美国国家公共电台 NPR When Was The Last Time You Did Absolutely Nothing?（在线收听）

When Was The Last Time You Did Absolutely Nothing?

GUY RAZ, HOST:

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, ideas about slowing down, how to do it in a world that seems to be constantly speeding up. And that was a question Andy Puddicombe had in his 20s when he quit school and decided to become a Buddhist monk. And when he spoke on the TED stage, Andy explained what happens when you don't give your mind a few moments every day to take it just a little slower.

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ANDY PUDDICOMBE: The result, of course, is that we get stressed. You know, the mind whizzes away like a washing machine going round and round, lots of difficult, confusing emotions. And we miss out on the things that are most important to us. And the crazy thing is that everybody just assumes, well, that's the way life is so we just kind of got to get on with it, but that's really not how it has to be. So I was about 11 when I went along to my first meditation class. As I was there, you know, I guess, like a lot of people, I assumed that it was just an aspirin for the mind. You get stressed, you do some meditation - hadn't really thought that it could be sort of preventative in nature until I was about 20 when a number of things happened in my life, in quite quick succession, really serious things, which just flipped my life upside down.

And all of a sudden, I was inundated with thoughts, inundated with difficult emotions that I didn't know how to cope with. Every time I sort of pushed one down, another one would just sort of pop back up again. It was a really, very stressful time. I guess we all deal with stress in different ways. My own way of dealing with it was to become a monk. So I quit my degree. I headed off to the Himalayas. I became a monk, and I started studying meditation. It taught me - it gave me a greater appreciation and understanding for the present moment. I think the present moment is so underrated. There was a research paper that came out of Harvard just recently that said on average our minds are lost in thought almost 47 percent of the time - 47 percent. At the same time, this sort of constant mind-wandering is also a direct cause of unhappiness.

Now, we're not here for that long anyway, but to spend almost half of our life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy - don't know. Is it just me? It kind of seems tragic, actually, especially when there's something we can do about it, when there's a positive, practical, achievable, scientifically proven technique which allows our mind to be more healthy, to be more mindful and less distracted. Now, what usually happens when we're learning to be mindful is that we get distracted by a thought. Let's say this is an anxious thought. So everything's going fine and then we see the anxious thought and it's like, oh, I didn't realize I was worried about that. You go back to it, repeat it. Oh, I am worried. Oh, I really am worried. Wow, there's so much anxiety. And before we know it, right, we're anxious about feeling anxious.

You know, this is crazy. We do this all the time, even on an every day kind of level. If you think about the last time - I don't know - you had a wobbly tooth. You know it's wobbly, and you know that it hurts, but what do you do every 20-30 seconds? I don't know (ph). It does hurt. And we reinforce the storyline, right? And we just keep telling ourselves, and we do it all the time. And it's only in learning to watch the mind in this way that we can start to let go of those storylines and patterns of mind. But when you sit down and you watch the mind in this way, you might see many different patterns. You might find a mind that's really sort of restless and - the whole time.

You know, don't be surprised if you feel a bit agitated in your body when you sit down to do nothing and your mind feels like that. You might find a mind that's very sort of dull and boring, and it's just almost mechanical. It just sort of seems - it's as if you're just sort of getting up, going to work, eat, sleep, get up. Or it might just be that one little nagging thought that just goes round and round and round your mind. Whatever it is, meditation offers the opportunity, the potential, to step back and to get a different perspective, to see that things aren't always as they appear. You know, we can't change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it. Thank you very much.

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RAZ: That's Andy Puddicombe. By the way, he co-founded a meditation app. It's called Headspace, and you can see his entire talk at ted.com.