Andy Puddicombe is a former Buddhist monk who became the co-founder of Headspace – a guided meditation app that boasts 60 million users around the world.
Even if you’ve never heard of or seen Andy, his voice is instantly recognisable to anyone that’s used the app. His diction is shot through with pauses giving him time to think and when he slips into guided meditation mode, his speech takes on a slow rhythm bordering on hypnotic.
I met Andy at one of London’s swanky Soho hotels in a closed-off meeting room known as ‘the Library’. As the name implies, there were armchairs, a coffee table and shelves stacked with books. There was even a roaring fire.
During the course of the conversation, I asked the man who trained to meditate for up to 16 hours what he might recommend for someone to get started on the path to mindfulness right away.
He gives me two answers.
‘Pick one activity during your day – that might be having a cup of coffee or reading the paper – and do it without doing anything else at the same time.
‘That might mean you don’t look at your phone while you drink the coffee. Just put it down and focus on doing one thing without any distraction.’
So, I put it to you to see if you can focus on this article without any distractions. Ignore your notifications or avoid clicking on another browser tab. You’ll have taken the first step towards mindfulness and I’ll tell you at the end of the article what Andy’s second technique is.
Meanwhile, if you’re not familiar with Headspace, let me fill you in.
The app is part of a wider company devoted to digital health and making mindfulness more accessible. Initially, that’s through guided meditation but there are other avenues, such as movement and nutrition, to consider as well.
Headspace – through Andy’s narration – guides you through different techniques and while there’s a free tier, you have to subscribe and pay a monthly fee of £9.99 to keep accessing the new content. You can cut the monthly price in half if you sign up for a year at a time.
‘I get called an overnight success, but it’s taken 11 years,’ Andy tells Metro.co.uk. A Bristol native, Puddicombe moved to the US to start Headspace with his co-founder Rich Pierson. Now he lives in LA with his wife and kids and Headspace employs 300 people in LA, San Francisco, New York and London.
The app is pushing beyond just a subscription service on our smartphones. It’s currently about halfway through the FDA approval process in the US which will allow doctors to prescribe it to patients – therefore sidestepping the need to pay for a subscription as it will be covered by health insurance.
‘Things like mental health and emotional wellbeing are the disease states we go after. And the common wisdom is meditation is only for mental diseases, like anxiety for example,’ Andy says. ‘And yes, while there’s definitely a place for that, we’re also seeing a huge impact on physical ailments as well. Things like migraines or high blood pressure can be treated with meditation.’
Indeed, Headspace the company is split into three distinct areas: the consumer channel (the app), business-to-business (corporate wellness schemes) and healthcare (the aforementioned FDA process).
The drive into corporate and healthcare is an obvious one – it’s easy to write mindfulness off as some kind of pseudo-profound. But Andy tells me that 10 days of Headspace usage will improve focus by 14% – something anyone can try for free using the app.
He defines focus as committing to any task, whether mental or physical, without distraction.
But why is focus so hard to begin with?
‘Meditation existed 2,500 years ago,’ Andy explains. ‘What’s happening now is that we’re amplifying the noise and the distraction.’
He’s not telling us anything we don’t already know here. The bombardment of digital information – whether that’s 24/7 news, social media posts or the call of a new Netflix series – is leaving us both wired and stressed.
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When I mention that Generation Z (those typically born between the mid-90s and mid-2000s) won’t ever know a world without these things, Andy gets circumspect. He says that we won’t know the true effect of the Information Age for at least a generation.
‘Stuff is happening in schools right now,’ he says, ‘it’s coming from a generation who better understand the need for concern around this kind of thing.’
The company has a Headspace for Educators program that offers free access to the service for teachers, school administrators and support staff. It has partnered directly with over 168 schools in the UK since 2015.
As the company puts it: ‘Headspace believes that if we can help educators build resilience, improve sleep quality, mitigate stress and foster mindfulness in their classrooms – the impact on the next generation will be immeasurable.
‘We want to not only help Educators build their own healthy routines, but offer guidance and support to easily integrate Headspace into their classrooms in the most thoughtful, validated and relevant way.
‘To do this, we’re leveraging our authentic expertise, our full content library, our brand and techniques.’
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Of course, Headspace delivers digital content to you through a smartphone – just like Netflix, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook or any other digital service competing for our attention. So is it just part of the same problem?
Andy is willing to talk about his relationship with the smartphone as a piece of tech before I’ve even gotten a question out.
‘A phone is just a piece of metal and plastic,’ he says emphatically.
‘It can’t do anything on its own, but in most cases people have it optimised for distraction.’
At this point, he picks up his iPhone from the coffee table in front of us.
His homescreen is Zen personified.
It’s only got a couple of rows of icons on it and is refreshingly free from notifications.
‘The only red dot I ever see is the one from settings telling me there’s an update,’ he tells me.
It may seem inconsequential but rearranging how your phone works may go a long way to helping you check it less often. And while Andy does have to use social media for his work – posting updates to his followers or responding to questions about Headspace – he does it fleetingly and with purpose.
So, what does someone who has lived in 10-15 different countries over the course of his life (not to mention co-creating an internationally-recognised brand) feel about the state of the world in 2019?
‘I believe in people having different viewpoints but I think we’re losing the ability to listen. We’re losing the art of talking about meaningful things,’ he tells me.
‘However, I also feel everything is quite cyclical in nature. So while the world may feel divisive at the moment, I have great optimism. I know things will change.’
He reiterates that all of his success has come from a simple mission of wanting to bring mindfulness and meditation to a wider audience and promote it as a way to tackle a variety of problems. And getting started with it is simple – if you’ve made it this far without checking your phone or getting distracted then congratulations.
As promised, Andy’s one other simple tip for getting into mindfulness was to take a minute – just 60 seconds – to make yourself comfortable, close your eyes, settle your hands on your stomach and just listen to your breath inhaling and exhaling.
Give it a try for yourself and see what happens. If you want to find out more about Headspace, you can visit the company’s site here.