What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is a clinically proven technique that helps you to be more present, calm, clear and focused in both your personal and professional life, helping to reduce stress, increase happiness and improve your capacity to reach your full potential.
Derived from ancient mental effectiveness training, mindfulness is both a practice (meditation) and a way of being fully present and awake to each moment of your everyday life (mindfulness), without being overly reactive to whatever arises from moment to moment.
An often-quoted definition of mindfulness was created by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Jon describes mindfulness as “…paying attention, on purpose, in a particular way, to the present moment, non-judgmentally.” This definition captures the essence of how modern-day secular mindfulness is taught. (Kabat-Zinn,1994)
The foundation of mindfulness is in learning to how to maintain a present moment focus on a particular object, for example the breath, a body sensation, sounds, and to notice when you are thinking about something else and be able to bring your attention back to the here and now without giving yourself a hard time about being distracted.
When you first begin practicing mindfulness, you’ll become acutely aware of just how often you find yourself thinking about something other than what you intended.
Why is mindfulness important at work?
Thinking about something else, while performing any task, has been shown to reduce levels of happiness. Psychologists Killingsworth & Gilbert, (2010), followed the lives of 2250 people via an app and found on average participants in the study where caught up in thinking about things other than the task at hand almost 47% of the time and in those moments, they reported lower happiness levels than when they were focused and on task. So, being able to bring your mind back to the present moment, to focus on whatever it is you are engaged in, has some clear benefits.
Further, studies into multi-tasking reveal that when you intentionally multitask, for example choose to listen to a speaker and at the same time take notes, you can do so quite happily, however, when you are forced to multitask through disruptions like someone coming up to speak with you, a phone call, text or unexpected noise that takes your attention away, this can really put you off task, triggering the bodies stress response and making it harder to get back on task. Mindfulness is a tool to assist with calming the nervous system, amidst the chaos of life and get you back to the task at hand more efficiently (Yen et al, 2016).
Is there evidence to support mindfulness?
Science demonstrates, a sustained regular practice of mindfulness through meditation and by deliberately integrating mindful moments into your daily life, leads to beneficial outcomes including improved immune function, reductions in inflammation in the body, lower blood pressure and heart rate, improved sleep quality, reductions in a sense of not having enough time and reduced stress. The practice of mindfulness has also been linked to increases in the length of telomeres, part of our DNA strands, and longer telomeres are linked to increased life span, (Holzel et al, 2011 & Epel et al, 2009).
A systematic literature review by Janssen et al (2018) found participation in the full 8 week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, may help to improve employees’ psychological functioning, leading to decreased levels of “emotional exhaustion (a dimension of burnout), stress, psychological distress, depression, anxiety, and occupational stress” and they also noted increases in mindfulness, personal accomplishment, self-compassion, quality of sleep, and relaxation.
A study by Mulla et al (2017) into the outcomes of a 16-week MBSR intervention with senior executives of at a South Indian oil company, reported a positive impact on physical markers of stress in the form of reduced systolic and diastolic blood pressure and blood cortisol levels, and self-reported improvements in sleep quality, emotional reactivity, stress related behaviour and self-compassion.
A Holzel et al (2011), study with stressed executives, using fMRi imaging, revealed that participation in an intensive 8-week mindfulness program, lead to increases in grey matter density in the cortex and more specifically, the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) which is responsible for executive functioning (decision making) and plays a part in memory.
With mindfulness, stress reactivity is reduced, and decision making is improved. It’s also been demonstrated that those who practice mindfulness tend to have more flexible cognitive functioning, better decision-making capabilities, the capability to come up with varied responses to the same stimuli rather than being limited by past experiences and therefore more open to new ideas and innovation, (Moore A & Malinowski P, 2009; & Greenberg, Reiner and Meiran, 2012).
Mindfulness has also been shown to lead to improvements in emotional regulation, self-awareness and self-compassion, along with a capacity to understand how thoughts and the way we perceive an event colours how we react to it and that we do have a choice in how we respond to internal triggers (thoughts and emotions) and external events,(Boyle et al, 2017).
