Details Published on Monday, 03 March 2014 19:33

Stay positive./Pic from positivethoughts.inI don't know about you, but I am knackered. I wake up knackered, and spend each morning limply punching away at the fog inside my skull. I eat lunch knackered, then swear at every inanimate object in front of me. I try not to fall asleep at my desk, then stagger to my sofa, pass out in my clothes and crawl into bed for another night of infuriatingly broken sleep. That is my life. It's not like I even do very much.

I daren't complain about this out loud, of course, because I don't want to get into a game of competitive exhaustion with anyone. I don't want to tell somebody that I had four hours' sleep, because they'll reply that they had only three, plus their mattress caught fire at midnight. Worse, what if they're a new parent? "How are you?" they'll ask. "Bit tired," I'll reply. "Oh yeah?" they'll snap back. "Well, I haven't slept since October because I've been scraping baby diarrhoea off my fridge door with a spatula." You can't win with new parents.

But I am tired, and I blame myself. Like most people I know, my life has fallen into the quicksand of modernity, filled with a whirl of televisions and phones and sirens and emails and Twitter and lights and noise and bleeps. Simpsons quotes, video game sound effects and fairground music riverdance madly across the surface of my brain. Switching off takes deliberate effort, and even then it doesn't always work. I'll almost be asleep and suddenly my mind will shriek: "Have you remembered to set your alarm?" or, "You didn't reply to that woman yesterday, you idiot" or, "Remember the Nyan Cat song? No? OK, I'm going to repeat it over and over again at the top of my voice until 6am, hope that's cool."

To shut out the world, I have turned to transcendental meditation. This was not my first choice. First I tried the sleep app Pzizz, where you get bombarded by binaural sound effects until you drop off. This didn't work because I was convinced it would subliminally order me to eat my parents in my sleep. Then I tried flotation tanks, where you lie inside a tiny pod full of salty water for an hour. This didn't work because it turns out that splashing around inside a dark plastic coffin full of boiling hot tears is the precise opposite of relaxing. After that, I tried mindfulness.

Chances are you've already heard of mindfulness, because people won't shut up about it. Once, Buddhists and monks had mindfulness all to themselves, as a way of concentrating on their thought processes during meditation. Now that we've found a way of stripping out the spiritual aspect, it's everywhere. There are books. There are seminars. Therapists and counsellors prescribe it. There are apps, like the incredibly popular Headspace, where you're guided through 10 minutes of breathing exercises and top-down self-diagnostic checks on various parts of your body until you become the perfect model of beaming self-realisation.

Mindfulness helps thousands of people every day; people with depression and eating disorders and addiction problems. But it's not for me. Mindfulness requires self-observation, and self-observation is exhausting. You have to sit and pay attention to everything. How you're breathing, what your posture's like, what you're thinking about, why you're thinking about it, what to do because you're thinking about whatever you're thinking. It goes on and on. I know people who have been put on mindfulness courses by doctors, only to run away screaming at the piles of homework they're expected to do.

Plus mindfulness makes me neurotic. One exercise I did involved writing down every thought that passed through my mind over the course of half an hour. This taught me that I was worried about work. I didn't know I had been worried about work, but the knowledge sent me into a panicky death spiral. In retrospect, I should have just pushed all my feelings down into the pit of my stomach and ignored them until they turned into heart disease and killed me at a tragically young age. This is the Heritage way.

So I turned to transcendental meditation. I was wary at first, because I clearly remember watching a party political broadcast for the Natural Law party, the politicised wing of transcendental meditation, about 20 years ago. I still remember how colossally creepy it was. There was a man with a thick Selleck tache sitting behind a desk and explaining, in a cartoonishly sinister way, how his party wanted to unite the country beneath a field of collective consciousness. There was a horrible purple mural of the galaxy, the sort of thing you find in shops that sell under-the-counter bongs to 12-year-olds. There were the Yogic Flyers, who were basically a couple of blokes flapping around on a mattress in their pyjamas. There was the claim that the Yogic Flyers had single-handedly reduced crime in Merseyside by 60%, presumably by bouncing cross-legged around Toxteth like a squadron of low-flying Batmen. Some of us tried to yogic-fly up and down the CDT block at school the next day. It did our knees in.

The Natural Law party looked like the smug dinner party guest who had it all figured out and wanted to condescend you into submission. But times change. The Natural Law party deregistered a decade ago. Every idiot's got a beard now. More importantly, transcendental meditation has undergone an enormous PR overhaul. In recent years, it has been reframed as a practical lifestyle choice rather than something for bead-liking soap-dodgers.

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How To Be Very, Very Calm