Transcript

Hello everyone, and welcome to HBr on Facebook. We're live. You can ask us questions at any time. Remember the comment box on your screen. Today, we're going to talk about a question that people should be asking themselves, if they're not already. Does mindfulness really work? It's everywhere in business today. But does it really matter? What difference does it make? I'm Daniel Goleman. I've often written for HBr. I wrote the book Emotional intelligence. I write on leadership. And I'm here with an old friend. I'm Richie Davidson, and I am the founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a more than 40 year friend and colleague of Dan golemans, and we've just published a book altered traits. 

Science reveals how meditation changes your mind, brain and body. The answer to this question is in that book, but we're going to give you the short form answer in just 20 minutes, and then you can ask questions. So we got interested in this in our graduate school days. Richie and I were together at Harvard and got very interested in meditation long before anybody really thought it mattered. We both wanted to do our dissertation on it. And what did they say? Richie, they said, if you wanted a successful career in science, this was a terrible way to begin, exactly career ending move. 

But we did it anyway. At the time, there were about three published articles that we could cite on meditation. That was it. Today, there are more than 6000 peer review articles on meditation, and what we've done in this book is sort through them with very rigorous standards, and see which of the best, the strongest, have the fireproof, bulletproof methodology. And we boiled it all down in the book, altered traits. And if you looked at the plot of how many articles have been published in a given time. Over a span of years, the curve looks like this. In the last five years, there has been an explosion, and this is when we began, right? This is us very actually, we're kind of down here. So We waded through all this, and we found out of 6000 about 60 really good articles. So that would look something like this. And these are the ones that tell you, does mindfulness really work? And you know, I was just talking to a CEO of an investment company. She says, Every morning we get together, our team gets together, and we do 10 minutes of mindfulness and helps us enormously through the day. The question is, does it really help?

 One of the things that's very clear about mindfulness, and if you don't know mindfulness is a method of training your attention so that you can bring it where you want and keep it where you want. It's crucial, because distractions today are everywhere. I think never before in human history has every human being that we know, certainly in the workplace, carried a phone that had all kinds of really nifty attractions, diversions, amusements. So we're constantly being pulled away from that one thing we have to do right now, and mindfulness, I think it can help. What's the data? Well, the data show, first of all, that we are a very distracted culture.

There was a paper published by friends of ours in the Harvard psychology department a few years ago using smartphones to query when they're out and about in the world. And one of the remarkable findings in this study is that 47% of the time the average American adult reports that he or she is not paying attention to what they're doing. And the way they found this out was really simple. The iPhone app rang you at random times and asked you two questions, what are you doing now? What are you thinking about? If those don't match, your mind has wandered and so given where we are as a culture with distraction and mind wandering, the question is, Can mindfulness help? And the data show that even eight weeks of mindfulness training each week, for a two hour class and a few minutes every day, is sufficient to actually produce a change in reports of mind wandering. We actually become more focused. Our objective parameters of attention begin to change, and we are able to focus more specifically on what it is that we're choosing to attend to. So one of the big findings is that there's less mind wandering. And this makes sense because mindfulness is direct training and attention Never before has this culture needed a technique like that as badly as we do now, and one of the major sources of distraction is emotional cues. We pay attention to things that are emotionally salient. Do you mean that email he sent me that got me so ticked off, exactly, and then, then we reverberate. 

We keep ruminating about it after the email, I know that was four weeks ago, and I was thinking about it two in the morning. Yeah. So how does it work in the brain? Yeah. How does it work? Can you show us Sure? So if we draw a little diagram of the brain with this is the front of the brain, and this is the back of the brain. There is a big chunk of real estate right up front here that we call the prefrontal cortex, that's right behind the forehead, right right behind the forehead. And one of the amazing things about the prefrontal cortex is that if you look over the course of evolution, this area of the brain grows more prominently in humans than in any other species. 

So this is a really important chunk of real estate, and it probably has a lot to do with things that are characteristically human. In fact, it's called the brain's executive center. It's like the CEO of the brain. So this area of the brain has important connections to the emotional areas of the brain. We were talking about the source of distraction being emotion in many, many cases, and buried in the middle of the brain, sort of right around here, is a structure that we call the amygdala? Oh yeah, the amygdala is the brain's trigger point. It's like the radar for threat, the fight or flight or freeze response, which are very primitive, but it happens in today's offices all the time. And so there is a direct connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, and it is a structure that we call the Uncinate Fasciculus.

