Full-on full-time job blah blah, cost of living blah blah, cold house stupid energy prices blah blah, long covid blah blah, broken bathroom blah blah, too many children not enough money blah blah, ridiculous dog blah blah, menopause blah blah.
I’m stressed, who isn’t?
I’ve stopped watching the news, I ignore Twitter and can’t be drawn on the latest political cockswaddle.
I exercise, I avoid carbs, I do nature, I knit, but I still can’t sleep after 5am and some days I am a churning cement mixer of anxiety, misery, apprehension and worry.
Salted caramel cream vodka only helps so much, and, much as I would appreciate a pint of it to help me get out of bed every morning I don’t think life as a vodka cream alcoholic would be very sustainable.
Google tells me that meditation is the gateway to a magic garden of acceptance and peace. That it will help me turn down the over-analytical babble in my brain and give me a healthily detached perspective on life.
I could have sought out a Tibetan monk, swathed myself in a dyed orange sheet and committed to learning meditation in some freezing temple. Or taken myself off to an holistic retreat to immerse myself in chanting and omming. Or got a book and studied it diligently for an hour an day.
Naturally, I download an app, the beautifully designed Headspace, which was, in actual fact, co-founded by a former Tibetan monk.
There is a yearly subscription of fifty quid, which I didn’t think too bad considering it was going to melt away my anxiety, help me sleep like a rock, boost my creativity, improve my fitness, navigate injustice and honour my authentic self.
Headspace has the lot – meditations for stress, for job interviews, for grief, for anger, for food cravings, for first dates.
It has ‘mindful activities’ for eating well, managing your money, housework, creativity and more.
There are animations to help you find the blue sky behind the clouds or cultivate a beginner’s mind.
The daily Wake Up video gives you a thoughtful homily, or helpful advice for difficult days or introduces you to someone living the dream – making maple syrup in the wilds of beautiful Canada, reaching a flow state kneading artisan sour dough or being a professional sand sculptor. (Yep, he gets paid for making big sandcastles.)
There are also cardio workouts, yoga, focus music, any number of things to help you sleep, stuff for children, teenagers and parents, stuff for couples (anyone up for cultivating their sexual wellness?), students, women, minority communities, the unemployed…
Yes it is all a bit Californiany and bite size and middle class in a first-world problems way but the depth of content is endless (if a tad too American – Honour Your East Pacific Ancestors Day was lost on me, and I would have appreciated something last October recognising the fact that THE QUEEN HAD JUST DIED and I didn’t know what to feel).
But this is the problem – there is so much, and I have to do it all or I’ll never get my head straight.
Who doesn’t need a 30-day course to manage anxiety followed by one to transform anger and then learn how to prioritise, followed by a meditation to expand my femininity and then one to strengthen my boundaries? Why wouldn’t I want to develop a healthier relationship with tech, befriend my body and then deal with distractions?
Too much choice is stressful, and isn’t helped by Headspace guilt-tripping me to meditate every day.
This is for my own good – meditating gets better and more effective with practise, and a little every day is the way to go apparently.
So when you do the mediation of the day you get a tick, when you do the breathing exercise of the day you get a tick, ditto the daily Wake Up. You get a notification telling you your current run streak and reminding you to do the course you are currently embarked on every day.
You also get a suggestion for some exercise to do mid afternoon as a ‘lift’, and something else for a night-time wind-down.
So straight away my goal is to get a whole row of ticks every day, and after three days I’m putting ‘meditate’ on my To Do list and groaning when I see it because the breathing doesn’t make any difference, I find the meditation boring and I don’t have time – or space – to do a mid-afternoon yoga session or a late night mindful exercise.
Headspace asks you to check in regularly with your stress and anxiety levels, so you can monitor your progress – something which immediately causes me more stress and anxiety when I miss a month.
I have never taken only 30 days to do a 30-day course, and feel guilt when I forget to do the homework, which is usually something like pausing on the threshold of every door you pass through and having a mindful moment, or taking five deep breaths whenever you move from one task to another (I have a busy job; I’d be hyperventilating if I did this).
For me, meditation became a competitive sport; how long could I keep my streak going, could I get five ticks in one day. I had failed if I missed a meditation, and doing two the next day didn’t count.
And when I was meditating I was marking time, waiting for it to be over so I could cross it off the list and move into the next daily task.
This isn’t what Headspace is trying to do. I’m sure the lovely instructors would be horrified if they knew the stress their nice orange app has caused me.
But much as I try I’m just not getting it. Meditating is as difficult and unrewarding now as it was two years ago when I first started. I cannot detach from my overdriven brain and nod knowingly as thoughts and feelings simply come and go. I have no serenity.
It’s an interesting app and worth it if only for the non-meditating content, the yoga and workouts and sleepscapes and professional sandcastle people all rock and believe it or not I’d recommend it. Just don’t expect it to give you any head space.
Times when Headspace jumped the shark
- Plant stylist Maryah saying she never pots someone else’s plant because she ‘doesn’t want to step in on that journey between you and your houseplant’
- Maryah asking someone (possibly her mother?) what life lessons plants have taught her. (Reply: Patience and importance of rest of course)
- A yoga instructor telling us to be the kindest bit of seaweed on the bottom of the sea
- A trailer for a technology detox promising ‘a tech free ritual to help you explore your own joy’, something which sounds a lot lewder than it is
- The Mindful Eating course announcing that it is time to enter ‘sacred mealtime’
- A trailer for Black History Month urging users to ’embrace the idea of connecting to joy as a revolutionary act’. I can’t even begin to deconstruct that sentence.
Cheerful mantra of the day – To live wisely is to keep death by your side
Scimitars and Scarves 