How to Embrace Mindfulness in Everyday Life with Rohan Gunatillake

anybody would be interested in. It's also a great place for you to give us feedback on the episodes that you like, or concepts that you've learned that you think are helpful, or any other feedback you'd like to give us. If you're on Instagram, follow us it at one underscore you underscore feed and those words are all spelled out one underscore You underscore feed to add some nourishing content to your daily scrolling. See you there.

and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Rohan good Aatilica, the host of Meditative Story, an original award winning that combines immersive storytelling, breathtaking music, and mindfulness prompts

to help listeners strengthen their inner life. Meditative Story has achieved critical acclaim, earning numerous Webby, Amby and Signal Award recognitions, and with over twenty five million downloads, the show is deeply beloved by a loyal community of listeners. Rohan is also the founder of the best selling app Bootify and author of Modern Mindfulness, How to be more relaxed, focused, and kind while living in a fast, digital, always on world.

inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops think about it for a second and they look up with their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

individuals use stories for personal growth, I guess. And the other thing, I'm really interested in the mechanic of that, and how when I'm listening to that powable, I guess in my first reactions, I'm imagine being the kid. I'm inhabiting the kid, it's character and his position. And I love how by imagining ourselves as someone else were able to explore themes of our own life through another person's story.

That's really really important to me. And so a big part of what I do through my podcast work is dissect stories and look for interesting angles. And so when I hear the Power Boys, I've heard now many times on your show, I'm really interested in all the characters and all their different points of view. So you've got the kid who sort of represents maybe naivete I'm really interested in what's happened just before, Like what's the thing

that's led to that conversation happening. I'm really interested in the grandparent because when I first heard the powerboll I was like, oh, you know, the grandparent, you represents wisdom, But actually how did they learn their wisdom? Was it the hard way? You know? Did they make mistakes? What mistakes did they make or do they learn it the easy way? Were they born just as a sort of beatific front of insight? And do they know? Does the

grandparent know which wolf is? Which I've been intered in that, and then you know, me being me interested in there's more than there's two other characters. There's the bad Wolf and the good Wolf, and we can sort of almost anthropomorphize them, and the bad wolf is their classic fairy tale villain right in our culture, and then the good Wolf is the sort of the opposite of that. And do they know who they are? Do they know how they're being perceived? Are they siblings? Or I'm just doing that?

So that's as soon as I hear the powable, like, I throw all these different threads and start exploring. There's so much creative potential in that palable and that's why, of course you start the show with it. So those are my first reactions to that.

happen next. But what have you learned in dissecting stories, as you've said about how we can hear other people's stories and have that then lead to change in us. What are some of the mechanisms that make that possible or would allow us to do that better.

of them. Because the person themselves, even though they've lived an invariably fascinating and rich life, we as individuals don't necessarily see those moments or recognize the transformations in our own story today, and so the first part of it is working with someone to Typically it's probably like two three, four cares exploring, like, you know, tell us about the moments that really made a difference to you in your

life and where come from? Tell us about your how you grew up and so eking out the story, and then our team then think about, okay, sort of reflect back on between the conversations with the storyteller. We reflect back on what the storyline is and what the insights are.

And the particular thing Eric we look for is what are the moments when a perspective changed for you within your life and so we saw something differently or we recognize something you thought was true was no longer true, all the other way around, and those have been the richest minds to mine, I guess. So we've spoken to someone,

we've sort of worked out a story. So for example, a recent just the one that came to mind as a nature filmographer Tom Mustill, who was kayaking in just in the Monterey Bay in North California and was basically breached on by a massive humpback whale and survived it

and it was a near death experience. But also it was a truly transformed to experience for Tom because he found out speaking to whale experts after that, you know, looking at the footage, was that the whale moved during the incident to basically save him and his friend, and it got him into this whole thing of like was that, well, how do wales communicate with humans? And then that's an obvious sort of transformation moment, but it's the more subtle

stuff around. Obviously it was a near death experience, but also how did it make him change the way he saw the world? And then pulling on those threads and then the challenges for us as a team as to how do we present that in such a way that it elevates other people, And there's a few ways we

do that. One is a big focus on present tense, so telling the story as if it's happening in that moment and so sort of encourages a sense of immersion that's important to you're right there, the whole idea, you're sort of right there, and the other aspect is around I guess sensory descriptions, like really asking the storyteller what did it smell, like, what was the temperature and that time, and sort of adding all that multi sensory experience, so

