Monk Mode: Tarun Hari Das Builds a Lo-Fi + Rain Study Library for Clarity, Focus, and a Calmer Inner Climate

A note on why this exists

There’s a specific kind of mental fatigue that doesn’t always show up as exhaustion. It shows up as debris: too many tabs open in the mind, too much noise in the nervous system, too much “almost-focus” and not enough clean attention. You can be capable, motivated, even inspired—and still feel internally cluttered.

Monk Mode is Tarun Hari Das’ response to that reality: a growing YouTube library of lo-fi + rain study sessions designed to support day-to-day clarity, music-therapy-adjacent regulation, deep work, and an ambience that helps take the edge off mental debris—without asking you to step away from your life to access it.

This isn’t “music for when things are perfect.” It’s sound for the real world: the office, the commute, the late-night study sprint, the early morning planning hour, the long stretch of admin, the writing session you keep postponing, the emotional residue that lingers after a demanding day.

Why Tarun Hari Das went this direction: love of music, mastery of sound, and the practicality gap

Tarun Hari Das has always been deeply musical. Not just as a listener, but as a Jazz piano player, music producer & sound healer, someone who understands music as construction: rhythm, tension, release, frequency space, dynamics, timing, silence, and emotional contour. Where many people hear “a vibe,” producers hear architecture.

Alongside that production background, Tarun works with Tibetan sound bowls and facilitates Tibetan sound bowl healing—a practice rooted in resonance, overtones, and the way sustained vibration can support a shift in state: from scattered to coherent, from tight to open, from mentally noisy to internally quieter.

But there’s an obvious problem:

Most people don’t live in a setting where it’s convenient to stop what they’re doing and pull out sound bowls.

You’re in the office. You’re on a deadline. You’re at a café. You’re in a shared house. You’re trying to study while the world continues to world. You might need ambience that supports your mind and steadies your heart—but the tools that create that ambience aren’t always socially or practically accessible in the moment.

So Tarun went deeper into something people can use immediately:

A library of deliberately designed musical sessions that can be started with one click—sound environments built to help keep the mind fresh, sharp, and clear, while leaving the heart beautified rather than hardened by the pace of the day.

That’s the core purpose of Monk Mode:

Not escapism—state support. Not distraction—attention scaffolding. Not sedation—regulated clarity.

What Monk Mode sounds like: lo-fi rain, built for focus

At its foundation, Monk Mode lives in a specific sonic lane:

• Lo-fi: warm texture, stable grooves, restraint in arrangement

• Rain ambience: a natural, broadband sound bed that supports continuity

• Study / clarity pacing: enough consistency to sustain focus, enough movement to keep you engaged

Rain isn’t used as a gimmick. It’s used as a functional layer, a sonic “room tone” that helps smooth the edges of an environment. And lo-fi isn’t used as cliché. It’s used because it can be harmonically rich without being cognitively demanding.

But Monk Mode is not built as generic loop music. The sessions are composed with intention—because Tarun’s premise is simple:

If sound can move you into stress, it can also move you out of it. If sound can scatter attention, it can also shape attention.

Why rain works: what it can do to attention, arousal, and the “noise problem”

The sound of rain is often experienced as calming for two practical reasons:

1) Masking and reducing auditory “surprises”

Rain contains a wide spread of frequencies. That matters because it can act as a mask for sharp environmental sounds: sudden voices, keyboard clacks, traffic shifts, office movement—anything that repeatedly yanks attention away from the task.

This is one reason “rain sound” recordings are often discussed alongside white noise: both can create a steadier auditory field that makes distractions less salient. Research on white noise suggests it can modulate arousal and, in some contexts, reduce cortical excitability and support a more settled state.

2) Shifting the brain away from threat-monitoring

A separate body of work suggests naturalistic sounds can shift attention patterns and brain network activity away from internal rumination and threat scanning. For example, research on natural sounds has linked them to changes in functional connectivity associated with attention states (including work discussing the default mode network and mind-wandering).

Rain, specifically, has been studied as an auditory context during cognitive tasks. In one line of research connected to rainfall-like soundscapes (and white-noise-like sound), findings have suggested changes in cognitive performance and arousal dynamics in certain settings.

Important nuance: rain won’t “fix” attention by itself. What it can do is remove friction—reduce the number of micro-interruptions and soften the environment enough that focus becomes easier to sustain.

Monk Mode uses rain the same way a well-designed workspace uses lighting: it doesn’t do the work for you, but it can make doing the work feel less hostile.

The Monk Mode sessions are 108 minutes: why 108, and why it matters beyond symbolism

Each Monk Mode session runs 108 minutes—and that number is deliberate.

108 as a universal pattern in contemplative traditions

Across yogic and dharmic traditions, 108 shows up repeatedly: malas often have 108 beads; mantra repetitions are traditionally counted in cycles of 108; and practices like 108 sun salutations are used as markers of completion and devotion in certain contexts.

