Welcome guys to episode 189 of Behind the Shield podcast.
My name is James Gearing and I am so excited to bring to you this week
Andy Puddicombe, who is the founder of the app Headspace,
the meditation app that you've heard me rave about in other episodes.
So I am going to talk about his app for a second.
This is not a paid commercial by any means.
I just want to underline what I, you know, my opinion of it.
This is the app that I talk about when I try to sleep in the station.
You know, obviously your mind is going a million miles a minute.
I use this app, the 10 minute segments to deregulate, to bring myself down,
to be able to get some quality sleep between these calls.
I use this app as well when I come back from a high stress call
where your your whole body is running a thousand miles a minute by that point.
It's again deregulate and bring everything down,
whether it's to go back to sleep or just to come back down to a basal level again.
So I highly recommend this.
There is a 10 day free trial.
There's free content on there as well.
And not a paid commercial, like I said, I just in return for Andy coming on the show,
I want to make sure that I highlight you guys visiting this app and trying it
because it's absolutely worth your while.
So with that being said, as I always say, please go to your podcast app,
rate the show, share the show, and most importantly, use social media
and spread the word about each and every one of these amazing guests,
because every single person that donates their time and talk to us
has so much valuable information that could literally save a life
if we get it to the right person.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Andy Puticum. Enjoy.
I want to start by saying thank you so much for coming on the show.
It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
All right. So where are we finding you on planet Earth this morning?
This morning, I am in the middle of a mission.
This morning, I am in, I'm actually just down the road from my home
in Santa Monica in California.
Beautiful. And obviously by your accent, that's not where you were born.
So where were you born?
So I was born in the UK.
I was actually born in in North London, but I grew up in the southwest of England,
very close to Bristol.
And I know we were chatting just now, I thought I might have heard
just a touch of the southwest in your accent.
Yes. Yeah, it's kind of hidden, I think, because of the Florida thing.
So their accent sounds similar, but I'm from Bath originally.
You are? OK. Yeah.
So I see Corshams. You went to school in Keynesham, didn't you?
I did. Yeah. Yeah.
I was banging in the middle of Bristol and Bath, but I know, I know, I know Corsham well.
Yeah. So the first question I'd love to ask, just to get a kind of background,
what was your family unit like?
What did your parents do and how many siblings did you have?
So my parents were together till I was about 10.
And then they went there, they're separate ways.
My mum worked as, goodness me, she worked as a teacher
and then she trained as a hypnotherapist.
She started working in stress management.
So quite sort of a similar, a similar thing to what I do now.
My dad worked looking after the elderly.
In care homes. And I had one, I still do have one sister who's a little bit,
a little bit older than me.
She's now married, living in near London with one child.
Brilliant. And whereabouts in North London were you born?
Just to go back to that for a moment.
In Barnet.
OK. Nice. I worked, I mean, I lived in Highgate for a few years, so it's kind of that way.
All right. Well, then, so obviously, what was your family unit like?
And so obviously with the profession that your mum did,
did she introduce you to meditation when you were still, you know, the age of a young age, I guess I'm trying to say.
Yeah, no, very much so.
It was actually a direct consequence of them getting divorced.
You know, she was struggling and feeling pretty stressed out.
So she was learning how to meditate.
And we just went along with her, James.
So I was probably about 10 or 11 at the time.
Brilliant. And then what about I know you ended up being an athlete as far as the circus arts.
What kind of sports were you into when you were young, the school age?
Yes. What I lacked in academic prowess, I sort of made up for enthusiasm in sports.
So I really, gymnastics was probably like the first thing that I did
with any degree of sort of, you know, regularity, intensity.
But once I was at high school, I played on the football team, as in the soccer team,
on the tennis team, athletics, basketball.
I did pretty much anything I could get my hands on.
Brilliant. Yeah. And with the gymnastics, I know there's a visualization component to headspace.
Were you introduced to any of that when you were doing that sport?
To some degree, I think I'm pretty old now.
That was a long time ago.
But I think it wasn't really even talked about as it definitely wasn't talked about as meditation.
It wasn't even talked about as visualization.
I think it was just we were always encouraged to sort of play it through in the mind
before trying to execute any particular kind of move.
Kind of what's that going to look like? What's that going to feel like?
And I'm sure kind of some of that proved to prove beneficial later on in the meditation.
Right. Now, what about career aspirations when you were in school?
What did you dream of becoming?
I'm pretty sure it wasn't a monk.
I mean, I don't remember.
I don't remember clearly.
I think I was definitely hoping for a career in sports, not necessarily as a professional athlete,
but just somewhere within sports.
By the time I was 18, I was working as a personal trainer at 21.
I was studying sports science at university.
I was really all in on sports.
So I wasn't too sure where it would take me.
But yeah, that was what I was thinking.
Right. Now, I know you've talked about this in the past,
a significant event happening in your personal life that then kind of started you on the
path towards becoming a monk.
Is that something you're comfortable telling the audience here?
Yeah, sure.
And look, Jamie, I mean, this is, you know, I'm sure you guys must see situations
kind of like this all too often.
But I was standing with a group of friends outside a club.
It was Christmas Eve or early Christmas morning.
And a drunk driver came flying down the road and we were just all stood on the sidewalk.
And he mounted the pavement and crashed into the group.
