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TAdherents to the concept of “new year, new me” will know the advice to empty your fridge and kitchen cabinets of junk food before January 1, in order to prepare yourself for a healthy diet. (Or a delivery from McDonald’s on New Year’s Day, when you wake up very well, and you’re not in the mood for oats overnight.)
After all that binge on Love Is Blind and Selling Sunset last year, Netflix is now offering an equally ambitious refresh, with a new round of guided meditations. Produced with the popular Headspace app, the eight 20-minute episodes are presented as a beginner’s guide to meditation, helping you start the year “by being kind to your mind.”
Meditation, and the state of consciousness it cultivates, has been so lively in recent years that it’s easy to roll your eyes on it like another panacea sold by wellness “practitioners” – or a band-aid. sticky for suffering that ignores political evils. At its most basic level, it’s little more than concentration training – but there are also benefits: mindfulness programs have positive effects on stress-related conditions, psychiatric disorders and – provisional evidence suggests it – the immune system.
The difficulty is to do the damn thing. Although just 10 minutes a day improves cognitive functioning, it is somewhat difficult to find the time.
Enter the streaming service, perhaps hoping to reverse its cultural association with laziness and unproductive excess. (A companion series, the Headspace Guide to Sleep, is in the works – as if Netflix isn’t already the biggest challenge.)
It’s a nifty attempt to “meet us where we are,” as apps like Calm and Headspace aim to make meditation bite-sized and accessible, almost gamified, just like Duolingo did to. learning languages. Spotify has also started including mindfulness prompts or guided practices alongside music in its new “Daily Wellness” playlists, introduced after the pandemic (only in the US and UK – talk about a sticky plaster solution).
The streaming model makes it as easy to try meditation as it is to try your luck on a new show. And, thankfully, investing 20 minutes feels less intensive on Netflix than it does on your phone – it’s the same length of an episode of Friends, and, God knows, we’ve all seen that quite often. But it works? In the first wave of the new year, the optimism that I too can live in the moment in 2021 – I am trying.
My first thought is that the spectacle is beautiful, like an animated watercolor or a Pixar dreamy landscape. The hyper-smooth presentation is a calling card of Vox Media, also behind Netflix’s Explained series; but it goes further than just flexing production values to be a pretty effective way of showing how brains work.
Psychological concepts and functioning are often communicated in visual terms, so it’s helpful to see a visual representation of neural plasticity, or to watch onscreen cars driving down a highway to replace the flow of our thoughts. In this way, the medium helps with the message, which is thematic by episode – including letting go of the past, cultivating gratitude, and dealing with stress, pain, and anger.
The choice of the narrator – or rather the guide – of Andy Puddicombe is also advised. Puddicombe is the co-founder of Headspace, and has been described as “doing for meditation what Jamie Oliver did for food”. As a fairly run-of-the-mill middle-aged British man, he doesn’t trigger the same nose wrinkles (dare I say sexist?) That a young wellness influencer might – despite his spiritual journey.
In his early twenties, dissatisfied with his study of sports science, Puddicombe decided to study meditation instead – in the Himalayas. After 10 years of practice, he was ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk. Sharing the fruits of this mission is Headspace’s goal, and the goal of this series – “so you don’t have to go to the Himalayas,” Puddicombe says.
But the relative ease of sitting 20 minutes in front of your computer has a downside – it’s much easier to get distracted than in a monastery. Halfway through my first attempt at meditation, as an orange scribble slowly spins across the screen, the silence is broken by an omniscient voice: “Battery low. Recharge your headphones. “
This reflects the challenge of trying to solve technology fractional concentration with more technology. But I’m surprised at how far I get with the Netflix Guide. The combination of 10 minutes of theory, 10 minutes of practice and joyful animation makes meditation less intimidating – if only because sitting down and looking at a screen is so familiar. Before you know it, you’ve done 80 minutes of meditation. And it feels good.
The Jamie Oliver parallel is a good parallel. Oliver doesn’t sweat the history of healthy eating or the science of nutrition, nor does he demand a total diet overhaul and strict adherence. It suggests easy exchanges, gradual improvement and the search for a balance. Stealth health is always healthier, and around this time last year I was watching Love Is Blind. After eight hours of that – I guess I can manage 10 minutes every now and then.
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