Mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe wants to make meditation accessible to everybody: for a happier, healthier you. He’s the author of Get Some Headspace: How Mindfulness Can Change Your Life in Ten Minutes a Day
We don’t look after the mind
The mind, our most valuable and precious resource, through which we experience every single moment of our life, the mind that we rely upon to be happy, content, emotionally stable as individuals, and at the same time to be kind and thoughtful and considerate in our relationships with others. This is the same mind that we depend upon to be focused, creative, spontaneous, and to perform at our very best in everything that we do. And yet, we don’t take any time out to look after it.
Result: No presence
The result, of course, is that we get stressed. You know, the mind whizzes away like a washing machine going round and round, lots of difficult, confusing emotions, and we don’t really know how to deal with that, and the sad fact is that we are so distracted that we’re no longer present in the world in which we live.
There was a research paper that came out of Harvard, just recently, that said on average our minds are lost in thought almost 47 percent of the time. Forty-seven percent. At the same time, this sort of constant mind-wandering is also a direct cause of unhappiness.
Remedy: 10 minutes a day
Now we’re not here for that long anyway, but to spend almost half of our life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy, dunno, it just kind of seems tragic, actually, especially when there’s something we can do about it, when there’s a positive, practical, achievable,scientifically proven technique which allows our mind to be more healthy, to be more mindful and less distracted. And the beauty of it is that even though it need only take about 10 minutes a day, it impacts our entire life.
But we need to know how to do it. We need an exercise. We need a framework to learn how to be more mindful. That’s essentially what meditation is. It’s familiarizing ourselves with the present moment.
Complement Get Some Headspace: How Mindfulness Can Change Your Life in Ten Minutes a Day with Hack your brain’s default mode with meditation.