Meditation is a good exercise for NEETs to pick up. Succinct version: meditation is an process of introspection that can improve insight, self-awareness, concentration, tranquility, pleasure, and altered states of consciousness.

The major flavors of meditation in the Theravada Buddhist tradition are samadhi, which can be described as concentration+tranquility, and vipassana , awareness+insight. Other kinds of “mind work” in the neighborhood of these two styles include yoga, ruminations, lucid dreaming, visualization, and prayer; so too mindfulness, “flow state”, dissociation, hypnosis.

Objects of meditation are plentiful. When people typically think of mindfulness, they think of mindfulness of breathing, but this activity which sounds so simple has a remarkable level of depth across traditions. The most basic form of that is just counting your breaths from 1 to 10 and back again. Other popular forms of meditation involve mindfulness of emotion, intentions, the body, thoughts… God… focus on certain emotions… chanting mantras. Theravada Buddhism and other schools of Eastern philosophy have standard lists of meditation objects and techniques.

Per the Visuddhimagga:

• Substances
  • Earth
  • Water
  • Fire
  • Air
  • Void
• Colors
  • Blue
  • Yellow
  • Red
  • White
• Emotions
  • Good-will
  • Compassion
  • Sympathy
  • Equanimity
• Abstractions
  • Sphere of infinite space
  • Sphere of infinite consciousness
  • Sphere of no-thingness
  • Sphere of neither perception nor non-perception