I do this every day. I have no qualifications in it.

Affirmations are what this site is mostly about, and what I have used every day for more than forty years. Meditation sits alongside them. I use both, and the overlap between the two has turned out to be one of the more useful things I have found.

They are similar enough to help each other and different enough that I keep them on separate sites. That’s why I’m keeping this page fairly short and pointing elsewhere for the depth, rather than pretending to be a teacher of something I simply do.

Where I came across it, and why I was bad at it

When I was twelve I used to come home from school just in time to watch a US television programme about yoga, presented by a man called Richard Hittleman. He was very calm, and the exercises were lovely to do. Gentle stretches, breathing, that sort of thing. I was supple back then and found them easy.

I bought the book the programme was promoting. It went further than the exercises and into the philosophy, and Hittleman was very much a proponent of mindfulness and meditation, so there were meditation exercises in there as well. That is really where I first came across any of this.

The physical side I managed. The meditation part I found a bit boring. I have a very active mind, always have, and I love stimulation, so I was not exactly a good student. Or a good meditator.

That was fifty-five years ago. At the time of writing this I am just a few months shy of sixty-eight, and I cannot do the exercises as easily now, or as regularly. But the foundation of them has stayed with me the whole time, and here is the part I did not expect: the meditation side is easier now than the physical side. Age can be thanked for that.

Why it is always tea

I drank a lot of coffee as a child. My parents were fairly relaxed about that sort of thing. And I hated tea, because the only tea I had ever tasted was the way my entire extended family made it, which was stewed. Overbrew tea and it turns bitter. That was all I knew it to be.

It took until my late teens, and other people offering me a cup, to work out that it did not have to taste like that. Tea made properly is a different drink altogether. After that I found all the other varieties, and my favourite is Earl Grey, which has a light perfumed flavour. That sounds ridiculous written down.

So I switched. I still have a coffee now and then, but it is tea nearly all of the time, and that is precisely why it works as a trigger. There is never a day when I do not have one on waking, and several more as the day goes on. The habit I am attaching the meditation to is not one I have to remember. It was happening anyway.

If you want the version of that idea written out properly, my other site has a piece on building a practice around making tea, which is more or less what I do without having planned it.

You may not make tea. But I can guarantee there are things you do every single day without giving them a moment's thought. Attaching the habit you want to build to one that already repeats is the easiest way I know of making the new one stick. And it does not have to be meditation. The trick works with any habit you are trying to start.

Funnily enough, it is close to a memory technique taught a long time ago by a chap called Harry Lorayne. You anchor one thing to another, and recalling the first brings back the second. I love that idea. It’s worth its weight in gold.

Why the two go together

Affirmations are words. You say them, or you listen to them, and over time they change the tone of what your mind tells you about yourself. Meditation is closer to the opposite move: less input rather than better input.

What I have found is that the quiet makes the words land differently. Say an affirmation in the middle of a busy, arguing head and it bounces. Say it when things have already settled and it goes somewhere. That is not a claim about mechanisms, it is just what happens to me, reliably enough that I would not drop either half.

There is a piece on my other site about using the two together for confidence, which is the specific version of this I would start with.

And mindfulness is a third thing

Slightly different again, and the word gets used as though it were interchangeable with meditation, which it is not. Here is the way I hold the difference. Somebody more academic would probably put it better.

Meditation is the thing you sit down and do. You stop everything else, you give it your attention, and it has a beginning and an end. My session first thing in the morning is meditation.

Mindfulness is not a session at all. It is where your attention happens to be while you are doing something ordinary, and whether you are really there for it. Making tea mindfully means noticing the water, the smell, the waiting, instead of standing at the kettle planning your afternoon. Same kettle. Different attention.

Which means you can meditate badly, sitting there for twenty minutes thinking about your emails, and you can be thoroughly mindful without ever sitting down once. One is a practice. The other is a way of paying attention that the practice happens to train.

And the saxophone I am about to mention is neither of them, strictly speaking. That is absorption, which crowds everything else out rather than making room for it. It works, but it is a different animal.

For what it is worth, the people who study this for a living have not entirely settled it either. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who did more than anyone to get mindfulness into hospitals and clinics, defines it as the awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and without judging what you find. On that reading, mindfulness is the awareness itself and meditation is one way of training it. America’s National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, part of the National Institutes of Health, files it the other way round, and treats mindfulness as one kind of meditation practice among several.

So if the two words feel tangled to you, that is not you being slow. They are genuinely tangled.

The distinction the research does draw cleanly is between formal and informal practice. Formal is the session you sit down for. Informal is attention paid during something you were going to do anyway, which is exactly what the tea is. The NIH summary notes that programmes combining both look the most promising, which I was pleased to read, because it is what I had been doing for years without knowing there was a name for it.

One caution, since I am recommending something. That same NIH summary reports that around eight per cent of people in the studies had a negative experience, most commonly anxiety or low mood. That is not nothing. If sitting quietly with your own thoughts reliably makes things worse rather than better, that is worth taking seriously rather than pushing through, and worth raising with your doctor rather than solving with a better technique.

Both are worth having, and it is worth knowing which one you are attempting, because they fail in different ways. If you want it set out more carefully than I have just managed, there is a piece on the difference on my other site.

The one thing I do that is not really meditation at all

Worth mentioning because it may suit you better than sitting does.

When I practise the saxophone I have to remember what each note on the page means, the fingering, and how long to hold it. That much attention on something outside myself leaves no room to think about anything else. I get a similar effect at the gym. It is arrived at from a different direction entirely, and on the days sitting quietly is not going to happen, it does the same job.

I have written that up as one of four practical ways to take the edge off stress, which also has the box breathing technique I use, filmed rather than described.

Where to go, depending on what is in your way

Four honest routes. Time Your Peace is where I keep the meditation writing, and these are the pieces I would point a friend at.

• You have never done it and do not know how long to sit

  Start with how long a beginner should meditate rather than with a technique. The answer is shorter than you expect.

• Sitting still is the part you cannot do

  Then do not sit. Meditating without sitting still covers walking and moving practice. No cushion, no stillness required.

• You tried it and it did not work

  Meditation didn’t work. Read this one first if you are sceptical, because most of the reasons it fails are the same reasons affirmations fail, and almost none of them are your fault.

• You are sitting there with no idea what you are meant to be doing

  The usual answer is “watch the breath”, which is not much help when the mind will not stop. How to stop overthinking is the one to read, and the short version is that a wandering mind is the exercise rather than a sign you are failing at it.

• You do not have twenty minutes and you are not going to find them

  Then do not try. Sixty-second meditations is what I would start with, because a minute you actually do beats twenty you keep postponing.

• You were doing it and stopped

  Falling off the habit. I stopped one set of my affirmations for two years and watched the benefit quietly drain away, so I have no lectures to give here.

If you would rather start with the words

Affirmations are the easier of the two to begin, in my experience, because there is something to say rather than nothing to do. If you want the honest account of why I still use them after four decades, it is in whether affirmations actually work.

And if you would rather have something to fill in than something to read, the worksheet is ten pages, free, with nothing to sign up for.