Trying Out a Change in my Meditation

For information about my experiment, please refer to my first post. 

Despite trying to rest last week, I was not able to really accomplish that. The interesting thing about getting somewhat adept at meditation is that you tend to fall easily into a meditative state throughout the day. I noticed when working, watching videos, singing, etc. that I was doing them in a state of hyperfocus. So, while I did rest and recover, it wasn't as much I intended.

I decided to make my meditation a bit more chess specific this week. My meditation was running through a line of the Four Knights Scotch, restarting from the beginning after I got to the end of the line. I would repeat that as many times as I could. With my eyes closed, I visualized everything on my mental representation of a chessboard. It was extremely difficult. I could meditate this way for about 5 minutes. It exhausted me enough that I could only meditate my normal way for 9 minutes on my first try and then another 5 minutes on my second try. It was interesting, and I might continue playing with this idea in the future.

I posted a forum post in order to survey the chess.com community. It is 2 questions. 1. How long in duration can you calculate before your mind wanders, and 2. what are your ratings? If you have any established ratings and you want to participate, you can find the forum post on my profile. If I gather enough information, I'll run some statistics on it to see if there are any relationships between the two factors.

I participated in a casual tournament this weekend. It was 3 rounds, and I won the first 2 games pretty cleanly. In the third game, I was experiencing some mental fatigue and I won on time in an endgame that I think my opponent could have held if he had more time. The opponents were not super strong (strongest was 1500), but it was still a nice result. After the tournament I played 2 games against an 1100. While both games were easy wins, the second game was significantly harder relative to the first, which suggests some mental fatigue. I managed to improve my puzzle rush survival score to 56, which is an all-time high for me (previous high was 55). I tentatively can state that I am experiencing some improvement from this experiment.

My USCF Classical Rating: 1648 (provisional)  

My USCF Rapid Rating: 1614 (provisional)