What should you do when your favorite method or methods stop working? This often freaks people out, because they think something has gone wrong. Actually, it is usually a good sign.

Most typically it means you’ve made progress and outgrown your current method. It has changed you, and as a result you’re no longer aligned with the method that produced the changes. It’s very important to know when this is the case, so that you can just move one.

Sometimes, though, when a method stops working it can mean that you are just in a lull with that method and it will start working again. In this case you should stick with your current method.

So, how do you tell? Through our research we learned that best way to tell is to keep at it and see. If you’re meditating our recommended hour a day, then go for another week or two and see if things start to head back in the right direction. If you’re meditating for 20-30 minutes per day you’ll want to give it another 4-6 weeks. If the lull persists, it’s time to resume your search and find the new method or methods that will work for you, so you can resume heading in the desired direction.

It’s extremely important to figure this out. You definitely don’t want to continue to use a method that is no longer working. At best it will prevent further progress, but often times it will start to actually undo the progress that it made. You see, it’s aligned with the old version of you, that’s who it worked for, and it will have a tendency to want to pull you back in that direction if you keep sticking with it.

So you want to be especially sensitive to when a method stops working. How do you know? In our experience, people can usually “just tell.” When you’ve been using a method that is heading in the right direction, it’s often pretty clear when that stops being the case.

However, it’s also a good idea to keep in mind the types of progress we’re looking for and make sure that they are still happening. Recall from earlier in the video I said that this can show up as increases in wellbeing, less reactivity, better emotional regulation, less tendency to be drawn into thoughts, a quieting of the inner critical voice in your head, a greater sense of presence or being in the moment, and fewer memories from the past arising and their having less emotional charge when they do. So if the opposite of these types of things start happening, that’s a good indication.

Of course, things will come up in your life, emotional triggers will occur, and so on. These don’t necessarily indicate a lack of progress. You want to look at things overall, the overall trend of things in the previous list, not specific incidents. Incidents will come and go, both positive and negative, it’s the overall trends that matter.

There’s another key element put in the mix beyond just your main practice. We’ll cover that next…