it becomes as many dimensional as possible, and through that we tell story. And then I come in in particular after that, once the story has been told, to augment it and enhance it. So I do two things, Mainly while I introduce the show, but also at the end I write a meditation designed on the theme of the story. And then also during the show, I pop up two or three times to really land some of the stuff

that's happening in the Tibetan bullish tribution. There's a style of teaching called pointing out instructions, which is where the meditator is having an experience, but they're not necessarily seeing all aspects of it, and so the job of the teachers to point out different parts of it where the richer insights lie. And that's sort of how I see

my role is to help enhance that. And then also I have a lot of fun writing sort of bispo closing meditations, either taking a visual image from the episode or the story or a theme and then just playing with it. That's how it works. And I think the important sor of sort of storytelling. I think this show

starts with the story and this goes on there. So I think we are sort of in the Fame family of show and I think and also I think a key thing also is recognizing that we have a composer, Ryan Holliday, who just creates this incredible it sort of demeans it to call it a sound bed. For me, it's the start of the show.

sort of a har moments per minute. That's our key metric if we But we know every listener is different. You don't know what they're doing, you don't know where they are, you don't know what their life experiences is. So we try to put out a bordinet of different types of ways people can resonate, and all it takes is that one thing and then suddenly it opens something up for them. So that's the way we do it.

and we'll like go on to the next thing. But the trick is almost to reflect on that, oh, I've just had this reaction to the words just happened. And if you've got the time, you're binge watching something whatever the hot show is at the moment. I don't know, if you're binge watching the Sopranos or whatever shit's creak, you might not have that sort of mental bandwidth to

do that. But I think for me that is the key thing, because I think the ability to review and reflect on how we're reacting to story, and particularly coming back to the single story where we're inhabiting another person's life or other people's life, but we're having genuine emotional reactions to it, and so which are very much grounded in our own experience, and your fingerprint of emotional reactions to a particular movie will be radically different to another person.

And being interested in that and say, oh, that reminded me, say you see a character. So I've watched an amazing film, Chinese American film called The Farewell, which is about Chinese American family. The matriarch of the family is dying, but she doesn't know, she doesn't know, and all her family go to visit her in China and effectively fake a wedding to spend time with her as a family occasion.

It's a real wedding, basically a cousin in the family are getting married just so they can all spend time with this matriarch. And it's wonderful grandmother and incredibly moving and hilarious film. And then as I was watching, I was like, remind me of the matriarchs in my family. Then my maternal grandmother who's very sort of strong and certainly not as comic as the character in The Farewell.

But then after watching the film, I deliberately spent time thinking about her, called my mum about her to talk about her. So allowing that extra bit of space around, using your reactions as the clue, you know, that's the clue. And sometimes those reactions a difficult you know, if it's based on trauma or whatever, then approach with caution. But I think the easy way to start could be to

stuff that you find that move you positively. Be that in literature, be that in films, TV, visual art, podcasts, gaming, whatever it is. Using those then being me, and then what we doing is helping point out to people because when you have those reactions is because there's something in

your own life that is related to it. And so going back to another episode, another favorite mind is when John Moore Another Nature when actually he's a wildlife photographer and he's in Rwanda photographing these gorillas and he misses the shot, like the ultimate shot of the silver Back. He completely screws up and you know, stuff goes down and he doesn't get it. Thinking about those moments when there was an opportunity and you didn't take it and

sort of reflecting on that during that process yourself. Of like it could be like two minutes over a cup of coffee. You could do some journaling off it. You know, you can talk to your friend about it and talk to your whatever the mechanic of it is, you know,

whatever works for you. But the basic idea of taking at least a breath or two to inquire as to what are the moments of transformation where I missed an opportunity but actually spun it and use that as a way to grow and get better at something else.

So I just have a couple different books about people who are writing about the show, and even then just doing that simple thing of what happened in the show, and then what someone's interpretation or deeper analysis is of it brings the whole thing into a little bit clearer focus. But I think it's a thing that requires us to move from and you talk about this elsewhere, to move from just a consumer to a interactor. Maybe that's the wrong word. I don't know what word you would use.