I was very lucky.
I think there were three of us out of about 20 that didn't get struck.
But it killed two people and put another 12 in intensive care.
So it was, I think for everybody, it was a massive wake up call at a very early age.
And I think it impacted all of us sort of differently, you know, but for me personally,
it definitely tapped into thoughts about the fragility of life and thoughts about
the meaning of life and what it meant to live a life of purpose.
Was that in Bristol?
That was, yeah, that was actually that was in Keynesham.
That was Keynesham Rugby Club.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So how did you initially process that trauma? Did it send you down
a path of some negative coping mechanisms originally?
Yeah, I mean, I didn't just because of I think probably having grown up in sport,
I didn't necessarily go to, you know, the thing go down the drug route or anything like that.
I could very easily have done, I think, had I been in a slightly different circle,
the friends at the time.
Definitely, I tried all the usual kind of stuff, maybe drinking a little bit more and
going out more often, distracting myself a bit more, eventually trying to kind of go away,
like hoping that I could maybe if I move to another place, if I went abroad,
maybe kind of just getting away would kind of make it feel different.
And none of the truth is none of those things, you know, they all they all added to my experience
and retrospectively, I'm incredibly grateful for doing them. But none of them really shifted that,
you know, those underlying feelings and the restless quality of mind developed through that
that experience.
Right. Yeah, I've had some people that on the show that, you know, one exercise became her coping
mechanism, but it became an infatuation and ended up being she surpassed the healing part and then
went too far. Another one of my guests is a firefighter and again, that profession distracted
him for about 10 years. But then after 10 years, when that kind of really the novelty wore off,
that's when they crept back in again. So it's interesting that whether it's that, whether it's
you know, geographical, that thing between our ears is there, whether we like it or not.
It is, it is and it will always follow us. I think that was that was the beauty of going
of heading off to, you know, heading off to the Himalayas and going on that journey of meditation
out there, there is there is no distraction. You know, the sitting with oneself, you know, there
is there is nothing to distract oneself with. There is no one really kind of to talk to or get
away, sort of get away from one's own thinking. So it kind of asks you as an individual to sit and
be present with the mind as it is. And that's the good stuff, the happy thoughts is the difficult
stuff, the challenging thoughts is the upset is, is everything. And I think, sort of stepping out
of the distraction of everyday life, yeah, can have a very sort of profound effect, whether that's
for a short period of time in a day or whether it's sort of, you know, for a decade of your life.
Yeah. And what was it that actually made you make that decision? Like, do you remember the moment?
Because Keynesham is not the kind of place where it's like, what are you going to do today? Well,
I might just become a monk because that's kind of that's what my dad did, you know.
Yeah. Well, all your friends in Korsham weren't heading off to the monastery, really?
There was no hair in the entire city of Korsham, we were all shaved. Yeah, it's not, it's definitely
not the most obvious, obvious route I'll grant you. And yeah, and it kind of almost mystifies me
retrospectively. I think, obviously, having been around some of that growing up, and you know,
I've been exposed to meditation, I've got a lot of meditation classes and meditation groups. So
definitely that was kind of around. I've been exposed to some of it at university, through
a few friends and a girlfriend who was kind of, you know, really into sort of Buddhism and stuff.
So there were a bunch of influences. And as for the actually making the decision, I,
I, you know, people talk a lot about callings in life. And I think they can take many sort of
shapes and forms. For me, personally, this was a, this was a legit calling in the sense that
I hadn't really thought about it as an idea. But when the thought came to mind, it was like,
it was the only thing that had ever made sense. And I couldn't, it just felt like I couldn't
really do anything else. It wouldn't have made sense to do anything different. So I just went
along with it. And yeah, I quit, quit university and flew off to India.
Amazing. And then I know you've told the story on other podcasts, interviews and articles. So
if you could just give us an overview of how long you were there and what your average day looked
like during that time.
Yes, I went off. I mean, it's a weird thing, isn't it? You're going to be a Buddhist monk back in
those days, there was no, there was no internet. So, you know, I had my trusted lonely planet
directing me to basically where the Dalai Lama lived in, in northern India at the time.
And so I just sort of headed up in that direction and I found a,
found a retreat center and a monastery and I started to get a stay in there for a while.
I started to get a sense of what aspects of the training kind of interested me most. And it was,
it was definitely meditation. I trained as a, as a novice monk in the Burmese tradition. I took
full ordination in the Tibetan tradition. I was probably, probably away overall for about 10 years,
not as a fully ordained monk all that time, training as a, as a lay person first, then as a
novice monk and then as a fully ordained monk. But yeah, I spent about 10, 10 years overseas and
it was an incredible, it was an incredible experience. Every day is, I want to say every
day is different. As a monk, every day is the same. If you're in a monastery, then, like a
working monastery, then there's a balance of meditation and work, work being sort of cleaning
and cooking and just looking after the sort of general running of the place. If you're in a
retreat monastery, if you're in a retreat context, then yeah, you're, you're training, you're,
you're meditating sort of all day, every day. So sort of in Burma, that meant sort of nine hours
of seated meditation a day, nine hours of walking meditation a day in the Tibetan monasteries. It
was maybe kind of closer to 14 hours of seated meditation a day, it depended monastery to
monastery. But retreat was the thing that I kind of enjoyed the most and found most fulfilling.