Where did mindfulness originate?
Mindfulness and meditation have been practiced for thousands of years in various ancient traditions. Beginning in the early 1900s, western scientists took an interest in the minds of long term meditators, often monks from eastern cultures like Tibet or Vietnam, and began to study the behaviours, brains and physiology of these meditators in an effort to find the secret sauce of their unusual capacity for maintaining long periods of calm, clear and focused attention, even when they were faced with what westerners would deem adverse or stressful situations.
Modern day mindfulness training has taken the essence of these ancient practices, less the religion and ritual, and created secular programs that are delivered in the health, education, corporate, elite and amateur sport, government and military sectors.
Now in 2018, there are hundreds of studies demonstrating the benefits of mindfulness training for human health, wellbeing and mental agility and the links to accessing optimal human potential in your personal and professional lives.
Why is mindfulness relevant to life now?
Technology
Mobile technologies, mean we have access to more information then we could ever have imagined. We hold in our pockets the capacity to stream, search, interact and connect in the online world 24/7. Checking emails, sending messages, scrolling through social media feeds at our desks, in the park while our kids are playing, on the bus or train, while we wait in a queue, even as we walk with a group of friends and anywhere else you can imagine.
While there are many benefits to having 24/7 access to information and the ability to connect in the online world no matter where we are, researchers are currently exploring the potential pitfalls for health and wellbeing, including the potential for various effects on cognitive ability. Although there is no conclusive evidence to show negative cognitive impacts of mobile technologies (Wilmer, Sherman, Chein; 2017), in the authors face to face workshops with teachers, lawyers, sports people, nurses, parents and young people, they all report feeling more pressure to be available and switched on 24/7 due to the accessibility of mobile technologies and this leads to increased levels of stress and a sense that there is not enough down time.
Mindfulness can help you stay on task
Technology is not the only potential distraction, in any given moment there can be a myriad of different things vying for our attention. Who can relate to sitting at your desk, immersed in a report and that little bleep at the top of your screen lets you know an email has just come in, so you take your attention off the report as you decide whether to respond to the email or keep working on the report. Next, another bleep, this time from your phone, it’s your partner and again, you’re required to switch your attention from your intended focus to the text. Finally, back to your report, you hear colleagues speaking in the background and get caught up in checking out what their saying, and back to the report again, thoughts of the heated discussion you had with someone earlier pop in and you begin the rehash the event in your mind and so on goes the merry go round of being on and off task.
Mindfulness is a tool that when practiced consistently, can help you to maintain a clear and focused present moment awareness, despite any potential distractions from your external world or from your internal world in the form of unwanted thoughts and emotions. This capacity to stay present, helps to negate some of the negative effects of being constantly switched on in this increasingly fast paced world.
Mindfulness helps to access a state of calm present focus
When constantly under pressure, humans live more in a state of hyperarousal and find it difficult to switch off and relax. Living in a state where the bodies sympathetic nervous system is readied for action, ready to fight off a predator, jump out of the way of a bus, react to whatever threat may come your way, even when there is no real threat, becomes the norm and quite often, you don’t realise the adverse consequences until you’re given a nudge in the form of some form of health scare. Living in a perpetual state of hypervigilance becomes a habit, the brain becomes hardwired to be this way, and you begin to find it hard to switch off at the end of the day, or to relax, even when on holidays.
Mindfulness is the tool to accessing the parasympathetic side of your nervous system, helping you to dial down the level of hypervigilance and access a more restful and relaxed state, even amongst the chaos of life. With a regular mindfulness practice, being able to drop into a place of calm can become your new normal, replacing a tendency to live in a more hypervigilant anxious state.
How to Begin a Mindfulness Practice?