But you know, one of the things that you've done a lot of is worked in the modern mindfulness business building apps a very popular meditation app called Bootify. So you've reflected a lot about what modern mindfulness looks like, what apps look like. And one of the things that you say as a problem is that the meditation app business is a content business. It is primarily putting the people who are meditating in the role if we're not

careful of a content consumer. And I think what you and I are talking about here is, yes, we all consume content. There's nothing wrong with that, But how does that content become transformative or how does it actually change us?

investors will be asking about. And so you want to keep people hooked and you keep people consuming and the reason but if we never took any investment, I sort of approached it more like as an artist rather than as an entrepreneur, which meant that I was less incentivized by the commercial aspect of it. But also there's a philosophical component to it, which is, for me, the purpose of a good meditation app is to get you to the point where you no longer need a meditation app. Investors are not.

so there isn't an independence. It's a dependent relationship. And I'm really passionate about giving people the tools to become independent practitioners and to explore different things and learn how to meditate by themselves. And you know, I think I've had you know, many people of the years, you know, write to me and say we love this and that meditation you did one in particular saying I've fallen asleep to this particular meditation every night for the last five years.

And part of me is delighted about that. Part of me also is a bit sad about that, because it means that the person hasn't really grocked the mechanic. And so what I try to do is really emphasize, even in a guided meditation, yes, do the instructions, you know, do this and that, but then also during that guide imitation,

explaining what is happening. So we're doing this because this happens when you do that, you know, when you pay attention to the breath in this kind of way, and then this happens, and you keep doing that, then something else happens. So just really sort of sharing that mechanical aspect that's for me, the thing that allows someone to let go of the training with by constantly we're basically creating a culture of mindfress practitioners who are always cycling

with training wheels. You're never going to win the Tour de France with that. But then you know, the flip side of that is the scale of which the modern mindfulness marketplace is and the number of people is touched that would never have gone anywhere near modes before is transformative in itself. So I think I'm a critic of

what I think is a fundamentally good thing. But I sort of sit in a weird part of the Venn diagram, which is sort of old school traditional mindfulness purist with like a sort of fairly traditional training background, but also actively involved in the marketplace in a positive way. And so I think that that gives me sort of the ability to look both ways.

is that good? If there's a person who may just by nature not be the sort of person who's ever really going to develop a deep meditative practice, but does get a lot of benefit out of sitting down and having somebody guide them through meditation twenty minutes a day, and they feel like that's really helping them, is it necessary for everybody that they go on to the next level or do you see that different people have different needs.

professional cyclist, it's a very professional cyclist. So professional cyclist is an elite athlete who's you know, at the sort of super and they were elite meditators, right who are plumbing the depths of consciousness to the utmost and getting wild achievements and insights and doing all sorts of cool stuff. And that's very very sort of minor in the context by in the middle people who want to be able to cycle to work or they want to be able to cycle with their kids down their canal on a

Sunday afternoon. Let's call them the regular cyclist, not the guys INCRA who are bombing up and down the Scottish Its every weekend. But the key thing is, I personally think that there's room for sort of everyone. But the key thing for me is knowing that those paths exist, so being aware of the breadcrumbs. So, for example, a lot of people, the majority actually based on the information,

I've seen people get into mindfulness because of sleep problems. Right, So that's the sort of classic entry way into trying meditation if that's all you want, Right, If all you want is a bit of better sleep, you might just use mindfulness for that and that works, and then that's great. You can go tick. I'm feeling better. I've got some techniques I can use some body relaxation, whatever it is,

and I don't need anything else. Who think about the basic mechanic of what is often happening in sleep and mindfulness is that people are learning two things. Where they're learning the calming aspect they're learning to move the baseline of their mind to acquieter space, and that that helps them get to sleep quicker because there's not so frantic

at bedtime. And then the second aspect is the I guess, the insight or the wisdomspect, whether they're able to learn to let go of any of their or have a more softer relationship with the obsessive thoughts that might be keeping them up. But those two dimensions of calm and insight, which someone might have had a sort of nice opening introduction to to help their steep problems, those go deep, right,

those go super deep. There's a range of different ways you can take through my fulness, and you can stop at any point, if there's nothing bad about stopping any point, if that's what you want to do. But it's just

at least you know that they exist. I think that's the key thing, because again I've met lots of people who've come in through the app route and didn't know that other forms of meditation exist, or other styles, or you could do it without headphones, or you could do it walking, or you could do it in the context

of relationships, or do with children. But then I've got good friends who are meditation teachers, and they think that they often host and lead retreats for young people and residential retreats, and then they see people who go all the way to the energy and bravery to go to an actual physical retreat, silent retreat for even a weekend. There's a lot there's a lot of barriers to doing that, and the people who just haven't tried an app to

help them sleep better. So that sort of funnel that the right phrase maybe my marketing lingo coming in, but that funnel works. It's just that the app universe try to create individual universes around themselves to keep the user trapped within the subscription model. And so that's the thing is that if the person themselves is able to explore

and things, that's fine. Because I think in the old days, pre app stores, pre phones, you know, pre digital, you might go into a bookstore a library and then you're literally seeing thirty different books, all slightly different, you know, like proper religious stuff, some more secular stuff, therapeutic stuff on the shelf. You see that they will exist because

you're physically going through the spine. Yeah, Whereas within the app store, once you find something that works for you, initially they great, this is that, this is my thing now.

