I followed Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel’s morning routine for a week. I finally understand the appeal of waking up early.

On Wednesday, I tried Kriya meditation for the first time. Spiegel has called it “life-changing.”

Wednesday was the first time I struggled to wake up on time. Despite taking my daily Snap at 5:11 a.m., I didn’t get out of bed until 5:45 a.m. Given how sore I felt from working out the past two days, I decided Wednesday would be the perfect day to try Spiegel’s other morning activity: Kriya meditation.

Spiegel told Vogue Australia in 2022 that his wife got him “hooked on Kriya meditation.”

“On a good day, I can get 45 minutes in the morning to meditate, which is life-changing,” he added.

In 2020, BI reported on the extensive benefits of meditation including better focus and concentration, reduced stress levels, and improved self-esteem and self-awareness.

On YouTube, I found a video entitled “Isha Kriya: A Guided Meditation For Health And Wellbeing | 15-Minutes” by the channel Sadhguru.

“Daily practice of Isha Kriya will bring health, dynamism, prosperity, and wellbeing. It is a powerful tool to cope with the hectic pace of modern life and empowers people to experience their lives to the fullest potential,” the video displayed on the screen.

From my understanding after watching the video, one of the main features of Isha Kriya meditation is the practice of breathing while thinking, “I am not the body,” and exhaling with the thought, “I am not even my mind.”

I don’t know if it’s possible to be “bad” at meditating, but that’s certainly what it felt like to me — a first-timer and chronic over-thinker.

While trying to focus on the space between my eyebrows and to think only of how “I am not my body,” I was instead thinking about all the things I had planned for the day, how I would write about the experience, and how long it’d been since I started.

Although I wouldn’t call this initial attempt at meditation successful, I think trying it was useful in helping me identify a weakness that makes it challenging to stay in the present.

I finished the meditation and proceeded with the rest of the routine, arriving at my office in time to grab a coffee and snack and read a bit of a WSJ article.