Life Hacks: A Christmas Special (2025) - #1037

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Merry Christmas, everybody. For the people who joined the podcast within the last five years, the last few million, three million subscribers, this is my living room in Newcastle, and this is Jonny, and this is George, and that's Yusef, and he's in Malaysia. And this is a Christmas episode. We've got one day to turn this around. So Merry Christmas, it's Christmas Day. Enjoy the turkey and the pigs in blankets. And we are going to do some lessons and life hacks and fails from the last 12 months. It's kind of a Christmas tradition, I suppose. And also another part of the tradition is that you go first, Jonny. So give us a life hack.

**Jonny Watson** (0:43)
All right, my life hack, which might not be allowed. We'll see if it gets past the Chris rule. It's already been a life hack, okay? Is that all right? One of the best ones. The reason it's a life hack is I was speaking to a few friends about this and neither of them had heard of it.

**Chris Williamson** (1:00)
And I was like, you know, I thought Chris was building attention here.

**Jonny Watson** (1:03)
I know. Well, it's the Waking Up App by Sam Harris. Why is that bad?

**Chris Williamson** (1:10)
He's been sponsored. It's not. Have you been paid off by Big Sam? Big meditations come to date.

**Jonny Watson** (1:17)
I think, well, do you guys meditate?

**Chris Williamson** (1:20)
Yes.

**Jonny Watson** (1:20)
No. Yes. I think it is the...
Well, so the hack specifically is download the app using the... No. Download the app and listen to the fundamentals, like theory series. And it's like five audios with Sam explaining why you should meditate. And I think that is the thing. So I meditate every day this year, which is the first time it's ever happened. And it was that audio series.

**Chris Williamson** (1:48)
But that's not a meditation. That's not just buy-in.

**Jonny Watson** (1:51)
Yeah. So the app is also, I think it makes it, it's just like a daily audio you can follow. They're different every day.

**Chris Williamson** (1:55)
Okay.

**Jonny Watson** (1:56)
It's like daily programming.

**Chris Williamson** (1:58)
But this was important because it got you to buy in to doing...

**Jonny Watson** (2:02)
Yeah. So there's like an analogy he uses in it, which is, this isn't word for word, but something like everyone's in a dream about being a human being. And it's like the dream is you're in a prison cell. And everyone's trying to make the prison cell nicer by like buying things, moving around and changing where the windows are. And that's life. And meditating allows you to just wake up from the dream. And it's a completely different way of viewing kind of that everybody's absorbed in their thoughts and their feelings and just being run by their mind. And meditating is just waking up from the dream. But that series completely changed how I feel about meditating.

**Chris Williamson** (2:40)
But this, you're not saying this is someone who hadn't meditated a lot before. You've done thousands of sessions of meditation previously.

**Jonny Watson** (2:47)
Yeah, but I think the difference is, it's kind of like this switch where you go from like going to the gym because like you think you should, to it just becomes like part of your personality, part of what you do. And that identity change for me was that series.

**Chris Williamson** (3:04)
Do you feel that Yusef?

**Yusef Smith** (3:07)
Yeah, the identity shift is big as well. The quotes of watch your thoughts because they become your words, watch your words because they become your actions, watch your actions because they become your habits, become your beliefs, your perception, your identity. So like starting at that means that the downstream habits are much easier to stick to. I also love the rearranging the furniture in the prison cell analogy.

**Jonny Watson** (3:37)
So how long are you doing these sessions for?
I'll do like, so the standard one is like 10 minutes long. I'll do that as the minimum and then if it's going well, I'll keep going. If it's like, you know, there's days in especially ones where it like makes you have your eyes open.

**Chris Williamson** (3:54)
They're hard.

**Jonny Watson** (3:55)
They're particularly difficult. Those are difficult to do. But if it's, I think the easiest way to make it an effortless habit is not trying to do 30 minutes or 40 minutes, just have a minimum and then...

**Chris Williamson** (4:08)
So how is getting out of the prison cell going?

**Jonny Watson** (4:12)
Good question. I have glimpses where I'm like, oh, this is just a dream of being in a prison cell. What does that mean? The difficult, well, what does it mean? It's the identifying with your thoughts versus, it's the experience of a self. I feel like this is for the first life act, this is going. I also don't feel like I'm qualified to talk about this. That's what this show is for.