the marketplace is way bigger. Wisehead Space got gazillion users, and only ten people come to my dropping past. That's basically where a lot where the energies come from. So I'm being.

am mobile activity. Share a little bit about what you mean by.

individual's perception of mindfulness or meditation is culturally. You know, do a googling research for whatever, and you'll find maybe it's changing a little bit now, but certainly when we launched. But if I the you know, meditation looked like a person in a rainforest, It looked like a person sitting cross legged doing some yogic moudras. It looked like someone far away from what my actual life looks like.

So you talked about you know, meditation going mobile. So the idea that you don't have to be in a quiet, calm, sitting down posture to do meditation. You can do it wherever you are, whatever you're doing. If I have a mantra. It's like you can do it wherever you are, what you're doing, you just need to know how right. You need to let go of the mental model that meditation needs to look like something. If you're open to the idea that someone meditating can be invisible, it's stealth. It's

a total stealth activity. If you're up for that, then all you need to know is the technique of how do you meditate whilst walking? How do you meditate whilst you're on the subway, how do you meditate whilst you're scrolling Instagram?

And so that's the heart of it, and the heart of that, like I said, came from my own experience where when I really got into meditation just after leaving college, I also started work in London in a really busy sort of corporate job, and you know, I was loving it was, you know, it was fast paced, really exciting.

But at the same time I was doing all these hardcore meditation practices and going on retreats in weird monasteries and off of London now and then in those meditation environments, no one was teaching me about how do you meditate with technology, how do you meditate in the context of internet dating, whatever, So that conversation wasn't happening with these random time monks, right, So then it was on common

on me. I sort of have a choice there, like compartmentalize your practice from the rest of your life, which can be an okay solution, but the problem is it's that it then becomes compoulab by definition it doesn't touch your other stuff, and then it can really kick you in the butt later on. And so the other solution is to work out, okay, how do I practice with the same sort of level of intention in this busy, chaotic life. You know, I was watching on my commute.

I was like, okay, I don't have time to do a half an hour sitting practice at home, and I was on the tube, which was half an hour journey, and I was like, why don't I just do it now? I am literally sitting down. Yeah, it's vibrating and it's noisy, and it's whatever busy, But that's great. Those are the sensory experiences I will use as my object. I won't use a quiet object. I use a chaotic object. And

let's see what that's like. And this is where going back to the idea of understanding the mechanics, understanding the techniques. If you know three or four or five basic techniques like concentration, you know, the idea of choosing something and looking to keep your attention on that object. We want a technique like loving kindness, a technique like paying attention to the relationship to things, so something's happening and then

watching your mind react to that thing happening. You know, there were sort of three or four really really core It was only you know, within my limited world of the classic monufust tradition. There's sort of three or four really core techniques, and then you can apply those that everywhere. But just you have to be playful. You have to let go of that idea of what meditation looks like. You know, I remember early on and I was trying to meditate on the tube. I was like trying to

find my breath and I couldn't. Of course I couldn't. It was like but then I was like, well, hang on, why don't I pay attention to the vibrations of the body because there are such a dominant sensation. And suddenly I was like locked in. I just was using the wrong object. I was using the right technique with the wrong object. And so one of the things that really inspired me on that journey was in part of London called South Bank, which is just literally on the South Bank.

It's where during the eighties and nineties is where the skate culture grew up. There big skate park sort of in the shadows of the National Theater there, but then it became the hub for London free erunners or park or practitioners, and so on my lunch break, I'd all just walking around. I'd see these amazing people jumping around, flipping themselves off lamp posts, doing these incredible acrobatic things.

Is about the time the first Daniel Craig Bond film, when Parker was really park has always been cool, but it was especially cool then, and I was just really really inspired by that. This Actually, before I was into meditation, I was really inspired by this idea of using everything around you as your playground. They use architecture as their playground, as their exercise equipment, as their dance space or playspace.