The senses of the body and mind; sensations, sound, sight, smell, taste and observation of thoughts, provide an anchor to the present moment. To cultivate mindfulness we begin with anchoring to the present moment through one of the senses of the body. In this module, we’ll tap into the present using the foundational practice of mindfulness of breath.
When you begin, the first thing you will notice is that your mind has a mind of its own. Your intention may be to rest your awareness (attention) on the flow of your breathing, but you’ll quickly find that your mind has been carried off to more compelling things. This may arise as thinking about the past or the future, a narrative about the practice and the voice guiding you, daydreaming, sounds or other more vivid sensations, hunger, pain, an itch, this is all part of the practice.
You may find you’re mind gets carried off 100 or even 1000 times, the good thing about mindfulness is you can’t get it wrong, the practice of mindfulness is noticing the wandering mind and redirecting your attention again and again to the chosen object of attention, in this case the breath.
As you begin your exploration of this first mindfulness practice, know that whilst you are training the mind to keep an awareness of breathing at the forefront of your mind, there will still be an awareness of other things happening around you or inside you in the form of thoughts, emotions or body sensations.
The practice in the beginning is to notice when the breath is no longer at the forefront of your mind, unhooking from whatever has distracted you in that moment, and coming back once more to a sustained focus on the breath.
This is a simple introductory breathe awareness practice. Simply notice when your breath is no longer at the forefront of your mind, then let go of whatever has distracted you in that moment, and come back once more to a sustained focus on the breath.
Simple Breathing Practice
8 minutes
References (APA 6th edition)
Boyle, C. C., Stanton, A. L., Ganz, P. A., Crespi, C. M., & Bower, J. E. (2017). Improvements in Emotion Regulation Following Mindfulness Meditation: Effects on Depressive Symptoms and Perceived Stress in Younger Breast Cancer Survivors. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 85(4), 397–402. doi.org/10.1037/ccp0000186
Epel, E., Daubenmier, J., Moskowitz, J. T., Folkman, S., & Blackburn, E. (2009). Can meditation slow rate of cellular aging? Cognitive stress, mindfulness, and telomeres. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1172, 34–53. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2009.04414.x
Greenberg, J., Reiner, K., Meiran, N. (2012) Mind the Trap: Mindfulness practice reduces cognitive rigidity. PLOS ONE 7(5): e36206. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0036206
Hölzel, B.K., Lazar, S.W., Gard, t., Schuman-Olivier, Z., Vago, D.R., & Ulrich, O. (2011). How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(6), 537 – 559. doi.org/10.1177/1745691611419671
Janssen, M., Heerkens, Y., Kuijer, W., van der Heijden, B., & Engels, J. (2018). Effects of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction on employees’ mental health: A systematic review. PLoS ONE, 13(1), e0191332. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0191332
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever you go, there you are: Mindfulness meditation in everyday life. New York: Hyperion.
Killingsworth, M., & Gilbert, D. (2010). A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. Science, 330(6006), 932-932. doi: 10.1126/science.1192439
Mulla, Z.R., Govindaraj, K., Polisetti, S.R., George, E., & More. N.R., (2017).Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction for Executives: Results from a Field Experiment. Business Perspectives and Research, 5(2), 113 – 123. doi.org/10.1177/2278533717692906
Siegel, D.J., (2010). Mindsight; Change your brain and your life. Random House Inc: Australia.
Williams, M. & Penman, D. (2011) Mindfulness, A Practical Guide to Finding Peace in A Frantic World. Piatkus Great Britain
Wilmer, H. H., Sherman, L. E., & Chein, J. M. (2017). Smartphones and Cognition: A Review of research Exploring the Links between Mobile Technology Habits and Cognitive Functioning. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 605. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00605
Yen, P.-Y., Kelley, M., Lopetegui, M., Rosado, A. L., Migliore, E. M., Chipps, E. M., & Buck, J. (2016). Understanding and Visualizing Multitasking and Task Switching Activities: A Time Motion Study to Capture Nursing Workflow. AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings, 2016, 1264–1273.