NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - Kate Snow talks to 'Headspace' co-founder Andy Puddicombe

Episode Date: December 11, 2018

For millions of people every day, meditation apps like “Headspace” are offering quick ways to calm down. NBC News’ Kate Snow speaks with the app’s co-founder Andy Puddicombe on how people can achieve inner peace wherever they are.

Do people stop you in the street when they hear your voice? Sometimes they do. So it's normally in restaurants or airports when they hear the voice. And occasionally people come up in the street. Wait, that's the voice on my phone every day. Yeah, I think it's an interesting relationship because for people who do it every day, they have a friendship. It's very personal.

We have a relationship already. So it's always a surprise for me when they come up and they give me a big hug. And it's lovely. But it's a surprise as well. What do you think the attraction is of the app? So I think the simplicity of it. I think the accessibility of it. And I think the authenticity of it.

So these aren't things that we've sort of come up with. They're things that have been around for a few thousand years. They work. You know, in the science, you know, we have a whole science team now that's kind of proving out the efficacy of these techniques. There's so many different types of meditation. There's so many different ways of it being practiced. So there's not a lot of research kind of actually measuring the efficacy of an app. Of short term, short meditation.

So mindfulness being delivered as an intervention in very sort of bite-sized chunks, you know. Why does it work? It works because typically we are very distracted. We don't spend a lot of time in the present. And because we're distracted, we get very easily overwhelmed. So once we learn how to step out of that busy mind, that thinking, and we're not so easily overwhelmed, there are lots of physiological changes that take place in our body.

Our heart rate slows down, our breathing slows down. We're less likely to produce a lot of the harmful chemicals that typically are pumping around our body. And we experience a greater sense of calm, not only in our body, but also in our mind. What's your daily meditation routine? Yeah, so it used to be, before having children, I would get up every morning, that would be

the first thing I do. Now the first thing I do is go straight out the front door and I go for a run or a cycle, whatever. Which can be meditative too. Which has its own, yeah, which has its own benefits and then I meditate later in the day. I normally meditate, I try and meditate sort of around lunchtime or at the end of the day once the children have gone to bed. How long do you personally meditate? It varies. I still try and meditate an hour a day.

Sometimes a little bit less. Occasionally it's a little bit more. It depends. How short is too short? How long do you need? It's a great question. When I left the monastery, so having been trained as a Buddhist monk, I really thought anything less than an hour wasn't sort of worth kind of doing, you know, that was my thinking, that's how I've been trained. And then I started working with people one-to-one and I found that actually 20 minutes was really meaningful and then 10 minutes was really meaningful. We've experimented with the app a lot and now you'd even find in the app sort of three-minute exercises, so it can help sort of de-escalate really stressful situations

and the science is proving out that actually it's more it's more about quality than it is about quantity and it's more about frequency so little and often is what I encourage people to do. Little and often. Yeah. So for the skeptics who would say five minutes of meditating on an app on your phone, come on. Yeah and I wouldn't even try to sit here and say why they should do it. I would encourage everybody to discover for themselves. So see it as an experiment. If you're sure that it's not going to work for you, try it. Prove it to yourself. Do it for 10 minutes, three minutes a day, five minutes a day, for 10 days, and just see if it makes a difference. If

it doesn't, then you've proved yourself that you're right. If it does make a difference, there might be a nice upside. What do you say to the person who says, I don't want something tethering me to my phone? Yeah. You know, the idea that it's an app, you're supposed to be disconnecting, and yet you're tethered to your phone. Look, personally, I love that tension. I think it's really interesting. The phone is not bad. The phone is not evil. The phone does not stress us out. Our relationship with the phone stresses us out. So I think this is actually an opportunity to recalibrate and think about how we relate to

the phone in a different way, how we can use it in a positive way. So I would encourage people to not think that the phone is bad. Start to try to use the phone in ways that are going to benefit you, whether it's mentally or physically. Is it a trend? Is it a fad? If it is, it's one of the longest-running fads ever, right? Two and a half thousand years? I mean, I think it has become more fashionable,

and it's very helpful that people in the public eye have started to come out. Everybody's talking about it. And talking about it. And it gives people permission to try it. A lot of people who were maybe a little skeptical about kind of giving it a go are now willing to give it a go. So that's been an amazing boost for us. It's really a gigantic business right now. It's reflective of the world

in which we're living in right now. I think most people feel really overwhelmed by so many different aspects of life, whether it's the digital chatter and social media, whether it's politics. There seem to be so many different things going on right now that are exacerbating feelings of anxiety. I think, yeah, there's of a lot of people looking for a way to cope. Any tips for people around the holidays? One is very easy to get overwhelmed by all the things that are going on around us but actually if we take a moment to pause we can actually find a place of stillness even in the middle of chaos. So even when there's lots of stuff going on it's really

important just once a day to take three minutes to take five minutes out of the day and just reconnect we're just sort of feeling grounded and present in our life I think that in itself can can have a big impact I think if we are out and about I was really tempting to think that all these people you know these people are in our way and you know driving around somewhere like LA or somewhere you know you're at the mall exactly and and we forget that that we are the people we are the traffic and the person behind us is thinking the same thing about us so reflecting in that way i think can bring a really kind of a much healthier perspective and all of a sudden the mind just sort of softens a little bit it lets go of some of the aggression and frustration.

And we recognize we're all in this together and we're all just trying to get through it together. And I think kind of traveling as well. In the app, we even have kind of meditations for your commute and for when you're flying. So I feel like these are perfect times. We don't even have to take any extra time out of our day. We don't have to do anything different.

It's simply how we use the time that we have. Yeah, that's the thing. People think they can't meditate because they have no time. I hear that a lot and I get it. I really do. Life is busy and we will have a lot of responsibilities, but if we can't find five minutes, three minutes in our day to pause,

then probably it's time to reassess kind of how we're living.