And I had this idea of using everything around you as an opportunity to do what you want to do, reframing the environment around you, seeing it in new ways. And I got into what in those days was called social games or urban games that using big scale games played in around cities where you've sort of created like stories and experiences where you ran around cities and did wild things and using the city in an unusual innovative way.

And Parker did it. Social game did it, and I thought meditation can do it as well, and that sort of was my inspiration.

So I'm happy to use both. Certainly for the more dynamic style of practice that I talked about. If I'm doing a more traditional seated meditation, you'd feel a bit jarring to say I just did forty five minutes of mindfulness. That's not the language I would use, right, But then life's too short to get too caught up in the semantics of things. I think whatever works for you, I think is I definitely leave it in the gift of the person to find the term that works for them.

But then you know, now mindflance has its own type of baggage as well. I guess we'll have its own But then that's the nature of things.

sort of a nineteenth century British archaeological construct. But going back to this idea of cultivation and what you're what are you cultivating? You're cultivating beautiful qualities of the heart. So if you're doing some practice whilst you're walking and you're maybe growing appreciation or growing body awareness or growing sensory awareness, that is as good a definition as meditation

as you know. If you're intentionally cultivating positive aspects of yourself through the use of your attention, that's meditation for me. Those three elements. You're doing it on purpose, is something to do with your attention, and you're developing a particularly positive quality. And if those two things exist, then I will declare it as meditation. I will happily, happily challenge anyone who disagrees with me.

it is. So then all those things have changed over time the reason you can't practice, and so the flipping it around, and you know, having a definition which is really generous and inclusive, I think is really important rather there being a thing that is hard to attain makes sense.

even though faith can often be an unfashionable word. The mobile mindfulness approach does need us to have the firm belief that we can develop these positive qualities in everyday life. Say a little more about that.

it's sweet, and sometimes it feels like nothing's happening. Sometimes it maybe be difficult because maybe your body awareness has grown and you're sensitive to a sensation in the body or some tension that you weren't aware of because it's quite subtle. And so at that point, say that's in that example. Oh, actually, mind for us is really painful.

Doing the meditation is really painful. I don't want to do it anymore, and so having the faith to recognize that there is a trajectory to it and the benefits. Sometimes it do come intrinsically. After a couple of weeks, you might be sleeping that a little bit better, and that's great, But sometimes it either feels neutral or you know, at worse feels difficult trusting the process. I think it's

the phrase used a lot nowadays. But the flip side of that, Erica also is sometimes it can be really valuable, especially when your early issue or not necessarily super mature in the practice. And also if you're doing it by yourself, is to just lean into the stuff which it is feels more positive. So you don't need to have faith

in something which is just working straight away. If you've cut somebody upon a technique which makes you feel super calm and super connected or whatever it is, just do that. Faith by oneself is quite tricky. Faith in community, and it's the broader sense, you know. You know again going back to the old school, pre digital days, and you go to a random drop in meditation class and you sit there and go at the end at the cup of tea or actually I don't just didn't feel like

I'm gainingwhere the other person might go. Actually I felt exactly the same.

is remembering to remember. And so this is the idea of if we're going to practice mindfulness, meditation, whatever we want to call it, in our day to day life, as we go through, remembering to do it is a real challenge. And so you know, in the Spiritual Habits program that I teach, we spend a lot of time focusing on triggers in the positive sense, trigger in the

sense of reminding me to do something. And you've got a story in the book that I absolutely love, and you say, when I was starting out mindfulness, I decided that whenever I saw anyone wearing a hat or something red, I would send them kind thoughts. And that sounds sort of silly, but I note from personal experience exactly how well that works that eventually that does become habitual and it becomes a constant and concer distant trigger as a reminder to practice.

approaching things like that. And so it comes back to it also around how stuff like meditation and mindfulness it can feel heavy at worst, it can feel like a chore, and so another thing on your to do list, and then you can then that leads into more spirals around feeling tight about it. You know, you'll know much more about this through your habits work. But using those devices like wearing red or hat, even if you're lucky wearing a red hat.

