New Year’s Resolution: Get Some Head Space
A long time ago I read somewhere that the writer Anne Lamott had likened meditation to coming down off cocaine. I have never been on cocaine, mainly because my mind is so busy on nothing, I can’t imagine wanting to hop things up. Thus, I used that quotation to justify not trying meditation for fifteen years.
But last summer, I read an article in the New Yorker about Andy Puddicombe’s uniquely tech-friendly approach to meditation about the same time I was suffering the worst round of anxiety in several years. The fact that this was a product popular with smart start-up creative types and had the brain science to prove that it could help with mood disorders, anxiety and depression, combined with how bad I was feeling was enough, at last, to short circuit my resistance to sitting. Just sitting.
Headspace has changed my life. The app is brilliantly built— the animations are clever and smart and offer metaphors that don’t cloy, the user-interface is the best one I have on my phone, and I love that you can’t binge-meditate. Which seems like an odd thing to want to do, but think about it: you run 2 miles. The next day you feel like you have to run 3. And then 5. It’s hard to just be good with steady on. Headspace allows you to do just one meditation a day on your timeline (with a few SOS and On-The-Go options on the side). This means you can’t do that thing to yourself where you raise the bar every time you get a bit of success. More isn’t better with Headspace. You get that sense of accomplishment every single time.
It has a social component, too;you can have Headspace buddies and encourage each other and there’s a counter that shows you how many other people are meditating at any moment, your own accrued meditation minutes, your ‘run streak’ and other metrics. You get encouraging notifications in just the right amounts, and when your run streaks get high enough you win Headspace subscriptions to donate to friends.
The best part, though is Andy‘s voice. I am sure an English citizen could locate his town if not his neighborhood from it since his accent is so distinctive. Even I know it’s not posh — there’s not much Masterpiece Theatre or Oxford in it. But it has all the rich pronunciation and word choice of England in it, and it’s warm and encouraging and just the right amount reassuringly confident. In interviews Puddicombe says that when he is in a public space talking with friend, passersby occasionally recognize his voice as the one that is ‘in their head’ when they meditate. Do Headspace enough and you do feel a bit like you’ve got a lovely friend helping you out right inside your brain.
In another post I’ll talk about the neuroscience of meditation, but for now I’ll just say the best New Year’s resolution you could make is to do Headspace for ten minutes every day. It will support any other self-improvement you’ve got going on and better, it will make you feel less like you need to self-improve and more like you’re centered, happy, confident, creative and ready to take on the world. Thank you Andy Puddicombe.
Here is Andy’s TED Talk
And this interview is worth the listen — you have to sit through 13 minutes of Rich Roll’s introductory material, but then he takes Andy through a long interview that details Puddicombe’s extraordinary journey from bloke to monk to mindfulness entrepreneur.