A couple of months back, I entirely quitted any form on online content, no YouTube or Instagram, no Twitter or Netflix. It sounds extreme, but I did it because I thought they would just distract me from completing my goals. That blackout period lasted only about a month, and these days I’ve rekindled my love for YouTube with creators like Matt D’Avella. 

Back when I was avoiding the content jungle of the internet in the hope of maintaining my focus, I knew that others were using meditation to gain clarity. 

Of course, I wasn’t interested. For me, meditation was a woo-woo thing tied somehow to reincarnation, and since I think of myself as a smart person, I didn’t buy into it.

But how things have changed, I’ve gained a better understanding of what meditation is about. I wouldn’t dare to call myself anything close to an expert, but I now meditate two or three times a week, for about 10 minutes each time. (I use a very comfy chair; there’s no way I am going to do the lotus position.)

I’ve learned that meditation is, in the simplest of ways, an exercise for the mind. One might compare it even to the way we use our muscles when we play sports. Because for me, it’s not related to weird topics like faith or mysticism. 

Instead, it’s about taking out a brief moment in your day, learning how to observe the thoughts in my head, and gaining some distance from them.

Andy Puddicombe has received a slight amount of criticism for his low-barrier approach, but his approach convinced me to tackle meditation heads on. 

Who do you wonder? Well, let me introduce: Andy Puddicombe, the 46-year-old co-founder and soothing voice of the popular Headspace app. Andy is the person who turned me from skeptic (slightly euphemistic here) to a believer (again somewhat euphemistic). 

Before finding Headspace, I had tried to read several books on meditation. But with every book I picked up, I got more intimidated by this whole ‘meditation thing’. To sum it up: I thought that the investment of time and energy into meditation was too high. 

But along came Andy. Headspace made the barrier to entry low enough for me. It’s just 10 minutes a day of listening to Andy’s soothing British accent and trying to follow him. Andy has taken a lot of heat from ‘hard-core’ meditators for his approach, but he removed my fear of meditation and made me stick with it. I’m happy he did.

 An easy way to get started yourself—definitely if you’re as frightened as I was—is to grab yourself a copy of Andy’s book, The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness. Andy’s a gifted storyteller and provides you with lots of helpful metaphors to explain tricky concepts, which makes the book a delight to read.

In the book, he speaks on the evidence base behind these concepts in sections called “What the research shows,” so you know the benefits are legitimate. 

The story also helps you see that Andy himself is legitimate. He’s an ordained Buddhist monk who trained for many years in monasteries in India, Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand, Australia, Russia, and Scotland.

The book begins with Andy describing one of them: “Locked in, day and night, surrounded by high stone walls and with no way of contacting anyone on the outside, at times it had felt more like a prison.” It’s like a review from a beautiful Airbnb. 

At another monastery, the monks served students curry and rice every day, and they made the students eat their meal slowly for precisely an hour. Then, on one scorching day, the monks placed in front of each student a delightful surprise: ice cream. “It was like being a child at a birthday party when the cake comes out.” Unfortunately, the students soon learned they were not allowed to enjoy the ice cream until they had eaten their curry and rice in the (now quite painful) slow way they’d been taught. As the ice cream started melting in front of Andy, he felt anger, then sadness and guilty for feeling angry—just as the monks knew their students would. 

But it turns out that the monastic life wasn’t the right fit for Andy. After ten long years, he made his way back and—I’m not making this up—decided to become a circus clown in London. Andy wanted to be engaged in society rather than locking himself away in artificially quiet retreats.

While he was exercising his newly found talents as a clown, he started to help people with severe anxiety and other conditions through meditation. A couple of years later, Andy decides to start Headspace and so begins on his ambitious journey to teach meditation to the masses. He understood that meditation was a skill everyone could master without sitting behind high stone walls in China or being subjected to icecream torture. 

Due to my broad set of professional and personal interests, meditation has been an essential skill for improving my focus. Furthermore, it helped me step back and observe whatever thoughts or emotions are present. I appreciate what I’m getting from my 10 minutes every day, and I’m thankful to Andy for helping me on this journey.