All it takes is 10 mindful minutes | Andy Puddicombe (re-release)

0:03You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.

0:10Andy Puddicombe: You know, the mind whizzes away like a washing machine going round and round, lots of difficult, confusing emotions. And we don't really kind of 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. We miss out on the things that are most important to us. That's Andy Puttycomb, former Buddhist monk, co-founder of Headspace, and one of the most listened to voices in guided meditation today. We dug into our archives to reshare his talk from 2012, where he makes the case that 10 minutes a day is all it takes to refresh your mind.

0:49No incense, no sitting cross-legged on the floor, just a little time to step back from the noise.

0:56Andy Puddicombe: We can't change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it. That's the potential of meditation. That's coming up right after a short break.

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3:43And now our TED Talk of the day.

3:46Andy Puddicombe: We live in an incredibly busy world. The pace of life is often frantic. Our minds are always busy and we're always doing something. So with that in mind, I'd like you just to take a moment to think, when did you last take any time to do nothing? Just ten minutes. Undisturbed. And when I say nothing, I do mean nothing. So that's no emailing, texting, no internet, no TV, no chatting, no eating, no reading. Not even sitting there reminiscing about the past or planning for the future. Simply doing nothing. I see a lot of very blank faces. My thinking is, it's probably going to have to go a long way back.

4:27Andy Puddicombe: And this is an extraordinary thing, right? We're talking about our 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. In fact, we spend more time looking after our cars, our clothes and our hair than we...

5:10Andy Puddicombe: OK, maybe not our hair, but you see where I'm going. 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 kind of 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. We miss out on the things that are most important to us. And the crazy thing is that everybody just assumes, well, that's the way life is, so we've just kind of got to get on with it. That's really not how it has to be. So I was about 11 when I went along to my first meditation class.

5:52Andy Puddicombe: and trust me, it had all the stereotypes that you can imagine, sitting cross-legged on the floor, the incense, the herbal tea, the vegetarians, the whole deal. But my mom was going and I was intrigued, so I went along with her. I'd also seen a few kung fu movies and secretly I kind of thought I might be able to learn how to fly, but I was very young at the time, you know. Now, as I was there, I guess like a lot of people, I assumed that it was just an aspirin for the mind. You get stressed, to do some meditation. I hadn't really thought that it could be sort of preventative in nature until I was about 20 when a number of things happened in my life in quite quick succession, really serious things which just flipped my life upside down and all of a sudden I was inundated with thoughts, inundated with difficult emotions that I didn't know how to cope with.

6:42Andy Puddicombe: Every time I sort of pushed one down another one would just sort of pop back up again. It was a really very stressful time. I guess we will deal with stress in different ways. Some people will bury themselves in work, grateful for the distraction. Others will turn to their friends, their family, looking for support. Some people hit the bottle, start taking medication. My own way of dealing with it was to become a monk. So I quit my degree. I headed off to the Himalayas. I became a monk and I started studying meditation. People often ask me, you know, what I learned from that time. Well, obviously it changed things, you know.

7:20Andy Puddicombe: Let's face it, becoming a celibate monk is going to change a number of things. But it was more than that, you know. It taught me, it gave me a greater appreciation and understanding for the present moment. By that I mean not being lost in thought, not being distracted, not being overwhelmed by difficult emotions, but instead learning how to be in the here and now, how to be mindful, how to be present. I think the present moment is so underrated. It sounds so ordinary, and yet we spend so little time in the present moment that it's anything but ordinary. There was a research paper that came out of Harvard just recently that said, on average, our minds are lost in thought almost 47 % of the time.

8:11Andy Puddicombe: 47%. At the same time, this sort of constant mind-wandering is also a direct cause of unhappiness. Now, we're not here for that long anyway, but to spend almost half of our life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy, I don't know, it 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 kind of need only take about 10 minutes a day, it impacts our entire life.

8:57Andy Puddicombe: 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 ourself with the present moment. But we also need to know how to approach it in the right way to get the best from it. And that's what these are for, in case you've been wondering. Hey, it's Elise, jumping in quickly. Throughout the talk, Andy has actually been holding three red juggling balls. At this point in the talk, he starts to juggle with them occasionally while speaking to visually demonstrate different emotions one may experience.

9:29Andy Puddicombe: Because most people assume that meditation is all about sort of stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind. But actually, it's quite different from that. It's more about sort of stepping back, sort of seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going, emotions coming and going without judgment, but with a relaxed, focused mind. So for example, right now, if I focus too much on the balls, then there's no way that I can relax and talk to you at the same time. Equally, if I relax too much talking to you, then there's no way I can focus on the balls. I'm going to drop them.

10:07Now in life and in meditation,

10:09Andy Puddicombe: there'll be times when the focus becomes a little bit too intense and life starts to feel a bit like this. It's a very uncomfortable way to live life when we get this tight and stressed. At other times, we might take our foot off the gas a little bit too much, and things just become a little bit like this. And of course, in meditation, we're going to end up falling asleep. So we're looking for a balance of focused relaxation where we can allow thoughts to come and go without all the usual involvement. Now, what usually happens when we're learning to be mindful is that we get distracted by a thought.

10:47Andy Puddicombe: Let's say this is an anxious thought. so everything's going fine and then we see the anxious thought and it's like oh I didn't realize I was worried about that you go back to it repeat it oh I am worried oh I really am worried wow there's so much anxiety and before we know it right we're anxious about feeling anxious you know this is crazy we do this all the time even on an everyday kind of level if you think about the last time I don't know you had a wobbly tooth you know it's wobbly and you know that it hurts. But what do you do every 20, 30 seconds? It does hurt. And we reinforce the storyline, right?

11:27Andy Puddicombe: And we just keep telling ourselves. And we do it all the time. And it's only in learning to watch the mind in this way that we can start to let go of those storylines and patterns of mind. But when you sit down and you watch the mind in this way, you might see many different patterns. You might find a mind that's really sort of restless the whole time. Don't be surprised if you feel a bit agitated in your body when you sit down to do nothing and your mind feels like that. You might find a mind that's very sort of dull and boring and it's just almost mechanical. It just sort of seems as if you're just getting up, going to work, eat, sleep, get up.

12:03Andy Puddicombe: Or it might just be that one little nagging thought that just goes round and round and round your mind. Whatever it is, meditation offers the opportunity, the potential, to step back and to get a different perspective, to see that things aren't always as they appear. We can't change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it. That's the potential of meditation, of mindfulness. You don't have to burn any incense, and you definitely don't have to sit on the floor. All you need to do is to take 10 minutes out a day to step back, to familiarize yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm, and clarity in your life.

12:58Andy Puddicombe: Thank you very much. Thank you.

13:05That was Andy Puttycomb at TED Salon London in 2012. This talk was originally posted in January of 2013. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little and Tanzika Sangmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Lucy Little. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening.

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