There's some really really easy ones that red hat so red coats are a little bit arbitrary, something relatively easy unless you have any particular triggers around it, something like if you see a pregnant woman in the street, right, and then a simple offer of may you and your child be well?

many people that will be easy. Were relatively easy. But I've done that so often that it just spontaneously happens, and that is just like it's wild and lovely, how like it just becomes as part of what my body does, like digesting food or you know, it's just the thing that I do and so just finding those little things and they build, they really really build up over time to move that baseline and yourself towards those qualities that we care about.

and that's where the faith can be so valuable. That really that understanding the concept that little by little, a little becomes a lot, and you talk about that, you say, one of the other things is to understand how mindfulness works. And I think this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which was one of the criticisms of apps, is that the apps teach you to do something in

a very particular way, in a very particular circumstance. And we might even say in certain cases they're not teaching you. They're just telling you. They're leading you, and to develop this mindfulness in all aspects of your life. The creativity comes from combining different things, but you've got to know what the elements are to combine exactly.

and this is why we think it works. So it's a review and it's part of that sort of calling back all the way back to the beginning when we talked about when someone is listening to or watching a story and noticing the moments when they're resonating and getting interested in and reviewing. At that point, it's taking the time that little extra bit of reflection what's actually happening here. It means that if your practice becomes sustainable at that point,

you can get some of that independence. And I think that's what teachers do. That's the whole point. Teachers don't want to see you turning up to the class forever and ever and ever. They don't want to see you on retreat every minute of the day for the rest of your life. That's probably not what they want to do. So giving people the tools to then move on and be independent and also importantly that then means that that's

how evolution works in the mindfulness tradition. So in the context of people, So I'm part of a generation who have decent meditation training but also have very active digital lives, and so we're sort of one of the first group of people to sort of understand, like or to explore and eventually hopefully understand and continue to understand how meditation

and technology can live together positively. What the upsides are downsides because talking before about you know, the story of meditation and the story of suddenly mindfuls meditation is that exclusionary story of like, oh no, you can't meditate unless you're a woman, unless you're a man, You can't meditation unless you're Asian, and now probably ten years ago, you

can't meditate unless you turn your phones off. You can't meditate unless you divorce yourself from this part of your life because that stuff is not mindful, which is basically a cultural result of boomer mindfulness teachers, and so I totally understood why that is. All those barriers to not including things were due to cultural reasons, not intrinsic mindfulness reasons.

You know, there was a line I think I've struggle to argue that practice mindfulness whilst bulldozing the Amazonian rainforest. There's not like there is a line at which you draw. There are some things which maybe you shouldn't be doing in the context of mindfulness, but should be interested in the barriers. Providing people the tools to learn the mechanics and understand how mynfness works means that it's a live tradition.

Looking back on the last ten years of work I've done of thing just to just help the tradition feel like more culturally relevant and more part of the times, and being part of that sort of inflection point of this particular bit of the mindfulness stories. And then who knows how whey will go in the future.

won't in the future. So the fact that you're holding in your hand and you are touching it to move content means that there's a physical experience to scholing Instagram, which means that you can scholl Instagram and practice body awareness at the same time. Be that the texture of your phone case in your and the feeling of your firmb on thel and however small in a way you do that, that means that part of your mind and part of your attention and part of your awareness is

not stuck in the content vortext. If there's a little bit of it which is intentionally to be really sort of like reductive, I'm sure sort of attention scientists will probably explain why this is not true. But my failt experience is that when part of my attention is on the physical aspect of using my phone, I'm less likely to wake up like ten minutes later and go shit, I've just gone down a YouTube wormhole. So it becomes like a lifeline. That's a physical way of doing it,

and that's a super small thing. It's very minor, but it works, and it's a very simple, sort of accessible way of doing it. Another way of doing it is just actually around. Going back to what we talked about before, is like approaching social media scrolling as a insight practice. And what I mean by that is an insight practice is one which is interested in how are my and moves around experience, not necessarily what's happening, but how is

our mind moving around what's happening? So if I'm scrolling and I stop at this post but not the previous post, can I be interested in that? Can I be interested in why? And it might be a simple thing like oh, that was my football team and the previous one wasn't my football team. So I'm not that saying they could be banal like that, but a lot of the times it could be quite interesting as to like you know, what are the patterns, what can you learn from your

mind about this? And will necessarily very pretty some of it, right, But again I think I don't want you people to think that I'm just like saying, oh, you can do this, and so therefore cart blow and she use as much social media as you want. Knock yourself out. It's all good, it's not. But there are little things we can do. I do the hard stuff. I use sort of my freedom map, which blocks my social media during eight hours a day so I can just get on with other stuff.

I do that, but I also do this other stuff as well. That'll so that you can change your relationship to the stuff. So there are universe of people against stopping us, wanting us to get sucked into that content, but there are little things we can do and they.

To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneufeed dot net slash join The One You Feed Podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.