Text/Chen Yuqi
As he grew older, Zhang suffered from his declining concentration and work efficiency, and he began to meditate for about 20 minutes a day.
"When I turned off the lights and put down my phone to get ready for bed, the party started in my head, and all kinds of thoughts ran rampant in my head." During graduate school, Jiang Xue was lying in bed worrying about experiments, and she began to try to meditate, trying to get rid of her wild thoughts before going to bed every night.
Li Yu, who works in the Internet industry, has been in a state of anxiety for a long time, and even experienced several panic attacks, and in the process of psychological counseling, she got meditation advice from doctors.
Even Gu Ailing said in an interview with the Olympic Organizing Committee that in the face of the pressure of the competition, she likes to reduce stress by playing the piano and meditating.
More and more young people and urban social animals, who are devastated by stress, anxiety, and insomnia, are starting to pay for meditation. Some people have likened that if the brain is the CPU of a computer, meditation can help clean up memory and upgrade the system.
What is a meditation that can make people sleep soundly, have a good mood, have high concentration, and cure all kinds of emotional diseases? Can the fledgling sport in China be a real craze?
Meditation enthusiasts follow their mentors to practice (courtesy of interviewee)
Mindfulness meditation, a panacea?
In a quiet environment, the back is straight, the hands are naturally placed on the legs, close the eyes, focus on the breath, feel the air flow through the nose, throat, lungs, feel the rise and fall of the abdomen. Count while breathing, inhale and meditate on 1, exhale and meditate on 2, counting all the way down for 15 minutes.
The seemingly simple process is actually very easy to lose your mind. At the beginning, Jiang Xue couldn't sit still for 5 minutes, feeling very impatient, and all kinds of thoughts would appear in his mind.
After practicing mindfulness meditation for a year, Jiang Xue's daily practice time has increased from 5 minutes to 30 minutes, from the initial impatience and confusion to the current peace of mind and comfort. She believes that the core of meditation is to focus on the present moment, "meditation is the practice of constantly bringing attention back to the breath."
Meditation originating from religion is a broader concept that includes different forms of Buddhist meditation, meditation, yoga breathing meditation, etc., the most widely known of which is a form of meditation called "Mindfulness".
According to the definition of Kabakin, the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, mindfulness is conscious awareness and focus on the present moment without attaching subjective judgments. "Positive" means "being" and "thought" is "thought."
In 1978, Kabakin introduced mindfulness into the field of psychotherapy, pioneering mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy. Since then, mindfulness has stripped itself of religion and become a standard, verifiable psychological intervention technique that is a quick and effective self-help tool.
Yuan Xinsong, doctor of psychiatry and mental health at Fudan University and a physician in medical psychology, introduced that at present, many psychiatric treatments and psychotherapy have combined mindfulness interventions, including mindfulness stress reduction, cognitive behavioral therapy, and acceptance commitment therapy.
In 2019, the Mindfulness Psychology Professional Committee of the Chinese Psychological Association (preparing) formulated and published the "Expert Consensus on Mindfulness Intervention" to standardize the research, practice, education and dissemination of mindfulness training in mainland China.
A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that being trained in mindfulness meditation reduces activation in the amygdala of the brain, a brain region that processes fear and other emotions.
Yuan Xinsong occasionally recommends mindfulness training to patients during the consultation. In the clinic, she also plays "ten minutes of mindfulness audio" to emotional patients.
Jiang Xue reflected that he was a person with serious internal friction, and would constantly struggle with what had happened, "Objectively nothing has been done, but his heart is too tired to do it." After practicing meditation, she can react more quickly, divert her attention, and avoid getting caught up in emotions. "Meditation is like charging, especially at night, so that I don't fall too deep."
Yuan Emphasizes that Mindfulness is merely a tool for improving mood, aided by clinical medicine and psychotherapy, not a belief, a miracle or magic. "Mindfulness is a way of learning from all kinds of good and bad feelings, and you can control them without being controlled by them."
From Silicon Valley to China
"All life scenes can be placed under mindfulness." Gao Hong believes that eating, walking, stretching... Even the pain of being sick can be the object of mindfulness practice, and meditation is just a relatively focused way of training that turns mindfulness into a lifestyle by practicing meditation regularly.
Jobs, Murdoch, Oprah, John Lennon... Many celebrities are fans of mindfulness meditation, and "meditation" has appeared in American dramas such as "Westworld", "House of Cards", "The Big Bang Theory" and so on.
