Discover The Balance Between Productivity And Mental Health

(mouse clicks) (gentle music) Headspace Studios. (gentle music) (clock ticking faintly) Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday morning. So one thing that has consistently come up from a lot of people over the last six months or so is the passage of time. Some people say that time is going incredibly slowly. It feels like we're almost stuck in time. For others, they say that in the chaos of everything, it feels like the year's just sort of flying by. And time has a really sort of malleable quality in that way, I think, and we can witness it really easily in meditation. If you've done some meditation, you'll know there are some days when you'll sit there, you know, you don't even think about time. And before you know it, it's the end of the session. At other times it's almost like you're waiting for the session to finish, and in waiting, there is thinking about time, and because we are thinking about time, time feels like it's going very, very slowly. (clock ticking) I remember being in one particular monastery; it was a monastery that was very, very strict and everything was run on the clock, by the hour, by the minute. It's strange in a way, 'cause you might think sort of in a Buddhist monastery that everyone's sort of very laid back and there is no time, there is no space, kind of, "Why do you need a clock for?" But in order to live in a community in that way, there needed to be some schedule. I remember every now and again we'd have to go and prepare lunch or refreshment for the teacher, and I would have to be in a room and I would've had to have made the tea, and I would genuinely have to wait until the clock showed 45 seconds until the top of the hour. And at that point, you leave the room with the tea and you know that that gives you sort of 30 seconds to walk up the hallway, 15 seconds to knock on the door to wait to be allowed in and to serve the tea. On the one hand you could say, (laughing) "Wow, that's really strict. Is it that necessary?" At the same time, there was something quite interesting in it. Whilst it brought a sharp awareness to time, there was also a sense of sort of no longer trying to control things, either. In following a schedule, you kind of let go of your own desires to wanna do things to your own sort of timeline. (clock ticking) (gentle music continues) Look, we're all different, and I have friends who are incredibly focused on time. You know, I dunno how you are as a person. You know, I can say for myself if I'm going to the airport to catch a flight, for example, I like to get there early, maybe even half an hour earlier than I have...