How much are you involved in Mind Candy these days? The company went through some difficult times as kids’ gaming moved from web to mobile – what did you learn from that?
I’m very proud of Moshi Monsters, it was an incredible brand that we built, but it was a challenging time when the kids moved on from Moshi into new apps. I realised that in kids’ entertainment you can be everything one minute and nothing the next, so it was very challenging trying to spark it back to life. Mind Candy is now headed up by a brilliant chap called Ian Chambers, who is running the company. I’m still on the board, we’re working on a few new things at the moment to bring Moshi Monsters back to the success it had in the past. My mindfulness business, Calm, is now my main focus, but I still care passionately about Moshi as well.
For a while you were poster boy and advocate for the London tech scene. Why did you swap Silicon Roundabout for Silicon Valley?
I’ve certainly had an interesting few years. After over a decade of running Mind Candy in London, I was ready for a new adventure. My business partner and I both felt San Francisco would be the best city to set this kind of business up – partially because of Silicon Valley, but also because of California being at the leading edge of health and wellness.
How did you become a convert to mindfulness?
Like a lot of people, I thought mindfulness or meditation was weird and woo-woo. I assumed it was religious, and I just didn’t really get it. The way Mind Candy grew and the challenges when it started to come down were very stressful. I had a time when I was not sleeping well, I was exhausted all the time and I had headaches, so I was open to trying new things. I dived in to meditation and a lightbulb went on when I realised it wasn’t weird or woo-woo but was actually endorsed by science. I decided I wanted to spread this relatively simple ancient skill and use modern technology to distribute it as far and wide as possible.
What are the benefits of meditation?
We see it as mental fitness: we look after our bodies and we should also look after our minds, and meditation is a very powerful way of doing that. One of the key things about mediation is that it’s not about switching off and completely clearing your mind. The mind loves whirling away, but you should notice the thoughts and gently move them away and refocus on a constant such as your breath, and then the mind will wander again and then you bring it back to the breath, and again and again. And the more you do that the stronger your attention muscle becomes, which is incredibly valuable in everyday life. It helps you not get caught up in your emotions and get knocked around by them, to give you more resilience, to increase your focus. Over time it improves a whole host of other areas such as blood pressure, sleep – for a very simple practice, it has a huge number of valuable benefits.
You do a 10-minute meditation with your employees every morning. Would you advocate this for every workplace? Should we be doing this at the Observer?
Yes! Absolutely, it would revolutionise workplaces around the world. And I know it sounds very Californian to meditate with your team, but it’s wonderful. Everyone loves it. It’s a very important tradition here, and one of the other places where it’s super-valuable is in school. One of my big passions is helping teachers pass the skill on to the next generation. The Dalai Lama said: “If we could teach meditation to every eight-year-old in the world, we could eliminate violence in a generation”, and we’ve decided to make Calm free to every teacher in the world. We give mindfulness training to teachers and they tell us it has transformed student attendance, their performance, their anger levels and so on.
If you’d practised meditation from an early age, do you think your life would have turned out differently?
When you are an entrepreneur, or in any high-stress job, you do get yanked around a lot by emotions, and meditation helps give you a little more perspective. It helps you ride the waves of life better. I think I would have had a similar career, but I might not have had so many stressful moments as I have done.
When people seek out mindfulness, a lot of what they are seeking refuge from is the frantic nature of modern life, particularly digital culture with all its distractions. It seems strange to invent an app to deal with that…
Absolutely, but technology and smartphones aren’t the problem, it’s how we use them that matters. They are extraordinary: look at the way they are reshaping the world – and in many instances for the better – but like any tool, it can be misused. I think the average person checks their phone 150 times a day – most of those instances they will be on autopilot, they won’t be doing that consciously. What meditation and living mindfully allows you to do is to check your phone when and if you want to. You become a master of this device, rather than a slave to it. We think a better, more intelligent, more conscious use of technology is the solution.
That’s putting a lot of onus on the user. Haven’t we let technology set the terms for how we interact with it? The default setting is to be over-notified, to be distracted.
Where does the responsibility lie? On the other side of the screen there are hundreds of very smart people optimising the app experience so you come back as many times as possible. They want to grow their user base and grow their companies, but I think individuals have to take responsibility for how they use these devices. Start by being careful about which apps notify you. It is incredibly distracting to go through life when every few minutes you are getting a little nudge, a digital tap on the shoulder… but it’s addictive, the brain craves these little hits. I just worry about the long- term effects of this, the constant state of anxiety gnawing away at people, which leads to many of the major mental health issues we face in western society.
How have you changed your own habits?
Living life a little more mindfully, I have got better than I used to be. I used to go to bed tapping out emails until the phone was glued to my face, but now I try not to use my phone in bed. I don’t turn it on until I’m sitting in a coffee shop and I’ve had a chance to have a shower, collect my thoughts, do a little daydreaming, and I think that has made a big difference.
You’ve introduced Sleep Stories to the app. What makes an effective sleep story: the topic, the voice, how boring it is?
We’d seen from our data that many people were using our meditation to help them fall asleep. We all loved having bedtime stories read to us when we were kids – why should that stop now we are grownups? The perfect sleep story isn’t necessarily boring but it starts in an engaging way, your brain is intrigued and then we gently take you down. The voice gets slower, the length between the words gets a little longer. The most popular one is Stephen Fry reading a Phoebe Smith story about the lavender fields of Provence.
So sleep is an area you’re expanding into…
It’s part of living a healthy life: eating well, exercising, being mentally fit and sleeping. But it’s the part that most people disrespect; it’s almost a badge of honour to talk about how little sleep you get. But I think that is changing. There’s a great book by Matthew Walker that you featured in the Observer recently… some of the research he talks about says that regularly sleeping less than seven hours a night is a linked to all kinds of negative outcomes, such as Alzheimer’s and diabetes.
Poor people get less sleep, shift workers get less sleep… are apps really the answer to these deep-rooted social issues?
True, I think the first step is for society to start recognising that sleep is a key part of our health. Instead of prescribing sleeping pills, doctors should prescribe sleep. It’s free, we just need to educate, to make sure all parts of society understand its value. We have campaigns to encourage people to eat their five-a-day – why not similar campaigns for sleep?
Some of these things, such as exercise, healthy eating and now sleep are being marketed as luxury products, or status symbols. There are many people whose circumstances are incompatible with sleeping regular hours, joining gyms, cooking healthy food for their families…
That is a problem, but meditation or sleep don’t necessarily require a lot of money. Ten minutes a day is all that’s required for meditation – if someone cannot spare that time, there’s something wrong, which society needs to work on.
