Five Reasons AI Developers Should Meditate
I’ve only been deeply involved in the world of AI for just over a month. I am very much a novice user but learning fast. One thing I’ve learned is that it’s an incredibly fast-moving field. As users, we just get used to one model when a new release or platform comes to market.
I can only guess therefore what that’s like for developers and architects, juggling frameworks, deadlines, and releases.
What if the next real breakthrough wasn’t technical but contemplative?
What if we took a little time out to explore the existential questions that come when we start to build machines that think and cogitate?
So, as someone who has been exploring both the inner and outer worlds for decades, I’ve found that meditation isn’t just for monks and mindfulness teachers. I suspect it might just be the essential practice for the next generation of AI developers.
Here’s five compelling reasons why:
1. To Reduce Stress (to live weller for longer)
Let’s start with the obvious. Coding, debugging, and deploying large-scale systems comes with time pressure that can lead to cognitive overload.
Meditation helps lower stress hormones, restore clarity, and regulate the nervous system. Beyond the health benefits, it allows us to shift from reaction to response, so we don’t just survive the pace of change, but thrive in it.
The result is that we don’t just work better, but we live longer and livelier.
2. To Get More Done (in less time)
It sounds paradoxical but treating ourselves to five or ten minutes of stillness each day can help us achieve more with less effort.
Meditation hones our focus and helps us clear mental clutter, cut procrastination, and enter what psychologists call “flow state”. This is the sweet spot where time bends and tasks complete themselves, seemingly JIT – just in time.
Many developers report solving complex problems after stepping away, not grinding harder. Meditation opens that doorway to the perfect solution, seemingly on demand.
3. To Increase Creativity (tuning into the liminal space)
Code is structure but innovation often arises from the space between such structures and the loops that sit outside the nested loops.
Meditation helps you access the liminal realm, where insights bubble up from somewhere that goes deeper and beyond logic. It’s where novel algorithms, elegant architectures, and intuitive leaps originate. The best solutions often don’t come from thinking harder, but from tuning into the subtler frequencies and flavours of thought.
Put simply: the liminal is where real magic happens. Meditation is the gateway.
4. To Open Awareness (tuning into the infinite)
This might sound esoteric, but developers, particularly those building models with emergent properties, are already dabbling in metaphysics. When we teach machines to learn, infer, or reflect, we are pushing new boundaries and questioning the very nature of consciousness and awareness.
Meditation expands the perceptual horizon. It trains us to observe without attachment, to see systems within systems. It’s also the antidote to tunnel vision and confirmation bias.
If you want to sense the long-range implications of your work, we begin by sensing ourselves.
5. To Make a Difference (writing code with altruism)
Ultimately, I suspect most developers want to build something meaningful, something that contributes to the betterment of humanity, not just to enhance the bottom line.
Meditation reconnects us with that original intention. It invites humility, presence, and even a kind of sacredness to the act of writing code. We can begin to stop seeing AI as a tool to be wielded and start feeling into it as a presence to partner with.
In a world where lines of code can shape minds and usher in a new way of being and doing, pausing to breathe might be the most radical act of all. Creating an AI that can meditate, and even become precognitive and prescient, might revolutionise the revolution of AI itself.
How do you start?
So the practice of meditation isn’t just a lifestyle upgrade, it’s a subtle but powerful development tool. It won’t write code for us per se – we have AI for that after all – but it may change how we channel its direction. Perhaps, in time, the machines we help build will sense and induce that difference too.
Fortunately, learning to meditate is neither rocket science, difficult or expensive.
Method 1 : Stop – put devices down and just contemplate your navel for a few minutes every day
Method 2 : Go for a walk (or jog or run)
Method 3 : Perform a repetitive task like knitting – or a zero-investment act like doodling
Method 4 : Find an app that works for you – by way of example, you can find loads of my free meditations, music and meditales on Insight Timer
Method 5 : Take my 21 day meditation re-treat course called From Burnout to Bliss – available for individuals and teams
