@The_Myth, I found this a little bit comical. Interesting how we can twist something relaxing into a competition. Just completely missing the point.
Excerpts from article -
Alan Stein Jr. is on his 324th straight day meditating—a streak he is tending with the mindfulness of a monk.
The 42-year-old performance coach from Gaithersburg, Md., has kept his record using the Headspace app, despite early-morning flights and travel across time zones. On a recent work trip to Atlanta, he remembered to meditate only just after the clock struck midnight. Worried he’d blown his record, he closed his eyes and quickly tried to meditate on the hotel bed for 10 minutes.
“The whole time I’m just waiting for the 10 minutes to be over to see if my streak was alive,” he said. Thanks to the app’s built-in grace period, his frantic attempt counted toward his total. He was, in the words of the mindful on social media, #Grateful.
Type-A people are descending on the ancient practice of meditation and tweaking the quest for inner peace to suit their hard-charging needs—racking up streaks and broadcasting their running tallies to the world. The result, for some: Meditation has never been more stressful.
In one online group, members regularly check a leaderboard to see who has meditated the most days in a row. A habit-tracking website charges the credit cards of meditators if they miss their sessions too often. One company is pitching meditators on a wristband that reminds them to practice and, if they don’t, gives them a mild electric shock.
Streaks are rampant on apps such as Headspace and Calm, which are designed to log and display the consecutive days a user has meditated or practiced mindfulness.
“There’s something deep in the human psyche about wanting to compete and keep a streak going,” said Calm co-founder Michael Acton Smith.
Pavlok, which sells wearable electronic shocking devices to help people change their behavior, suggests meditation as one of the top uses for its wristbands, which cost $145 to $245.
Nicholas Rozier, Pavlok’s 37-year-old director of operations based in Moscow, Idaho, said he cranks his device to 100% to remind himself to meditate at 7 a.m. for 10 minutes six days a week. If he fails to log a session, which he self-reports, he gets two zaps of 450 volts of electricity on the inside of his left wrist. He said it feels like a bee sting.