TL;DR: Because it does not matter.

After 227 days (almost seven and a half months) of daily meditation I missed one day, which broke the challenge I had set up for myself of meditating everyday for a year. The people at Headspace kindly reset the counter so that the streak would not be broken when I asked them how many days I had meditated in a row, but this did not change the fact that I had missed a day.

This reset was bugging me, because it was a lie.

And then last Sunday I missed another one which made it much easier to confront questions like does it matter and is it a flop or a win.

The truth is that it does not matter. Using the Headspace app, plus calendar reminders in conjunction with the challenge has been a success in making meditation a daily practice, something that is integrated into my routine.

I have issues with the days that break the routine (usually when there are holidays or days of the weekend with no regular alone time) but missing a day here and there does not really matter when I take into account that I have meditated a lot since December 6 2018 and gotten a lot out of it.

On top of this, I’ve meditated outside of the Headspace app too. In fact in every competition I do meditation exercises and I don’t need the app to do any of the meditations. I’ve learned a lot and remember enough to be autonomous, although I still enjoy and use the app.

I’ve succeeded in making mediation work for me like I set myself to do, and that’s what really matters, not an external sign of recognition in the form of a badge. The fact is that meditation has helped me see the futility of the one year goal 🙂

Update*: Angel from Headspace responded to my article along the same line 🙂*

Thank you for your reply and I’m happy to see that you are going to continue your practice without focusing on the run streak so much. That’s really the goal here, the run streak is used more for the beginning of your journey as a helpful motivation tool to go into the app each day. The hope is that you won’t feel the need to have this run streak in order to keep your practice going, that you’ll be able to apply the techniques to your daily life without even realizing it.

If you click the link here this is what Andy has to say about the run streak feature.