You remember the Uncinate Fasciculus? I don't think anybody heard of it, but so this is the connection, and it doesn't matter what it's called, but what we find in the scientific evidence is that when we practice mindfulness for some period of time, doesn't happen instantaneously. This connection is strengthened, and this allows the prefrontal cortex to modulate the impulses from the amygdala and to recover more quickly. Modulate means the amygdala says, This guy's ticking me off. I'd like to slug him. And the prefrontal cortex says, Just say no, it's inhibitory, right? Inhibitory? Turns it off. Yeah. Tones it down. Tones it down. So this is another important consequence. Is that emotionally you first, you don't react as much, and then you recover more quickly. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

And the recovery more quickly is really an important attribute of what we think of as resilience. Resilience is, in many ways, the ability to recover more quickly from adversity. So instead of ruminating about the email that ticked you off for several weeks after email, you can come back down and recover. That's great news. It is great and we don't need anything other than our minds in training our minds to do this. So are there other important findings for folks in the business world, from mindfulness any other benefit, there are a whole slew of other findings that we think are beneficial, and some of them relate to this, the ability to focus attention and to selectively focus on what we choose to focus on. 

We are in environments that have all kinds of competing information, and we work often in workplaces that are filled with all kinds of information overload and the ability to selectively focus on certain things and ignore other things is part of our capacity as humans. The prefrontal cortex has a lot to do with that. So basically, mindfulness works in a couple of ways. It makes less mind wandering, it strengthens the prefrontal ability to say no to those like emotional impulse, and it also helps us keep our attention on that one thing that's so important. So in other words, there are a lot of benefits. On the other hand, one of the reasons we wrote this book is there is a lot of hype about mindfulness. I'm sorry to say it, but it's true. Many of the studies that are cited are here. They're not among those rock solid. You know, 1% of studies that we found people are citing all kinds of things as reasons to sell mindfulness into business. So be aware of what you're buying. There's also a very important thing to understand. This became very clear to me in a study that I'm blogging about on Harvard, on hbr.com

I think it's going up today or tomorrow, but had to do with in depth interviews with 42 executives who were all doing mindfulness, and they all said, oh, all kinds of great things happen. I got a promotion. My boss trusts me more. There's a string of things. And then when my co author, Matthew Lippincott, looked more closely at what had happened to them, he realized, well, you know, it wasn't all mindfulness. Each of them had been strengthening what we call an emotional intelligence competence, and I blogged about that a while back a month or two ago, maybe on hbr.com but there are four parts of emotional intelligence, self awareness, managing ourselves, empathizing, social skill. Within each of those domains, there are specific learned and learnable abilities that make executives outstanding performers. So for example, within the self management cluster, there's not only handling negative emotions better managing that, but also adaptability in general, also maintaining a positive outlook no matter what happens, or keeping your eye on that long term goal, despite setbacks, obstacles and distractions and mindfulness actually doesn't help you directly with any of those.

it does help you with the first two, self awareness, self management, but if you look at all of the emotional intelligence competencies you need to add additional learning, and that's what had happened. Turned out, with these executives, they were committing what in psychology we call the attribution error, fundamental attribution error, attribution, attribution, yeah, and this means, I think mindfulness did all that, but actually, when you look more closely, there was another reason going on. So mindfulness doesn't do everything that's been claimed for it. It does do a lot of good things. We're recommending it, but we're not saying. We don't want to oversell it. Let's be rational about this. And then, actually, there are some companies that have found very good results. 

Could you tell us about Aetna? Well, Aetna is a great example of a health care company and its CEO, Mark Bertolini, through his own personal experience, he was in a very severe ski accident and broke his neck and spine and almost died and was in excruciating pain. It took a year to rehab the acute injuries, and one of the things that he found was during the rehab period, he discovered mindfulness practices, and this helped him enormously in not so much getting rid of the pain, but in changing his relationship to the pain, so that he was able to live with it in a less combative kind of way. And it dramatically changed his life, and he became very interested in the application of these mindfulness practices to health care, and he decided he's got 1000s of employees at Aetna, why not try and see what its impact is among the employees? And they disseminated a program for one year. And as part of what they did, they actually collected some very interesting metrics. Now this was a program where mindfulness was one important piece, but there are other elements as well. It included some physical exercise, some nutritional diet information, and one of the extraordinary things that they did is they actually monitored healthcare utilization, because this was Aetna, and they had all this information on their employees, and they found that, on average, the practice of mindfulness and these other strategies that were included in this intervention led to a reduction of $122 per month per employee, and when that adds up with 10s of 1000s employees, it's an enormous savings. This is what convinced mark to disseminate this much more widely throughout the Aetna system this, it's penny wise and pound foolish not to use this. And one of the things that has been, I think, so refreshing to both Danny and I is that we find that among the business community, there actually is greater receptivity in many ways than among the mainstream academic community in interest in this area, in part because they can readily see the return on investment, and this is something that I think we'll see more of in the future.

