Well, aside from the fact that the monastic vocation can be very compelling, there is what I would call an increasingly widespread practice which I think my friend Chrysostomos might forgive me for calling “semihesychasm”, popularized in Russia in the 19th century by books such as anonymous The Way of the Pilgrim, and more respectably, On the Prayer of Jesus, by St. Ignatius Brianchaninov, which was written specifically for laity, as opposed to The Arena, which was a manual he wrote for monastics (he was an abbot or hegumen and later, as is often the case, a bishop), and within Greek Orthodoxy Metropolitan Kallistos Ware has done much to popularize the saying of the Jesus Prayer as a continuous devotional in the 20th century.
The difference mainly is that monastic-level hesychasm is a full time thing, sometimes with breathing postures and other techniques, and there is an increased risk of prelest, which is spiritual delusion, as well as accidental damage to health, so it is best if this occurs in the safety of a cenobitic monastery where you have experienced elders to train monks, who basically pray full time, and on the side engage in various obediences to ensure the economic viability of the monastery, such as hosting pilgrims and manufacturing material for use in the church.
However, laity are not deprived of the joy of our Lord, or the benefits of the Jesus Prayer, and have different struggles than monastics. So the extreme form of hesychasm resulting from full time vocational practice under the training and supervision of more experienced monks, which is by no means required for salvation or even for divine joy, is unrealistic in the distracted secular world, but we living in the world have our own struggles a bit different from the monastics. So I would not let that get you down.
