Ten to Zen

I’m slowly working my way through some books that deal with mindfulness and embracing life changes for the better and this was recommended to me by the publisher based on previous reads. I enjoyed that the ten minutes were broken down into stages which allowed me to process calm in situations such as work, family and in fact general life. This is something I would recommend to friends who suffer anxiety. Thank you to netgalley and the publishers for this arc in exchange for my honest review.

I received a copy of this book via the publisher in exchange for an honest review. When I received the email asking if I would be interested in reviewing this book it came at a time when my anxiety was sky high. I obviously accepted but was a bit wary about it because I find a lot of self help books quite boring to read and I just want them to get to the point. This book was short and more or less to the point. I managed to read it in a couple of days. As with most self help books I like to read through the whole book to make sure the techniques are going to work for me and then go back to the relevant sections and apply the technique.

Ten to Zen is all about mindfulness and I really think that this is the best thing to use for anxiety and depression. I would highly recommend this book to anybody who has anxious thoughts.

This is a book that kinda grew on me a bit. I picked it up thinking that some recent chaos in my life was over, only to discover that there is always more chaos to come! Which is why I read with a wry smile about how O'Kane thinks anyone can find 10 minutes in their day while I couldn't read a whole chapter without the door or phone going and disturbing me. Yeah, for some of us 10 minutes really is a luxury. Luckily he won me over just as I was on the verge of giving up on this (helped by the fact it's a pretty short read I confess, a longer book would've seemed more of a gamble in those precious moments).

So yeah, the title/concept appeals to me. I frequently feel time poor as I'm bouncing around putting out fires for people. It can make me tense. But, I have developed various little mental escapes when I know it's all getting a bit excessive, and that's the basic concept here - just that is guides through a form of meditation-lite rather than my more frequent responses of "After my coffee!" I picked it up feeling this would be something I could get on board with. Things went wrong quickly.

I did not like the introductory chapters. At all. It was all just a bit too lightweight and felt like it came straight from a book promo on daytime TV, with any vague movement towards something informative feeling brushed aside because us simple readers would be bored by something so technical that we couldn't possibly understand. It was painful and hard going for me, but that's me. It just didn't start me off well when we got to the meet of the concept, which is why I'll give O'Kane a lot of credit for getting me back as well as he did. I'm not going to become a Ten to Zen zealot, he didn't perform a miracle, but he did recapture the basic premise that I can buy into - sometimes you just need to take a few minutes to compose yourself and you're ready for the next round.

And that's basically it. I mean, very basically. The book lays out some very simple concepts that, when combined, can help most people just get back on track. I think the good thing is the steps all have some flexibility that means you could adapt them to your needs. For example, there's a bit about breathing which is nothing too outlandish, but like most people trying to encourage some kind of mindfullness or meditation or suchlike it talks about counting during breathing. I can't think of anything less likely to help me relax. But, I know that a few slow, deep, breaths can be very soothing at times. Likewise, with the whole thing - he maps out the 10 minutes into specific groups which is probably a good guide for getting started, but with time people will no doubt shift these stages around by various seconds here and there just to suit their own needs and happiness, which is where I find my happy place with this book. Much as it is a fairly rigid timeline for simple tasks it can be treated more like a good old family recipe where you've adapted it to your tastes and now add extra garlic but skip the chilli flakes because you know that's what goes down well in your household.

That leads to what I ended up liking most about the book, the way O'Kane leaned into the limitations of it all. It's a framework to get you started. It's humble about that, and in a good way. Essentially he says this won't change your life, it's just a way to help you kickstart whatever changes you need to make, and that in itself can be pretty life-changing. There's a lot of sensible advice included, most of it pretty simple and easy to agree with. If you're looking for a way to find some peace in a storm then this could be for you. Those few minutes to step back from things can be invaluable and O'Kane offers up some good solutions both as part of Ten to Zen and as random tips on stifling stresses. If you could use some guidance, grab a copy. And if you find the introduction as annoying as I did skip straight to the actual Ten to Zen part - it's much better. Maybe once I find more zen I'll enjoy the intro too. But for now, it's a nice little reminder that I can, and should, seek out those little moments of calm in my day more often.

In case you hadn't noticed, mental health and mindfulness are big topics right now, and it's very easy to find plenty of writing telling us why we should be focusing on our mental wellness, talking about our problems, taking time for the things that really matter, and all the rest of it. What's lagging behind is information on the practicalities of changing our lives: yes, it's all very well saying we need to worry less and look after ourselves more, but given that the vast majority of us live in a world that's falling apart under authoritarian late-stage capitalism and our survival means we fundamentally don't have control over how we spend our time and energy, the actual realities of that can be quite different.
That's where Ten to Zen, by Owen O'Kane differs from other things we've seen on the topic: where other books are introductions to subject matter, this is very specifically a manual on how to integrate a particular ten minute "mental exercise routine" into your life. In doing so, O'Kane introduces a lot of tools and concepts I've been familiar with from elsewhere, as well as some (like EDMR and "tapping") that I'm not. Taking the rationale that, no matter how busy we are, most of us can probably squeeze in a ten minute activity somewhere in our ridiculous schedules, O'Kane offers a minute by minute breakdown of how we can calm down, centre ourselves and give our minds the workout needed to just work a bit better for us. He does so by bringing in lessons from his own life and work, including counselling for the terminally ill, which gives everything a touch of "focus on what really matters".

O'Kane brings quite a specific tone to the writing in this book that's probably best characterised as "friendly old schoolteacher". It's a tone that probably won't work for some people - it does, frankly, come across as a bit condescending at times - but it does mean that Ten to Zen is very accessibly written and would serve as a good introduction to the subject it tackles. If you've read other books on the techniques contained here, Ten to Zen is probably only going to be of interest if you are interested in that "how" question and in giving the specific ten-minute routine a go. I have to admit that so far I haven't actually tried it out, although I have taken on some of the things I didn't know much about and incorporated that into my "toolkit" of anti-anxiety stuff.
Of course, the concept isn't perfect. There is something fundamentally broken about the idea that we need to justify spending ten minutes watching the clouds and not thinking about our e-mails through its own "productivity" lens. But that's not O'Kane's fault, and I think the gap that Ten to Zen addresses is an important one to fill. This is a short read and, if the concept appeals, one that I can definitely recommend as delivering exactly what it promises.