How I Hacked My Meditation Practice with My Mobile Phone

My name is Carlos Rizo. Like mindfulness I’m trying to use different ways to hack my mindfulness practice using the law of less doing. With simplicity, I’m trying to understand and change my behavior and I’m using the password of my phone to get messages to my brain, try to create new habits.

The first one, a friend of mine told me I was not smiling anymore. So the first password I tried to do was smile more. And I tried a few iterations. This one didn’t work that well because I thought it was cheating. It was too quick for me to unlock the phone, smile and then understand I needed to smile a little bit more.

But what happens if I do practices or behavior that I already have like drinking water or reviewing to do lists that I seldom forget to do. I don’t know if this happens for you, but when you’re trying new tasks or new tools or you have many different projects, how do you get those reminders or those new practices to go and do these things.

Remembering to sleep is something that I experience. I sleep three or four hours a day. I don’t get that tired, so I’m trying to use a few of these passwords to remind myself that these things are important to me that I need to do.

It generally takes about two to three weeks to get into a new behavior a new pattern. Gratitude is one of those things that I remind myself constantly; for example being here. I’m very grateful of being exposed to this wonderful community.

And what I feel every time when I unlock my phone is I have a chance to take a deep breath and what I realize what I’m doing, I’m compressing meditation into the act of switching my password from time to time, or changing my password or having that extra friction that creates that break, that function to stop and to understand whether if that’s what you’re supposed to be doing.

Our devices are driving us to destruction and the process slows your life down. It’s not fast, because some of these passwords are longer. And sometime if it is the first or second week, you get into the habit of just using your fingers very quickly. And then when you change a new password it creates additional friction and you need to remember.

It’s something free. You don’t need subscriptions. You don’t need to download anything. You can do it any time. There are no additional costs if you change it twice or three times or if you need to remember it or create reminders.

It’s very east to setup, most phones have it. It just takes a couple of steps of entering the password twice. It’s available in every single language, so you can set it up and it’s your own creativity that you drive into the password.

You can reuse it in every other platform on Gmail, or LinkedIn and have different passwords. Although it confuses your life a bit, and one of the things I want to quantify is the amount of times I have to go to the password reminder to remind myself of the password I’ve forgotten.

It’s secure generally is longer, adds numbers and different types of characters, and if I am able to adopt one or two or three of these new behaviors every two or three weeks it’s healthy and it’s a lot of fun as well because you can share it to your friends. You can share it with your friends, and it’s ‘look, this is the password for my new phone’, and you try to make this new password sharing contagious. Although people may react and maybe confused in ‘Why are you sharing this with me?’

If you want more information that’s my link on Twitter.

Thank you.