Meditation isn&#x27;t magic, it&#x27;s just stimulus response.<p>Consider a skill such as hitting a baseball. This is impossible to do consciously, but fortunately it doesn&#x27;t need to be. You train hitting a ball over and over again, you develop sub-conscious reactions that are triggered by certain things. When you stand a certain way, when you see the pitcher move in a certain way, you react, you spool through a series of actions that your conscious mind only has partial control over, like controlling the reins of a horse.<p>The same is true for, say, typing. You do not consciously go through a process of thinking of a word, thinking of how it is spelled, then recalling the location of each key, etc. You trigger a mostly unconscious series of reactions, which is why it takes much longer to type out an unfamiliar word, regardless of how long it is.<p>Meditation works along similar principles. You practice entering a certain mind state, typically relaxation since that is the most important state and often difficult to achieve when desired, and along the way you sprinkle certain ritual behavioral aspects (breathing, words, movements, etc.) Eventually you can shortcut your way there through one of those associative channels.<p>For myself, I use breathing out and relaxing my shoulders as the cue. If I find myself in need of relaxing or being centered I can just take a moment, breath out, and gain calmness.<p>You can certainly train yourself to feel sleepier during practice, which is quite common, it doesn&#x27;t mean you&#x27;re doing it wrong, but you might think about changing things up a bit if that&#x27;s not what you want.<p>However, it&#x27;s a bit of a general purpose system, it&#x27;s a matter of training your emotional and mental state the same way you might train your body. You could, in principle, train yourself toward becoming very angry on cue, or any other behavior, with varying difficulty.