Everyone experiences this. Please don't be frustrated by it.

The mind wandering is part of the practice. In fact, that instant where your mind has been wandering and you "snap out of it" is perhaps the most valuable.

That little skill carries over into real life. When someone cuts you off in traffic and you feel that flash of anger, your mind will catch itself and you'll just let it go and get on with your life.

You're probabably already doing things right.

To paraphrase the wonderful Thich Nhat Hanh, include that in your meditation. None of us, even the most skilled mediators can get to the kind of clarity and simplicity that people expect from meditation.

It's not about emptying your mind, that's impossible, it's about learning to be fully present in the moment. Anchor in your breath, in your senses, in the right now and think "Breathing in, I know my mind is wandering"

I like to imagine it as a clear afternoon day. Some thoughts, some clouds will appear, but my presence is the sky behind them.

https://plumvillage.org/about/thich-nhat-hanh/key-books

Instead of a how-to course, I suggest you look for Dharma talks on the practice of meditation. They can be very, very profound, there is a lot of material available. On just one site, the first one I looked at, spiritrock.org, there are over 100 talks for beginners.

A how-to app is doomed, which fact can be hard to grok. It's not like learning to drive or learning a programming language. A teacher or a retreat can be very helpful to get you past the initial missteps and misapprehensions.

I am not sure if I can give definitive answers to all the ways how It's affected me, but I recognize more often when I've gone into autopilot

I read something that helped me keep going, can't remember the source so I'll paraphrase: Meditation is like showering. You have to keep doing it for the affects to stay

There’s the problem: trying to control your thoughts. Thoughts will come and you shouldn’t beat yourself up when they do. Be patient, keep practicing, and you’ll get better at focusing.

Alternatively consider something like box breathing. I use the iBreathe app and find that works better for me than meditation.

> I realized that even lifting weights, sleeping and eating well aren't enough

aren't enough for what?

Result: 90% reduction of agony.

Meditation method: remembering the sense of “I am-ness” in every waking moment, stop thinking whenever possible, focus on senses whenever I remember. When: always, unless I forget.

The first time I did a Vipassana retreat many years ago it really showed me that "oh, right, the mind can get into a veeery different state if given the right environment".

Some might say it's an artificial environment you can't replicate at home, and I agree, but by getting much further in such a dense time, it provided a better anchor for me to know what I'm even trying to achieve in my 20 minutes at home.

But it can be very intense, it's possible it would be too much for someone that isn't in an appropriate mindspace.

I'm a very unserious meditator, but when I sit down I at least know when I'm doing "right concentration" or not, so it's possible to have a direction.

I'm speaking very vaguely, but, you know... it comes with the territory.