Right. And the interesting thing, cause I heard you talking on one of the other podcasts, it was the,
god, I'm forgetting the name of it now, but the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,
wearable technology company. Oh, whoop. Whoop. That was it. Whoop. And it kind of reminded me,
because what I've loved about Headspace, and I've talked about it literally for years, I think I
just renewed my subscription for the third or fourth time. But it's so, so good for, you know,
my profession and a lot of people that are in associated professions, but we are kind of,
you know, just, we go all in on a lot of things. And obviously this profession, you have to,
otherwise your, you know, lives are at stake. But when you think of meditation, your first mind is
exactly what you've just described. And I think that puts off, you know, 99.9% of the people,
but it's the same as me saying, oh, I want to kick a football around with my son. Oh, but I don't
play as good as, you know, poor Gascoigne. So what's the point? You know? So, so it's interesting
hearing that. And then, and then obviously looking at Headspace now with the way you've
partitioned it, because now it gives that, removes that barrier to entry and that fear of, you know,
sitting on a cold floor for 10 hours a day in a robe and puts it into, you can do it on the plane,
the train, in the fire station and totally bridges that gap. Yeah. I mean, hopefully in the
amount of people on the platform suggested that it has broken down a lot of barriers, a lot of
obstacles for people. I do think there's also a big sort of misconception in the West, you know,
there's these two words, meditation and mindfulness that are often used interchangeably. And I think
people often, when they think of meditation, their mind immediately goes to a monk, nun, yogi,
sitting cross-legged on the floor and the meditation kind of component. And I'll talk a bit about the
meditation in a minute and why it doesn't have to be that way. But they kind of jump over the
mindfulness component. And really, we only meditate so that we can familiarize ourselves
with mindfulness so that we can then apply that to the rest of our life, whether that's
sort of first responders or whatever kind of we might do in life. It's not, we don't meditate to
get good at sitting still with our eyes closed. So we're familiarizing ourselves with a particular
quality of mind, of calm, of clarity, so we can take that into any situation in life. And for me,
that's the real kind of value, the real benefit. And it's often the thing that's sort of ignored
because people just focus on the meditation. So it's almost like, okay, so we have this
mindfulness, this ability to be more present in our life, which is going to help us in every
aspect of our life. But then we need an environment, we need a tool, a skill that we can actually
train in to get better at being more mindful in our life. And that's all meditation is really. So
here, when we created the app, it was kind of how do we create the most compelling invitation
for meditation so people can get a direct experience of what it feels like to be present,
to be less distracted. And so they could then get the benefit of that in everyday life. So my hope
is that as people use the platform and as, you know, just as a society, kind of our education
improves around what it means to be sort of more mindful and how meditation can help us be more
mindful, people start to see how it's not something separate from life. Actually, it's an integral
part of every single moment of our entire life. Yeah, yeah. One of my closing questions on the
show is always what do you do to decompress? And there's several things that come up over and over
again. One is spending time with their kids. Another one is being out in nature, whether it's
hunting, fishing, you know, hiking. But all these things are them being present. And I think that's
the thing. You go to a restaurant, especially here in America, you know, you're sitting down
and not only are you trying to have conversation with your family, you've got the noise from all
the other tables around you, you've got 500 televisions all playing different stations
flashing at you, you've got your cell phones on the table, you know, and so it's so hard just to
be present. And that's what I found with this is it's kind of like the 60-minute CrossFit workout
or the 10-minute kettlebell workout. That's your meditation, but then that applies to, God forbid,
I've got to climb 18 floors to go get a kid out of a building. That's when the application is.
Absolutely. Yeah, for me, it's like going to the gym. If I run on the treadmill, it's not because I
love running on the treadmill, because I want to get good at running on a treadmill. It's because
I want to be fit and functional in my life and be able to do all the things I love to do. And it's
interesting. I meet a lot of people who say, kind of, look, nature is my meditation or running is
my meditation. And look, that holds to a point in the sense that, yes, it can bring about a similar
kind of experience, but equally, it's really easy to go out running and in our mind just to be ticking
off a to-do list for the day, to be thinking about a conversation we had the other day, or to be
walking in nature, immersed in the most beautiful place in the world, and yet to be thinking about,
you know, what's happening at work next week, or an argument we have with a friend or something
like that. And even if we have sort of a discipline like running or swimming, that's fine. And it's
great if it brings about the quality of calm and decompression. But what happens when we get injured?
What happens when we can't engage in that thing? So it's all those things I think are amazing,
and they can be really beneficial, but they become even more beneficial when we're able to
be fully present. So when we are playing with our kids, for example, we're not half with our kids
and half on our phone, half thinking about what they want and half thinking about an email that
we need to send. Instead, we are fully kind of present with them. And I feel like true decompression
kind of happens when we are able to let go of all that stuff and be fully present in the body where
we are in that moment. Absolutely. And I want to explore the carryover and all the different,
you know, external and internal stresses as well. But just to kind of connect the dots. So from
the full-time, you know, actually practicing monk, what made you come back to the UK? And then
more importantly, really, what made you take that expanded practice and realize that you could
condense it and bridge the gap from people that really hadn't entered that world before?
