Headspace by Andy Puddincombe

When was the last time you took ten minutes out of your day? I don’t mean to read a book, watch TV, listen to music, or even to talk to friends. I mean when did you last take ten minutes out to do nothing? If you’re anything like most people, it was probably a long time ago. More likely still, you’ll have never done it, in your entire life. Funny when you think of it like that isn’t it? Or perhaps it’s frightening to think of it like that. However you feel about it, ‘doing nothing’ is seriously underrated, especially when it comes in the form of meditation.

This was our starting place for creating Headspace back in 2009. When we asked around to see how most people felt, most of the time, pretty much everyone said the same thing...‘mind always busy...won’t stop...wish I could stop the thoughts...wish I could stop worrying about stuff all the time...wish I didn’t feel depressed...wish I didn’t get so irritated about little things in life...wish I could go straight to sleep at night...and so on’. Seeing that everyone was feeling frazzled, we decided to do something about it.

In case you haven’t heard of us, the Headspace project is all about the practical application of meditation. I’m not talking about your stereotypical meditation - we don’t do chanting or incense at Headspace - or gurus for that matter. Instead we offer meditation in a very down-to-earth way, making it accessible, practical and most of all relevant to your everyday life. It’s all very well being able to sit on your bum and feel relaxed for a few minutes, but that’s of very limited use if you then go and lose it in a traffic jam or get caught up in an argument with someone. So for meditation (or mindfulness as it is sometimes known) to be truly useful, it has to impact every part of your life - at least that’s what we believe.

And so that’s what we do. Through one-day events, corporate workshops, private practice clinics, books, online resources and every other medium you can think of, we try to make meditation as accessible, useful and straightforward as possible. Using tried and tested techniques which have been refined and developed over thousands of years (more than enough time to iron out the wrinkles) we offer people the necessary tools to get some headspace.

And it seems as though our approach might just be working. Our Take10 programme was used by BBC Breakfast News as part of their Happiness Challenge. Our Take15 programme was adopted by the Guardian and over half a million Headspace booklets were distributed for free with the newspaper - not to mention a week’s worth of podcasts on the Guardian Online website. We’ve been featured in The Times, The Sunday Times Style, Vogue, Elle, The Evening Standard and so the list goes on. And it’s not just in the UK either. We’ve been featured in publications as far a field as New York, LA, Tokyo, Moscow and Stockholm.

Of course much of this approach is about the prevention of stress. But that doesn’t mean we’re not focusing on the treatment or management of stress and other illnesses. On the medical front we’re working with Southampton University to develop a mindfulness intervention as part of the treatment of cancer. We’re also working with neuroscientists at King’s College, London, to help better understand the effects of long-term meditation practice. With so much research going into the benefits of meditation and mindfulness, it’s perhaps no surprise that a new academic paper seems to get published every week. And the results are impressive too - by anyone’s standards. You can find out more about the clinical trials on our research page at Headspace.

So why not give it a go? We are, after all, talking about just 10 minutes of your life here. Wouldn’t it be great to know how to unwind your mind? Why not try some Headspace!?

Andy Puddicombe is the author of this article on Meditate. Find more information, about Mindful here