 But you know, I think it's important for companies to look for an ROI, to have a hard metric. How is this paying off? Can you find a way to measure performance, or measure any outcome that really matters to you for your business? If you introduce mindfulness, it feels great, but does it perform well? Now I just want to review the points that we've covered here, how we came to this. We had very early adopters. You could say there's an enormously increased interest in business, but is it based on the solid stuff, or is it based on hype? And then, what are the real effects of mindfulness? Well, one of them is that there's less mind wandering. There's better attention, selective attention. You react less to things that are upsetting. They don't throw you off or make you do something you're going to regret the next day. And then what's happening in the brain to make that happen?

And the interaction between mindfulness and emotional intelligence, and then Aetna as a case study. And now we would welcome your questions. Thank you very much. All right, everybody. Thank you for your questions. Please do keep them coming so we have one here that's very much kind of taking a step back, and if you could just provide a definition of mindfulness, like, What do you mean when you say mindfulness? So mindfulness typically starts very simply with monitoring your breath. It sounds so easy, but if you if you start to watch the natural flow of your breath, not trying to control it, but just keep your mind on the full in breath and the full out breath, something's going to happen. Your mind is going to wander off to something else. The mindful moment is when you notice a wander and you bring it back. 

There's something very parallel to that that happens in gyms when you're working out with weights. Every time you lift a weight, do a rep, you're strengthening that muscle a little bit. We believe, I think you would agree that at least in theory, every time you bring your mind back, you're strengthening that circuit. Your is called neuroplasticity. So fundamental understanding in brain science that when you the more you use a circuit, the stronger it becomes. So mindfulness is exercising the brain. It's a mental workout. And then there's another level of mindfulness, where you use the strength of concentration, and you become a kind of a witness to your own thoughts and your own feelings, which gives you an internal choice point you didn't have before. 

Do I want to really do that thing? Do I want to slug that guy who sent me the email? Well, actually, you don't. That's your boss. Be careful. And so just to amplify that, instead of being fused with our experience, we have we can step back from our experience, still participate in the experience fully, but we have more control over our thoughts, our feelings and our actions. There's a follow up question here from Jeffrey, and he's asking, Do you believe that by doing what excites us, what we are passionate about, is a form of meditation by default? It's interesting how we lose track of time by doing more of what we love versus the chore? Is mindfulness always necessarily something we have to do, such as yoga? I think what Jeff is describing is what's called flow. 

It's also talked about as good work. Good work occurs when you align three things, what you're really good at, what you love doing, and what matters to you, what has value. And if you do if all of those three things line up, then you get into a state that he describes, where time seems to shift. It goes faster or slower. You're fully concentrated, and there's another element, it feels really good. I think that mindfulness may allow that to happen more, but I don't think there's any guarantee.

Okay, another question, we're getting a lot of questions in, so thank you everybody. Please do keep them coming. This question is from Mira, and she's asking, how do you achieve mindfulness when you're under extreme stress?

Well, you can achieve mindfulness, really, at any point in time. If you're under a lot of stress, you can actually become aware of how the body is changing in response to the stress. So it's mindfulness is not about fighting with our mind. It's not about fighting with the body. The essence of mindfulness is awareness, and so if we're stressed, we often feel tension in our body. And actually, that's a great opportunity to practice mindfulness, because the feelings in our body are so prominent when our stress, when we're stressed, in some ways, it's the perfect time to practice mindfulness.

Yeah, and so I often find when I'm traveling and kind of jittery about traveling, it's a great opportunity to just bring awareness to the body notice what's happening again. It's not about changing anything, it's not about fixing anything. It's simply becoming aware of whatever it is that's there. Well, two important things that awareness, actually there's little Judo here, because the awareness shifts the activity. If I could look at this chart again, remember the emotional centers are making you jittery, and then you bring mindfulness, which is prefrontal that shifts the energy levels in those two circuits, and it makes the prefrontal area more active than the jittery area. 