Yeah, I think it was a dawning realization, you know, that there was this skill that
could be incredibly beneficial to a lot of people, but nobody really kind of had access to it.
I was actually living in Moscow at the time in Russia. So the monastery had asked me to teach
in a meditation center in Russia. I ended up living there for four, four and a half years,
something like that. And people would come along after work in the evening and they to learn
meditation. And increasingly, you know, I was meeting all these people, just regular people,
regular jobs, families, everything else who were struggling. They didn't necessarily want to,
they weren't looking for enlightenment. They didn't want to learn how to chant or anything like,
you know, they just wanted to sleep better. They wanted to feel less anxious. They wanted to have
happier relationships. And I knew there was this thing that could help. And yet walking around
dressed as a Buddhist monk, I wasn't sort of naturally reducing the barriers to entry. So
I think just over time, it started me thinking sort of, look, there is an opportunity here to
introduce this in a way that it hasn't really been talked about very much, definitely within
a secular context. And that sort of began the journey of sort of trying to demystify it somewhat.
Right. So just for the application to kind of, you know, underline how I've used it and why it's so
important and I think why, you know, it works and, you know, a shout from the rooftops about it.
You talked about the buy-in, you know, walking in wearing the robes. And I think that's a,
it's a two-pronged problem, I guess you could say. In our profession, firstly, if you come in and
there's no connection with the, say, fire service, police, military, whoever you're presenting to,
even if you're wearing a tracksuit and it's not a robe, you know, if you've come from the local
leisure center or whatever, you don't understand what it's like to work shifts, what it's like to
see people die and all these things that are horrific, but they are part of the issue.
But so a lack of understanding, then you're like, well, you guys need to do, you know,
an hour or two hours of meditation every day. There's just, there's no direct application.
How I've found, and this is the reason why I was so passionate about this particular thing is,
I would go run a call, let's say two in the morning, let's say it was a pretty bad call,
come back and, you know, most first responders will tell you, you basically can't go back to
sleep after that. I would put on the Headspace Sleep app and within 10 minutes, I'd take it out
and I would go right back to sleep. And it was deregulating that nervous system that most of us
are walking with and walk around with that's so highly, highly charged, whether it's before
sleep, whether it's the middle of the day, whether it's after your ex just called you again, whatever
it is. But those 10 minute segments are so user-friendly for our profession. And I think that
was what really made it click to me is it's like you did walk in understanding, you know, the needs
of my profession and it works, you know, flawlessly with when we need to access it.
Yeah, that's really, it's great feedback. James, thank you. And I'm really happy it works in that
way. And you know, you're right. It's not so much, it's interesting. I think a lot of people look at
meditation, especially them, you know, done a lot of it, don't have any experience of it. They look
at it almost as a, almost as a sort of a fix or something like that, kind of like, you know, it's
suddenly going to change, suddenly going to change anything where actually is much more about balancing
out and regulating helping physically us move from sympathetic to parasympathetic sort of state where
we do or are able to sort of relax and unwind a little bit. And at a psychological level where
we're more able to let go of a lot of the rumination and a lot of the inner dialogue
that typically we carry around with us. And that's, yeah, if it's at night time, it's in the
middle of the night, that can be really distracting. It can stop us sort of getting to sleep during the
day. It prevents us from being fully engaged in the world in which we live. So just having that as
a skill, just balancing things out, I think can make a real difference.
Yeah. Well, focusing on the daytime first, because I really want to delve into the sleep in a moment,
but what I found, you know, doing the practice is when we had an emergent call, I was able to be a
lot calmer on the way there and I would even use some of the same breathing techniques on the way
to the call. And then when you got there, you had a wide focus as far as, you know, at any potential
risks. So you weren't blinkered, but then you were very focused as far as the job in hand and
weren't running around like a chicken with his head cut off either. So I found that again, that
when you put the work in by doing the practice every day, every other day, whatever you're able to do,
everything became more relaxed and more efficient. Yeah. I love that. I love the
picture you painted there. I think a few people have talked to me about almost experiencing
sort of a matrix type moment where everything sort of just begins to slow down,
but everything's still happening real time. But our experience of it, our perception of it is that
everything is slowing down. And so we have more time to make decisions. And I think typically in
life, our mind is so busy that we tend to react to things. So, I mean, I can only imagine in a
critical situation, you know, like you might be attending, if you react to, on the one hand,
we need to respond very quickly. But if we react hastily, we could end up making the wrong decision.
If we can create a quality of mind where the mind is actually calm, but highly alert, highly focused,
but we have enough space to respond skillfully, then we make a better decision in that moment.
So I think it's really tempting to, for people who don't know a lot about meditation, to think that
it sort of gets you in a particular state of mind, maybe it's very relaxed, very calm, but actually
it's training and awareness. So yes, we can use it to kind of to relax and calm down, but we can also
use it to be highly alert, highly efficient, and to make good decisions in very challenging situations.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that being present is very important, whether it's in the actual job or again,
like you said, in the training. So you've got the meditation training itself, we've got our
fire training too. And let's say, for example, we are climbing, you know, 20 floors up with all
your gear. Well, instead of thinking, oh my God, I got 19 and got 18, if you're just focusing and
being in that moment and thinking about every single step, then it takes away the anxiety of
the what ifs when I get up there. Let me just focus. All I have right now is this. I have this load
and I have the next, you know, step or two to get up. And then you just keep cycling and cycling
before you know it, you're up there and you are focused instead of working your way into a frenzy
by the time you get up. Yeah. I think that's a great metaphor kind of across the whole of life,
actually. But just being able to let go of the thinking, which fuels the emotion. So
anxiety, for example, can only exist if we're fanning the flames of anxiety. So we have to be
applying a lot of thinking around the anxiety, the anxiety to continue. If we're able to let go
of the thinking, then the anxiety will subside and we're then able to be more present. So we're
not thinking about what did happen just now. We're not thinking what might happen or could happen
at the top of the ladder. Instead, we are just fully present in the body one run to the next.
