes, I immediately started noticing all my thoughts and became completely present.

My mind didn’t wander once.

^ Anyone who tells you that about their first or 1,001st time meditating is talking shit.

During that 10-minute meditation, my mind was wandering for approximately 9 minutes and 59 seconds.

But the power of the practice was in the 1 second when it wasn’t.

I was present.

I was aware.

I was observing my thoughts instead of becoming my thoughts.

At that moment I realised — whatever this meditation thing is — it can’t not help me sort my shit out before going back to uni next year.

So I decided to make it a daily practice.

And 1,218 days later, here we are.

Some days my mind still wanders for 99% of the meditation.

During others, it might wander for 90%.

But the point is not reducing how much the mind wanders. The point is to observe whenever it does.

And the more you practice this, the more you augment your awareness in everyday life.

Literally two days after that 10-minute meditation with Han, I started observing my thoughts about law.

I’d been studying it full-time for 5 years at that stage.

And I realised not once did I ask myself,

“Lennox, why are you doing law?”

After just a few days of meditating, I gained the slighted bit of awareness to confront that question.

The only answer I could come up with was money.

I realised I hated everything else about it.

Meditation augmented my awareness and helped me realise I was on a path that made me feel miserable.

With this newfound awareness, I could zoom out and see the bigger picture.

Despite hating the path, I was able to go about my final year of university with a better headspace.

2021 ended up being the best year of my academic career.

My hardware (brain) was capable of connecting these dots the whole time.

It just needed a software update.

Augmented Awareness through daily meditation is how I updated my brain’s software.

It’s how you can too.

Here’s how you do it.

How To Stop Feeling Stressed and Improve Your Life in 6 Steps Tomorrow

1. Choose duration

Choose the duration of meditation you can commit to daily.

• This might be 1 minute or 21.

• The most important thing — and I can’t emphasise this enough — is to pick a time you know you can commit to.

• Make it so easy there’s no excuse.

  • e.g. You can make excuses not to do 100 pushups a day. But you can’t if it’s just 1 pushup a day.

• Set the bar so low it’s impossible for you to fail.

It’s better to start small and build up over time than to start large, get overwhelmed and never make any progress.

We’re building a new behaviour here.

And the best way to build behaviours is with habits.

2. Create Implementation Intention

You’re 2-3 times more likely to follow through with a habit if you make a specific plan for when, where and how you’re going to implement it.

Enter: Implementation Intentions.

This comes from my favourite non-fiction book of all time, Atomic Habits, by James Clear.

~ you’ll quickly realise I’m a huge James Clear fan ~

What is an Implementation Intention?

Here’s the formula:

Implementation Intention = On [day] at [time] I will [habit] in [location].

This is my Implementation Intention for my daily meditation practice:

Implementation Intention = Each day at 2 pm I will meditate for 15 minutes in the lounge room.

REMEMBER: You don’t need to start with 15 minutes. Start with 1 minute.

Pro tip:

Pick a time in the day you know you always have control over. A constant, regular part of your day. (So there are no excuses for missing days)

For me, I know I’ll either be home after the gym or be home for my lunch break by 2 pm every day.

If you don’t have much flexibility with work hours, I suggest picking a time shortly after getting out of bed in the morning, once you’ve had a chance to wake up a bit.

(Meditating isn’t hitting snooze and sleeping for a few extra minutes)

3. Calendarise daily meditation

Create a repeating daily event in your calendar that reflects your implementation intention.

Relating this to my implementation intention, I’d create a repeating daily event called ‘Meditate’ in my calendar from 2-2:15 pm at ‘Lounge room’.

You don’t have to do this forever.

The hardest part of building habits is starting them.

This action of calendarising your meditation is a little way to constantly remind you of the commitment you’ve made in your Implementation Intention.

4. Select app

There are hundreds — probably thousands — of meditation apps.

Don’t let this paradox of choice get in the way of meaningful change.

Don’t overcomplicate it.

I’ll make it easy for you: choose Calm or Headspace.

I’ve got no affiliation with either — but I’ve used Headspace for the past 1,200 days and love it.

There are days I don’t feel like meditating or days when I’m really pressed for time.

But now it’s gotten to a point where I don’t want to lose my 1,200-day streak, so I’ll just meditate on those days, not to zen the fuck out, but to maintain my streak.

The point is that you’re not waiting for the right moment to show up.

The right moment will never show up.

• Don’t expect to ever think, “Oh, yeah I feel like meditating now.”

The point of your implementation intention is to remove the option of showing up. You just do it.

Headspace and Calm both have streaks. I highly recommend leveraging them to build and maintain your daily meditation habit.

5. Don’t break the chain

From Atomic Habits:

Growing the chain is satisfying for the same reason that we engage with streaks on apps: we love to see progress and hate to disrupt it.

The likelihood of achieving your goal — in this case, Augmented Awareness — increases as you grow the chain.

So in the context of our meditation habit, this would mean:

• Growing the chain by building your streak in your chosen meditation app; and

• Growing the chain of your daily meditation calendar entry.

  • Each daily meditation event in your calendar = a link in the chain.

  • If you don’t meditate on a given day, you have to delete that calendar event = you break the chain.

DON’T BREAK THE CHAIN!

6. Start tomorrow

Not “At the start of a new week”.

That’s an excuse.

Start tomorrow.

You have no excuse not to do this.

Everyone can find an extra minute in their day to do something.

And you should know by now that Augmented Awareness through daily meditation is one of the best things you can do to reduce stress and improve your life.

Simple Summary

The Catastrophe of Unawareness = A state of being physically present but mentally absent, resulting in a diluted experience of every moment. This is the enemy.

Augmented Awareness = The act of observing thoughts without becoming them and appreciating each moment to its full extent. This is the hero. It’s a software update for the hardware that’s your brain.

How To Reduce Stress and Improve Your Life in 6 Steps Tomorrow:

1. Choose duration

2. Create Implementation Intention

3. Calendarize daily meditation

4. Select app

5. Don’t break the chain

6. Start tomorrow

The Lesson

Daily meditation is how you overcome the Catastrophe of Unawareness and improve your life through Augmented Awareness.

Cya

I’ll close with the following excerpt from one of my favourite books, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, by Eric Jorgenson.

I haven’t got there yet. I don’t know if I ever will. But the journey to get there is what it’s all about anyway.

If you want to tag along with me on your meditation journey, join Saints College.

It’s my free community where you can:

• Get BTS access to everything related to this lesson; and

• Hop on a free call with me (not a sales call) so you can implement the “How To Reduce Stress and Improve Your Life in 6 Steps Tomorrow” process and start getting results NOW.

The first 100 people in the community get to join for free. Then the price goes to $5/month.

If you’re one of the first 100, it’ll be free for you forever.

Join Saints College here to secure free enrolment now!

Anyway, that’s it for this lesson.

Keep it simple until the next one.