I accidentally discovered I’ve been meditating wrong for years

This is embarrassing but I’ve meditated for years and I fairly recently spent a year meditating consistently. Daily practice, the whole thing. But I wasn’t really present in my day-to-day life.

Then I got lazy and just started listening to meditation podcasts while doing other stuff. Didn’t sit down to meditate once that month. My presence in daily life went through the roof. Better results than the entire previous year of actual practice.

Which makes me think I’ve been approaching behavior change completely wrong. Maybe it’s not about the practice itself. Maybe I just needed to keep “being present” loaded in my mind throughout the day instead of siloing it into 20-minute sessions.

Has anyone else discovered this or anything like it? Or am I just weird?