Yeah, exactly. And I know this has been said many, many times, but I think it's such a powerful
statement. Depression is worrying about the past and anxiety is worrying about the future. So if
you're present, in theory, you're basically eliminating both of those stresses. Yeah. And
the, I think the temptation, it can be is, when people begin meditation, especially is to think
that they are immediately going to be free from those stresses. And that they are immediately
going to be living in the present moment all of the time. My experience and the experience of most
people is that this is a journey. So I think it's also really important to highlight that,
yes, we can experience those things less frequently, but I would say it's even more valuable than that.
I would say that through regular meditation, through regular mindfulness, we can get to a
point where when we experience anxiety in the mind, we don't necessarily kind of buy into it. We
don't necessarily engage with it. Instead, we're actually okay with it. And when sad thoughts
arise in the mind, we don't necessarily engage with them. We don't necessarily buy into them.
We're okay with them. And that's actually, in a way, is way more freedom than simply being free
from something. If we're okay with the mind in good times and in bad times, that's absolute freedom.
Because then we're no longer concerned. We're no longer trying to maintain a certain quality
in mind. And we're no longer trying to keep certain thoughts and emotions at bay. Instead,
we are genuinely able to be at ease with the mind, no matter how it appears in each and every moment.
But that's, as I say, that is a journey. Yeah. And I noticed that, funny enough, with,
I think road rage is the wrong description, just getting wound up by other people's driving,
because it wasn't like I was out there dragging them through the glass or anything. But before,
I would react, I would get angry. And this was definitely part of sleep deprivation as well.
So I acknowledge that. But what I found with using the headspace was, just like you said,
I would acknowledge, yes, that person is still driving like an asshole. There's no question
about that. However, I choose not to react the same way, because it's going to have no effect
on the world. If I get wound up, they probably don't even realize they just cut me up anyway.
So the awareness of my reaction to the exterior world was a big change.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the biggest thing that, as I said, it's not that everything around us
is suddenly going to change and that all the difficulties and challenges of life
are suddenly going to disappear. But our perspective of some changes, and in that space,
in that renewed perspective, there is the opportunity to actually kind of let go of
some of the old habits that we might have engaged in over the course of a lifetime. And as a direct
result, maybe we do feel a bit less stressed and maybe we are able to be a bit more positive
in the world and a bit more connected with the people around us.
Absolutely. Well, I want to just explore sleep, because as I mentioned before,
that's where I used it the most. I would often use it before, I quote unquote, went to sleep,
and then a fire station waiting for an alarm to go off. It's not technically sleep,
it's just closing your eyes for a bit. But the 10-minute segments that you had, the sleep segments,
I really, really enjoyed. Now, from all your experience with the importance and quality of
sleep, what's your perspective on exactly that? How much have you learned about the value of sleep
and then the application of Headspace to help that?
Yeah, it's an interesting one, because in the monastery, for example, we might only sleep,
again, in retreat kind of context, and this can often be for years at a time,
but you might only sleep for four hours a night. So the sleep has to be incredibly efficient
to fully recover. Obviously, it's a very different environment, and you don't have the same sort of
stresses involved and the same level of distraction. But at the same time, it definitely made me
acutely aware that it's not the number of hours that we sleep, it's the quality of rest we have
while we're sleeping. So, you know, I know lots of people who sleep for 10 hours a night and wake up,
lucky people, I know, and I know that they're not going to be able to sleep for 10 hours a night,
wake up feeling exhausted. They're still tired when they wake up in the morning, and they feel
like their mind has been churning away sort of all night. And I know people who've slept for
considerably less, they wake up feeling very alert. So I do think it's really important that we pay
attention to not just how many hours we're spending in bed with our eyes shut, but also to the quality
of the quality of rest we're getting. And there are a few things we can do. I think one, this is
this is hard to sort of maybe wrap your head around immediately, but simply having a regular
meditation practice in the daytime will help lead to a better night's sleep. So we don't necessarily,
basically what happens is usually in every day we get to bedtime, we've been so busy, as soon as we
put our head on the pillow, it's almost like with nothing to do, all those thoughts then stream into
our mind, and they can sort of prevent us from getting to sleep. If we have a regular meditation
practice, we're less likely to store up all those thoughts during the day. There's a sense of them
being released as we go through the day. So therefore, when we get to bed, we're more likely
to be able to fall asleep. So having a regular meditation practice can help. Doing some, we have
loads of unwinding exercises on the app. So these are designed specifically before you go to bed,
almost in the same way that you'd warm up for exercise of any kind, in the same way you're
sort of preparing the mind to wind down and be in a state where it will comfortably sort of drift off.