In The Big Bang Theory, Raj hopes to use meditation to help Sheldon overcome his fears
As Takahiro says, exercise is fitness, and mindfulness meditation is "mental fitness, learning to live with stress. More and more young people and urban social animals, who are devastated by stress, anxiety and insomnia, are willing to pay for meditation.
Relevant data show that 300 million people in China are plagued by insomnia, and the demand for psychological counseling in second-tier cities has grown by 28% to 39%. Meditation, fitness, sleep, and psychological counseling are intertwined with each other and have become the "spiritual pills" of urban people.
The Baidu index shows that from January to March 2020, the search index for "meditation" keywords at the beginning of the epidemic increased sharply, nearly twice that of the same period in 2019.
"Meditation" Keyword Search Index from January to March 2020 (Source: Baidu Index)
In 2018, Gao Hong began to start a business, cooperating with hotels and resorts to provide meditation team building services to enterprises. He believes that the problems that mindfulness can help solve, including emotional management, concentration improvement, and how to deal with relationships with oneself, are all pain points for modern people.
He summarized that white-collar workers in first-tier cities with higher education levels are the main users of mindfulness meditation, and the proportion of women around 30 years old is larger, and users tend to be younger.
Gao Hong introduced that there are currently two business models for mindfulness meditation products.
One is the traffic model, such as many meditation APPS, which mainly help users get started with meditation by providing online meditation videos, audio, and offline boot camps or activities, and make a profit based on membership payment.
The other is a heavy vertical model, focusing on the construction of a heavy operating system offline, such as cooperating with hotels, resorts, and OTAs to develop "meditation + tourism" projects.
In August 2021, the FLOW Meditation APP, which was established less than 1 year ago, received millions of dollars in angel financing. Prior to this, the healthy lifestyle platform "Heartly lab" and the APP Tide to solve sleep problems completed the seed round/pre-A round of financing of tens of millions of yuan respectively.
Leverage the tens of billions of meditation markets
According to Data Bridge, the global meditation market size will reach $20.5 billion by 2029. The United States is the world's largest meditation market, reaching $1.21 billion in 2017 and expected to reach $2 billion in 2022.
Global Meditation Market Size Forecast 2022-2029 (Source: Data Bridge)
According to relevant data, 14% of the population in the United States currently adopt meditation as a habit, but in China, this number may not exceed 1%. In contrast, meditation is a new thing in China.
"China is still in the stage of market education." Gao Hong introduced that the promotion of mindfulness meditation in the United States is inseparable from spiritual leaders such as Jobs and John Lennon, "all of a sudden the concept spread, but China has not appeared in this magnitude of leadership, so China may be more from experience, from the behavior itself to do promotion."
On the other hand, Gao Hong said that silicon valley technology companies have contributed to the promotion of mindfulness meditation. Meditation rooms have become standard in many companies, and mindfulness meditation is one of the most core forms of team building. "In Silicon Valley, mindfulness is one of the core ways to shape corporate culture, and domestic team building is either going out and playing or playing games."
In recent years, the domestic Internet mental health track has started, and meditation has undoubtedly taken advantage of this shareholder wind. Pan-psychology platform KnowYourself has developed its own meditation mini program; fitness platform Keep launched mindfulness classes; NetEase Cloud Music launched the "Focused Meditation" section, which contains audio for different functions such as sleep aids, meditation, light music, goodnight stories, ethereal musical instruments, and decompression.
Meditation content on major apps
Some foreign pioneers in the field of mental health are also eyeing the Chinese market. In May 2021, Calm, the world's largest unicorn with a valuation of US$2 billion, announced its entry into the Chinese market.
Gao Hong said that the current meditation industry is mainly benchmarked with the yoga and fitness industries, for example, the main meditation APP adopts the model of free experience content and advanced content charging, and then precipitates to the offline, opens a meditation hall similar to the yoga hall, and sells derivative products such as meditation clothes and meditation mats.
But he believes that meditation is much more flexible than yoga, so the richness of future products is much higher than that of yoga products. "Yoga can't go out of the yoga studio, at least you have to change into yoga clothes, put on a yoga mat, and open the APP to practice, but meditation is different, it can happen in any scene, any time, it can be very fragmented." 」
In addition, when meditation jumps out of religious rituals, it can create more connections with technology and can also be integrated into other product formats, such as yoga, tourism, medical care, spiritual growth, etc.
Mindfulness meditation activity of "please get on the bus on weekends" in Ma Honeycomb (Source: Ma Honeycomb)
Meditation, a healthy lifestyle from Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs, is beginning to become an emotional haven for young Chinese.
(Zhang Meng, Jiang Xue, Li Yu as pseudonyms)
(Editor: Chen Yuqi Proofreader: Yan Jingning)