There's another thing too, and it has to do with the title of the book, altered traits, and that is that the more you practice mindfulness, or any other kind of meditation, there are many kinds mindfulness is just one, the more likely you are to experience kind of spillover effect where you know, when you're practicing mindfulness, it's easy to observe your sensations, but all of a sudden you'll notice, hey, you know that time I was so upset, I also was able to tune in. You can call on this, or you find it happening spontaneously outside the mindfulness session. And this is super important, because, after all, we're not so much interested in the buzz that we may get when we're meditating and sitting on the cushion or sitting in the chair. It's really about how this infiltrates into the interstices of everyday life. And so it really is about these trade effects which are enduring and persist beyond the meditation session itself, we're getting a few clarifying questions about the difference between meditation and mindfulness. 

Is there a difference? And is being mindful then a form of meditation? So is being mindful a form of meditation? The answer is yes. As I said, there are many kinds of meditation. Mindfulness is one another that's popular these days is TM. TM is different attentional strategy. In TM, you have a sound. It's actually Sanskrit mantra. You repeat it silently. When your mind wanders, you start the sound again. It's the same as focusing on your breath. Your mind wanders, you bring it back. But it's a different variety of meditation. Mindfulness has come to us in such a tidal wave that some people are confused and think it is meditation, but it's just one kind another question. This one's from, let's see Roman, and he's asking if there's ever a good time to practice mindfulness. Is there a time of day, or any recommendations that you would say on that friend, I would say that it's good to practice at a time when you are awake. And other than that, I mean not falling asleep, falling asleep, right? And other than that, I would say there. There really is no best time. It will vary among different people. There really is

every time really is an okay time to practice. And one of the things that often happens is, at the very beginning, we often are sleepy, and that can be an impediment. But other than that, any time is I would look at it this way, what's the best time to go to the gym to work out? Whenever you can fit it into your schedule? Same with mindfulness, another question. 

We're getting a lot of questions, so we'll just keep them coming. This one is from Caroline, and she's asking if you have any recommendations, or if you can teach mindfulness to children. Oh, yeah. I was in a classroom of seven year olds in a school in Spanish Harlem in New York City. And every day they have some little mindfulness session. They don't call it that. They call it belly buddies. The reason is, one by one, each kid goes to their cubby, gets their favorite stuffed animal, finds a place to lie down on a rug, puts that animal on their belly and watches it rise on the in breath and fall on the out breath. And this is basically mindfulness for seven year olds. I was a friend brought over his son, who was four, who was wearing a Batman costume. And I said to the kid, do you know how Batman got his power? And he said, No. And I said, Well, let's sit down. And then he watched his breath for a half hour. I was amazed. So we've done research with four and five year olds in public school systems. 

We have developed a mindfulness based kindness curriculum where we're combining elements of mindfulness and kindness in preschool kids, and we've published hard, no scientific evidence showing that these simple practices of the sort that Dan just described are enormously beneficial in producing changes on objective measures of cognitive control, which is directing your thoughts and feelings.

On measures of attention, even classroom grades improve as a function of this simple intervention. And so anyone who's interested, by the way, the mindfulness based kindness curriculum is available free on our center website. We've just done a public release of this, and it's the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. You just reminded me, if anyone's interested in emotional intelligence competencies, you can go to more than sound.net where they have a primer on each of them. I just forgot to say that

another question here from Elizabeth, and she's asking, what type of personality traits does mindfulness have the capacity to change or impact? If any,

I would say that mindfulness is really not so much about changing personality traits. Although our book altered traits does suggest that these practices can produce enduring changes. It won't necessarily make a person who is an extrovert into an introvert or an introvert into an extrovert, those kind of personality traits are not necessarily going to change dramatically, but there are changes in certain characteristics. So we know that anxiety and dysphoria depression can be reduced by these practices. These are changes that have been well established.

Resilience is something that can be improved through these practices, but not traditional personality traits like introversion, extroversion and that actually is an important caveat about what mindfulness is not. It's not about changing these personality traits.