And then there are even exercises that you can do, as you say, if you wake up in the middle of the
night to sort of help you go back to sleep. But ultimately, yeah, we're looking for a quality
of rest rather than simply more time in bed. Yeah. And then I think it's such a, again,
we talk about negative and positive or healthy coping mechanisms, a lot of the physical stresses,
the mental stresses, and there's a huge epidemic really of alcohol use in our profession, of pain
pill use, and then sleeping medicine as well. And all of those just destroy your quality of sleep.
So to be able to find something that actually is going to be beneficial 24 hours a day, but will
give you that deep restorative sleep, and then you can start weaning yourself off those crutches
that you use, I think is very powerful. Yeah. And again, I can only imagine how easy it would be
to go down any of those routes working in your profession. But as anyone who has gone through
long term use of any of those things will testify, it is most definitely not a comfortable,
long term, sustainable solution. And I think you hit the net on the head, it's not about kind of
immediately swapping this out. It's about introducing this as an additional skill in toolkit,
if you like, and at the same time working with a health professional, if that's necessary,
to slowly wean yourself off maybe some of the other less healthy supports that might have been
used in the past. Right. Now you mentioned health professional. I saw an article where,
I think it was Evening Standard, where you'd had referrals from local GPs, and I found that quite
interesting. So what's the story behind? Were they regular GPs? And what kind of people were
they sending you away? Yeah, funny enough, that was actually, so even before, even before I started
Headspace, so I went back, after the monastery, I went back to, after Russia, I went back to England.
And I spent a number of years working in a clinic doing just one to one stuff, private practice,
and it was an interdisciplinary health clinic. There were people across the board that were
sort of cardiac specialists, orthopedic. I mean, it was really, really broad, and it was run by a guy
who was just very sort of progressive, and he had this idea that if he brought enough people
from different disciplines under one roof, then no matter who walks in the door, no matter what was
wrong with them, he would have the people to sort of help. And so I would see people, if people were
in there, it was normally stress-related conditions. Either they were struggling with
insomnia, anxiety, depression, irritability, those types of things. I would either see them alongside
sort of a GP who was either just monitoring their condition or maybe even prescribing them some
medication. Or occasionally, if they felt they didn't warrant medication, but the meditation
would be helpful, then I would see that individual separately. And I used to see people, it was a
course that I ran there, so it was a 10-week course. I'd see people for one hour a week over
a 10-week period, and we'd kind of work not only on what was going on with them at that particular
moment, but also on a sort of a longer-term strategy. So at the end of the 10 weeks, they'd
actually have a skill they could take away and apply to any part of their life.
Yeah, I think that's incredible. I mean, I hear more and more of the power of psychotherapy and
a lot of the mental health issues too. Even use of MDMA recently to get rid of the barriers when
they're talking them through it. But it all results in a good psychotherapy, which again,
is self-talk. And I think they give them tools as well. But it's amazing to me how powerful that is
versus being prescribed a bunch of psych meds and being told to come back in 30 days.
Yeah, it's massive. I think it will require such a cultural sort of change. I think it has been a
certain way for such a long period of time. But I'm actually really encouraged when I look at
what's happened in the last 10 years. 10 years ago, we couldn't even really talk about meditation or
mindfulness without people kind of giggling. I think it's a very important thing to do.
People kind of giggling. There's now sort of 45 million people on the platform. And over those
last 10 years, we've only been one part of the conversation. But the conversation just around
mental health has moved on massively. Perhaps more so in the UK than here in the US. I don't know.
When I go back to the UK and back to Europe, I'm amazed now. Whether it's within workplace,
whether it's within healthcare, there is just a general acknowledgement now that our mental health
is just as, if not more important than our physical health. And unless we kind of introduce a culture
where people feel okay to be able to talk about this stuff, to feel okay to be vulnerable in their
work, in their relationships, then we're really going to struggle. So I actually think things
have moved on and I'm excited about the pace at which they're moving in some areas of the world.
Brilliant. Now, I know the Dalai Lama famously said if every eight-year-old in the world was
taught meditation, it would eliminate violence in a generation. And I know I actually looked online,
there was someone that was poo-pooing the whole thing. But the reality is, obviously we know,
like we just discussed for the last 40 minutes, that there is nothing but positive benefits from
this. What's your philosophy on actually implementing that in schools and getting kids
to understand mindfulness and meditation at an early age? Yeah, I mean, I'm obviously haven't
benefited from a young age myself. I'm a huge advocate of that and it's something we've worked
on really, really hard at Headspace. So even within the app, there's Headspace for kids,
five and under, six to eight and nine to 11. We have loads of people who kind of use it with kids
as young as three. I think that's really exciting. I love the statement that he came out with
and I love the sentiment of it. I think it will take, you know, this is a generational kind of
thing. It will take time, but most schools now, most schools that I know of, have mindfulness
in their curriculum to some extent. Sometimes it's teachers of their own volition just bringing it
into the classroom because they found it beneficial themselves. Over here in the US, we've worked,
we currently make Headspace available to all educators for free. We've reached somewhere
close to half a million teachers in the US. It's available in tons of schools and I think we're
working with, I could be wrong, but the last county was something like 70 odd school districts
across the US. And yeah, so we internally feel like setting the next generation up with these skills
so that they don't have to wait till they get to the point where they feel like they're struggling
with their mental health. That is the way forward. Absolutely. And on the other side of the scale,
have you done any work in prisons, bringing meditation into there? Yeah, we have done so back
in, I don't know in the US actually, but back in the UK. So when we were trying to work out sort of
how we were going to be engaged in sort of more philanthropic type work, we worked a lot with
sort of health centers, addiction centers, prisons, and also sort of homes which cater to people when
they left prison and returned to everyday life. And that's often sort of a period of real kind
of challenge. And it's been really, it's been fascinating. There's a ton of research online
that people can have a look at about sort of the work that's been done with meditation inside
prisons. But I do think there is a real opportunity. There are, just from a very sort of practical
point of view, not only is it a very sort of challenging environment where people would benefit
from these skills, but there is also the opportunity and the time in which to learn these skills
and where they can be an important part of rehabilitation, of acceptance, and developing
a healthy sense of self-worth and compassion as they head back out into society. And I feel like
that's a really missing component from sort of the penal system generally.
