Reframing Monday for a Happier Week, with Andy Puddicombe

(mouse clicking) (gentle music) Headspace Studios. (soft serene music) Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to "Radio Headspace" and to Monday morning. I hope you had a good weekend. I know Monday mornings for a lot of people can often be a lot of sort of negative thoughts in their mind. Maybe it's leaving behind the space and the freedom of the weekend. Maybe it's a sense of anxiety or fear heading into the week ahead. Whatever it is though, I think it can be useful to sort of reframe negative thinking. I know in the past, we've talked about sort of these three different areas that can sometimes sort of obscure our thinking or get in the way of living a happier life. One is sort of a sense of ignorance, not really knowing what's going on in our mind. As strange as it may sound, we spend all day every day with our mind, and yet because we're so involved in the surface thinking, we don't really always understand why we think the way we do, why we feel the way we do, and why we sometimes behave the way we do. The second one is that sense of attachment, that desire, chasing after things internally, externally, that often can sort of lead to its own sense of exhaustion and stress. But it's this third aspect, this idea of resistance that we're gonna focus on today. 'Cause if you think about negative thinking, most of it comes from resistance, if not all of it. Somehow a sense of dissatisfaction with our situation. Again, whether it's internal, whether it's external, there is a sense that things aren't as we would like them to be or as we think that they should be, and so we sort of push against it a little bit. Sometimes those things are really big things. They're really obvious in our life and we see them, but sometimes they're actually a lot more subtle than that. Actually, I'd love you to try this today or at some stage during the week, actually to begin to count how many times in a day you resist something in some way. So we're going through a typical day, maybe the alarm goes off. That could be our first moment of resistance. We don't want to quit sleeping, we wanna stay in bed, but we have to get out of bed. Maybe there's a sense, maybe it's cold where you live and you don't wanna get outta bed 'cause it's cold. Again, there's a sense of resistance towards it. It might be on your commute into work, the other people around you. It could be the sound, it could be the smells. As we go through our day, there are so many moments where we push against life as it is, and every single one of those moments, it's almost like it compounds over time so that by the time we get to the middle of the day or...