Here's another question about measuring the payoff of mindfulness. How do you measure the payoff of mindfulness, particularly in a corporate setting where everything is based on ROI? So this is a very difficult question. How do you get an ROI for something as soft as mindfulness? Or this question has been asked for decades about emotional intelligence, which also seems soft, but it turns out that so called soft skills have hard impacts, have hard consequences. So for example, Richie talked about the brain change that occurs. The question is, can you see it in performance? And here, I think it's important to ask yourself, well, what metric would we use for this person in this position to show that they do it any better than someone in the same position that doesn't do this? And this gets into a lot of methodological questions that I am going to turn over to Richie. 

Well, let me just share the results of one long term longitudinal study. This was a study done of 1000 people born in Dunedin, New Zealand, who have been followed since birth. They're now in their 40s. Metrics of self control, self regulation and attention, which are boosted by mindfulness. You're boosted by mindfulness when the kids are four and five years of age. Predict outcomes. When these individuals are in their early 30s, they predict the extent to which a person abuses drugs. The better self control you have as a kid, the less likely you are to abuse drugs when you're 32 years of age, it predicts physical health. It predicts financial success. 

I think this is very important for the business audience. Absolutely. What this says is that the ability that you learn in child and it can pick up at any point, these are learned and learnable. Remember that that ability to fix your attention on what matters and ignore distractions or a distant goal, is going to predict a financial outcome, a positive financial outcome. And actually, in this study, the kids who are in the top percentile in self control when they're four and five years of age earn on average, $6,000 a year, and US dollars more than the kids who are in the lowest percent. There's another kind of amazing fact they found, which is that cognitive control in childhood was a better predictor of your financial success in your adult years than IQ or the wealth of the family you grew up in. All put together. Okay,

we'll take maybe two more questions. Sure. We're getting a few questions about just, even just actually starting to practice mindfulness. Do you have any advice for how long you need to do it? Is there designated amount of time, or is it okay to kind of a really important question, and in our own center, we have been experimenting with that, and it's a really critical unanswered question. But my conjecture, based on everything we know, is that it's really important for a person to start very modestly and to choose a goal for him or herself that's doable. Often we have these unrealistic expectations that I'm going to practice 45 minutes a day.

Every day, and we may do that for a few days or even a few weeks, but the likelihood of continuing is very, very low. Hey, that's just like my workout at the gym. I said I was going to do it, and you know what? I don't do it that much anymore. Yeah. So we can choose a small amount of time, even two or three minutes, just whatever amount of time you can pick that you think you can make a commitment to and do it every day for 30 days consecutively, whatever that time is. And if there is benefit, then a person would be motivated to continue to practice more. There's a caveat, though, if you're just starting out and you start to notice when your mind wanders, you're going to think you're going crazy. My mind wanders all the time. It's not true. It's just that you're starting to be aware of what the mind does ordinarily. So don't give up if you see yourself mind wandering. We often hear this with from people who've just started stick with it.

Okay, another question here, asking about the chart that you described on the whiteboard there. How long does it take to strengthen and make the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala? Is this what we are trying to do, essentially, with mindfulness? It's, I would say it's a byproduct of mindfulness, and it certainly seems to be one mechanism that accounts for some of the changes that we see, for example, in stress reactivity. And this kind of strengthening is not something that occurs instantaneously. It takes several 1000 hours of practice before we begin to see these changes. And there are some changes that occur very, very rapidly. This is not one of them. And so one of the important elements that we highlight in our book altered traits is the value of practice. It's like strengthening a muscle, as Dan talked about earlier, and we know that when we continue to exercise, we will be able to increase and sustain whatever positive benefit may have occurred.

One more question. Yes, one more question. So Jovanna is asking, if you have any advice we can end with on filtering, basically the hyper stimulated when you're in hyper stimulated context. Do you have any advice for how to filter through the noise to actually get to a place of mindfulness so when you're over stimulated, how can you be mindful same way you do when you're under stimulated. Just bring your awareness to your breath to what's going on inside. Tune out of the distractions what's over stimulating you, and just be in the present.

So we hope that you understand the difference between the sound research on mindfulness and the hype that you understand that there are specific benefits that are well documented by science now that point to the advantages of having a mindfulness practice. That you see that mindfulness does not do everything that's attributed to it, that emotional intelligence, abilities, for example, need to be worked on more directly, but can be helped by mindfulness. And that companies like Aetna have found that there is good ROI from the practice, that this makes sense for a company, and we hope you'll stick with it. Thank you. So please try it. Thank you so much. Applause.