Yeah, yeah. And I think there's a lot of men and women that have got childhood trauma that
they've got to deal with. They've got the addiction that they use to fill the void. And there's so
many areas there that you could see would be beneficial if they replaced that with exploring
their own mind. Brilliant. All right. Well, I want to touch on one more area before we
talk about Headspace. I kind of want you to paint the picture so everyone knows exactly what is
available to them. But I know you were diagnosed with cancer. So being someone who was a monk for
10 years, I'm very holistic in the way I look at food and treatment. What were the changes that
you made in your life to overcome that? Yeah. So I was diagnosed with cancer just
after I came out to America. And it's really important to say at the start,
I'm not recommending a particular course of action here. This is a very personal thing
that's different for everyone. And you've got to do it alongside your doctor and everything else.
But yeah, for me, having grown up in a culture where meditation was part of growing up and
alternative health and acupuncture and nutrition, all that stuff was stuff I'd grown up with and
obviously kind of studying sports and things as well that all kind of fed into it. So yeah,
when I found out that I had cancer, I needed to have an operation straight away, which I had. And
then they wanted to do sort of more aggressive surgery and also go down the route of chemo and
everything else. And I just didn't feel like that was right for me at that time. So I went and got
a second opinion and then a third and then a fourth. And on the sixth opinion, I found a doctor
who thought in a similar way to me. And yeah, we came up with a plan and obviously meditation was
a, and more meditation was a really important part of that plan, changing nutrition as well. So
again, this is controversial. Some people are into it, some aren't, but we went on an alkaline diet
and ate nothing but raw food for a year with my wife, who very kindly joined me at the time.
And I made sure that I was just getting more rest than I had been previously and starting a company
and moving to a different country and everything else. There had been a lot going on. So it was
sort of modifying some of life behaviors, making sure I was getting enough exercise, I was eating
the right food, that I was doing enough meditation. And for me personally, that was my way of working
with quite a challenging situation. And what was the outcome? Well, so far so good, my friend.
There we go. There we go. We're five years on now. And there's been no sign of it yet. It's an
interesting one. I think meditation has taught me that apart from anything else that these things,
just in life, everything comes and goes. And it doesn't mean that it's gone forever. And I
would say that it will drift in and out of my mind. Maybe it comes up in conversation with someone.
And I don't think I ever feel like I'm just not of that personality where it's like,
oh, I've beaten it. Because I created some conditions for the body to heal, but I don't
really believe I beat it. Nature just played out that way within those conditions. And so,
all being well, it will remain that way. But yeah, I just feel the most useful thing
kind of throughout that process. And so many people, you must have spoken to loads of people,
down here, who feel the same way. But I feel like those things are a real gift when we survive them.
Because they do remind us of what's important in life. They do encourage us to feel more grateful.
And having meditation on that journey, where it would have been so easy to get strung out and
to think about what could happen, what might happen. And instead, to just be present and being
okay with just not really knowing along the way. That was a really valuable thing.
Yeah. Well, it goes back to what you said about the tragedy in Keynesham. I mean, you could be
100% healthy and then a drunk driver plows into you and your friends. So there's no way of knowing.
But just to me, the philosophy of taking all the natural tools that our ancestors,
thousands of years ago, had to put the body in as close to as homeostasis as you can,
to my medical mind, makes a lot more sense than blasting the body with radiation or chemicals
and destroying the immune system. Yeah, I think so. I mean, another time, another situation.
And I think that's the other thing as well. I think it can be really easy to look at life
in terms of black or white kind of thing. And I feel like meditation and mindfulness,
some people will say, oh, but what about medication? Is it medication or meditation?