108 and the human body: points, pathways, and the “mapping instinct”

One commonly referenced link between 108 and the body comes through traditional systems that describe vital points (often discussed as marma points in Ayurveda), sometimes enumerated as 108 in popular explanations. Whether someone takes these frameworks as literal anatomy, energetic mapping, or cultural symbolism, the recurring theme is consistent: 108 represents a complete circuit—a whole-body, whole-life sense of “enough to be transformational.”

Why 108 minutes is practical (not just spiritual)

Symbolism aside, 108 minutes is a functional design choice for modern life:

• It’s long enough to support deep work without constantly choosing a new track.

• It’s short enough to feel achievable as a single “container” you can finish.

• It mirrors a natural rhythm many people already use: extended focus blocks, long reading sessions, writing stretches, or project planning sprints.

Think of it as a ritual-length session that respects both productivity and presence.

Monk Mode’s message is not “work harder.” It’s “work cleaner.” And one of the cleanest supports is not having to keep resetting the environment.

Not typical loop music: why Monk Mode includes tension, contrast, and deliberate solos

A lot of “study music” is designed to disappear. That can help—until it starts to do something else: flatten the mind into passivity.

Monk Mode takes a different approach.

1) Tension keeps you awake

Tarun intentionally allows moments of tension—subtle harmonic turns, rhythmic lifts, shifts in texture—not to stress you out, but to keep the brain awake and responsive. It’s the difference between:

• sedation (dulling)and

• regulation (steady alertness)

If you’ve ever put on background loops and found yourself drifting into mental fog, you already understand the problem Monk Mode is solving.

2) Solos stretch attention and thinking capacity

You’ll also hear musical solos that are placed with purpose. They’re not there to show off. They’re there to expand the listener’s internal range.

When the ear follows a melodic line, especially one that’s coherent and harmonically grounded, it recruits a different mode of cognition than task-only thinking. It can open a wider bandwidth for ideas, pattern recognition, and creative connection-making.

This isn’t mystical. It’s one of the reasons music has long been studied in relation to cognition and performance.

What classical music research suggests (and what Monk Mode takes from it)

The popular “Mozart effect” narrative is often oversold in the mainstream, but the scientific conversation is more nuanced:

• Early findings suggested short-term improvements in certain types of spatial reasoning tasks after listening to specific music (e.g., Mozart K448).

• Later meta-analyses and replications found the effect is often small, task-dependent, and may be mediated by factors like arousal and mood rather than “intelligence boosts.”

The key takeaway Tarun applies is not “classical makes you smarter.”

It’s this:

Music can shift arousal and mood in ways that change how the brain performs—especially on tasks requiring sustained attention, spatial-temporal processing, or flexible thinking. 

Monk Mode borrows the principle, not the hype:

• Use harmony and structure to support coherence

• Use variation to prevent cognitive sleepwalking

• Use musicality—not monotony—to keep attention alive

That’s why Monk Mode isn’t a single 8-bar loop for two hours. It’s an environment with motion.

How to use Monk Mode: simple protocols that work in real life

Monk Mode is designed to be practical. Here are a few ways people can use 108 minutes without overthinking it:

The 108-minute “single container”

• Press play

• Choose one meaningful task

• Stay inside the container until the session ends. You can take micro-breaks, but you don’t leave the environment.

The 3-part focus arc (36 / 36 / 36)

• First 36: setup + warm focus (organize, outline, plan)

• Second 36: deep execution (hardest thinking)

• Third 36: refinement + completion (edit, finalize, send, review)

The nervous system reset

Not every use has to be productivity. Some days, the goal is simply:

• reduce internal noise

• regulate mood

• return to steadier presence

Rain + lo-fi can support that transition when silence feels too sharp and the world feels too loud.

This is only the beginning: Monk Mode will expand into multiple genres

The YouTube library is being built as a collection, not a one-off series.

Alongside the lo-fi rain foundation, Monk Mode will grow into genre lanes so you can choose what best supports your state and your work style:

• Neo-soul

• Rare groove

• Jazz

• Afro-jazz

Some days you’ll want minimal texture. Other days you’ll want more harmonic color, more swing, more movement—something that lifts the emotional tone while keeping the mind clear.

Monk Mode is designed so you can switch your style when you’re ready, without switching your intention.

Closing: what Monk Mode is really offering

At the surface, Monk Mode is a YouTube library of 108-minute lo-fi rain sessions.

At a deeper level, it’s a way of treating sound as a daily support:

• for attention

• for emotional tone

• for the inner atmosphere you carry into your decisions

Tarun Hari Das is building Monk Mode for people who don’t need more motivation—they need cleaner conditions.

Monk Mode: press play, set the ambience, and let clarity be easier to access. Tune into the playlist here & subscribe to the channel for updates. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDRMpzKKRs4-YlVUSTa1MgVcu52yYsAPM