Wellness Minutes
Looking for a short mental health podcast you can actually fit into your day? Wellness Minutes is designed for busy people who know stress, burnout, and overwhelm—but want quick, practical ways to feel better.
Hosted by an Indian Clinical-Community Psychologist based in the U.S., each short episode ( under 7 minutes) offers guided practices and bite-sized wisdom from psychology, neuroscience, and spirituality. Whether you need fast stress relief, a quick mindfulness break, or simple coping strategies for burnout, this podcast gives you tools you can use right away.
Think of it as your pocket-sized wellness companion: short, calming, and grounded in evidence-based mental health practices. Each episode is an invitation to pause, breathe, and bring more balance into your everyday life—no matter how busy things get.
Wellness Minutes
When Time Feels Like It's Slipping Away, Try This
Time can be transformed from an enemy into an ally through the Pomodoro technique, a powerful productivity method that structures work into focused 25-minute intervals followed by intentional breaks. Named after the Italian word for tomato because it takes about 25 minutes to make Pomodoro pasta sauce, this technique helps overcome overwhelm by breaking large tasks into manageable chunks.
• Commit to one task for 25 minutes at a time with complete focus
• Take mandatory 5-minute breaks between each Pomodoro session
• After four cycles (25min work/5min rest), take a longer 30-minute break
• Treat distractions as you would during meditation—notice them, then return to your focus
• Write down intrusive thoughts about other tasks so your brain can release them
• Consider the Pomodoro technique as a form of meditation that trains focus
• Single-tasking prevents the mental overwhelm that comes from having "50 tabs open"
Try the Pomodoro technique and share how it works for you!
We'd love to hear from you, send us a text!
Opening Music by Jeremiah Alves from Pixabay
Closing Music by Aleksandr Karabanov from Pixabay
Thank you for listening,
much metta,
Dr G
Hi, welcome to another episode of Wellness Minutes. This is an episode where we are going to actually reflect on ways to make time an ally, as opposed to the enemy. Time can be such a scarce resource and, with the sense of urgency with which we lead our lives, it feels like time is constantly slipping away. So a method that I discovered while in grad school Was this method called the Pomodoro technique, developed by Francisco Carrillo, and legend has it that Pomodoro technique is named after the Pomodoro sauce, and the story goes that it takes about 25 minutes to make Pomodoro pasta sauce. So if that's how much time it takes to make pasta sauce, what else could one accomplish in 25 minutes?
Speaker 1:I love the fact that 25 minutes is on the lower side of an hour, so it's something that feels very easy to commit, and when you feel extremely overwhelmed and like you don't have enough time or you have such a huge task you don't know where to start, you can just commit to one task 25 minutes at a time, set a timer for 25 minutes and just focus on that one task. Minutes and just focus on that one task. You might notice a lot of thoughts rushing through your mind, a lot of reminders, perhaps about other tasks you have to do, and convert this 25 minute time segment into a meditation by noticing all these other thoughts and pressures that come to your mind, but you continue to bring your attention back to the concrete task you have at hand. At the end of 25 minutes, you must take a mandatory 5-minute break to give your brain a chance to reset. The beauty of the Pomodoro technique is that it does both Gets you to work and rest. The conventional Pomodoro technique involves 25 minutes of work, 5 minutes of rest and then another 25 minutes of work, 5 minutes of rest and then another 25 minutes of work and 5 minutes of rest. So do this four times and then take a half an hour break, so that's a longer break. Give your brain another chance to reset at this higher level because you're taking a longer break, and then come back to doing this combination of pomodoro and rest 25 minutes of work, five minutes of rest.
Speaker 1:A crucial thing to remember is that when you are working on something for 25 minutes, you're focusing on only one task at a time. Sometimes, in the desire to be extremely productive, we end up trying to do too many things all at once and just like a computer that has 50 tabs open, your brain ends up feeling extremely overwhelmed by trying to do too many different things all at once. Use the Pomodoro to train your brain to listen as you ask it to keep returning back to the current moment, to the current task, each time you feel distracted by thoughts about another task or reminders to do something else. Maybe use a sheet of paper to write down those other things that you are afraid of forgetting, just so your brain doesn't have to keep using up its resources to think of those other tasks. Once you have written it down, the brain is free to focus only on the task at hand.
Speaker 1:I consider the Pomodoro technique another very beautiful form of meditation, because it pushes you to focus on the here and now, just the way meditation does, and I hope you will get to try it and share with me how it goes. So I'll let you go now and hope you'll take good care of yourself and I'll see you next time. Bye.