And I feel like these things are complementary. And sometimes, if I was in a real tight spot
and I needed surgery, I would not be going to my local acupuncturist to have a treatment. I would
be going to the doctor, to the hospital to have surgery because I know it's amazing that we have
those things. But from a long term preventative type of thinking, I think it's really helpful
to explore all the different things that are out there. Yeah, absolutely. And that's the thing. I
try not to demonize medicine. I try to be clear and preface a discussion with, yeah, if I got
nailed by a car and broke my femur in two, I'm not going to go to a chiropractor and say, hey, can you
pop that back in? I'm going to go to a trauma surgeon. But yeah, chronic disease, when I know,
I know, there's no question that you can reverse so many of these so-called irreversible diseases
through nutrition, through mental practice, yoga, all those things combined, then you really do not
need to be a drug addict on some statin for the rest of your life. All right. Well, let's take a
moment then to, if you wouldn't mind, just to tell people listening, how to access the platform,
what types of meditation practices there are in the links, just so they get a kind of mental picture
of what you have out there. Yeah. So look, you can download, obviously you can download the app,
either from iOS app store or Google Play store. And when you first download it, so
you don't need to, you don't need to subscribe in order to use it and to try it. So we work with a
system whereby there is free content on there that you can use forever, as long as you like.
If you want access, once you've learned the basics, if you want access to more content,
then it's a subscription kind of model. And once you go into that library, yeah, there are 10, 20,
30 day courses on everything from productivity and focus and performance to sleep, stress,
anxiety, self-esteem. There's a sports channel for those people that are specifically looking for
help with either preparing for sports in the performance itself or in the recovery.
This has space for kids. And the idea is that you can kind of create your own journey, you know,
and you kind of access the content that feels right for you at that time. And you can choose,
you don't, you know, as I said at the beginning, you don't have to sit for a really long time.
You can sit for, you can choose a session length as little as three minutes or five minutes.
I'd recommend slowly if you can try and build up to sort of 10 minutes. But the idea, as I say,
is that this is a facility that you can access and implement and integrate into your own life
as it exists. You don't have to make big changes necessarily in your own life to make room for this.
And yeah, every, every exercise is different. There are, there are some that focus more on
the breath, for example, sort of focus attention type exercises, which are really good for training
sort of a relaxed focus in the mind. There are others that are more sort of visualization
orientated that can be really helpful for sort of encouraging an environment for healing in the body.
So again, there are lots of different techniques in there, different ways of sort of cultivating
these qualities of mind that most of us would like to, to experience a little bit more often.
Yeah. And that 10 minute segment that you're talking about, again, to me works so well in
our profession because, you know, when you first get to the station or in your patrol car,
whatever it is that you're doing, that's a, that's a amount where you can just kind of control or
delete your brain a little bit. And then because you've only done the 10, that frees up a lot of
time where if you want to revisit it later in the day, you have a stressful call or you're getting
ready to do an exercise that you're actually pretty anxious about and it scares you, whether
it's heights or water or whatever it is, then you can revisit it again. And I think those segments
work extremely well for the jobs that we do. Yeah. That's a really interesting way of thinking
about it. And, and we actually specifically, recognizing that people didn't always want to sit
down for, you know, 10, 15, 20 minutes. We even, so there's even an SOS kind of channel sort of in
there as well. So that, you know, let's say you're feeling particularly anxious about something,
it doesn't mean that you have to do a whole kind of exercise. You know, you can just plug it in.
And for three minutes, you know, you'll be sort of coached through with a, with a mindfulness
exercise that will help sort of deescalate the sort of the panic in the mind. So my hope is that
there is something, something in there for everyone. Brilliant. All right. So I got some
very quick wrapper questions then. I know we've got just a few minutes left. Is there a book that
you love to recommend to people? Just to say, so you've written three books to get some headspace,
The Headspace Diet and The Headspace Guide to Mindful Pregnancy. So I want to make sure that we
mention those as well. Are there any books by other people that you love to recommend?
There are. Most of them are pretty niche, obviously given my backgrounds and my interest. But look,
there's one I'm going to throw out there, which I think is, I think it's amazing. It's, it is
meditation specific, but it's bigger than meditation. It's kind of about life. It's about awareness.
It's called Zen Mind Beginner's Mind by a Japanese chap called Suzuki Roshi, who came over to America,
I think back in the 50s or 60s and settled in San Francisco. It's just a book which really
encourages this idea of pulling back from the confusion of our inner dialogue and just gets us
looking at our mind, at our relationships and at the world in a very different way.
Brilliant. All right. And then I'm just going to ask one other wrapper question. Is there a person
that you would recommend to come on this podcast to talk to the first responders of the world?
Goodness me. You put me on the...
That one normally snags a few people and I don't mean to.
Do you know, I mean, one of the ones, I don't know if he'd do it, but the Tibetan Lama that I
trained under, I think would be really interesting, you know? Like it's, it's not like he's led his
whole life just again, sitting around a monastery with his eyes closed. I mean, those guys in
escaping Tibet, they spent six months going over, sort of traveling over the Himalayas by foot,
being shot at by Chinese soldiers. More than three quarters of the group he traveled in
died of either hypothermia or starvation. And it's amazing listening to someone like that,
who has been through really kind of, you know, life changing events in his life and how that's
been put to good effect in leading a sort of a happier and more positive life. I think he could
be a, he could be a really interesting one. It's a bit left field, but hey.
This is a left field show, I promise you. So I've had, I've had child soldiers, you name it. I've
had all kinds of people on here. So next time I see him, I'll ask him.
That would be amazing. Thank you. All right. Well, I just want to say thank you so much.
I can imagine how busy you are, but not only talk to you, but then to realize that we grew up a few
miles from each other is even more, more of an impact. Small world, small world.
So thank you so much. Thank you, James. Thanks for having me on.