Minding the business brain

From the pages of In Business magazine.

Mindfulness, according to Psychology Today, is described as “a state of active, open attention on the present.” When a person is mindful, according to the magazine, they observe their thoughts and feelings from a distance, without judging them good or bad. Mindfulness is about living in the moment and is often achieved through meditation.

So what comes to mind when you hear the word mindfulness? Does the very thought seem inviting or make you roll your eyes?

Whatever your opinion, the fact is mindfulness is proving to be effective in life and at work, and is being practiced — and yes, even encouraged — to the benefit of employees around the globe. These days, when everyone seems to be short on minutes in a day and employees are at a premium, mindfulness programs are also being offered by employers as a way to attract and retain employees. Why? Experts say its benefits are being proven, and frankly, couldn’t we all use a few moments to de-stress?

The World Health Organization estimates that stress costs American businesses about $300 billion annually and suggests stress-related maladies — heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure — could cost even more. With corporations looking to decrease health care costs, many are taking a more holistic approach. Aetna, Intel, and Keurig Green Mountain Inc. have taken the virtual leap into mindfulness, with Aetna, an insurance giant with 50,000 employees, reporting lower health care costs as a result. On average, Aetna workers practicing mindfulness reported a 28% reduction in stress levels, a 20% improvement in sleep quality, and a 19% reduction in pain, according to a 2015 Forbes article from contributor Jeanne Meister.

The practice of meditation has been around for thousands of years, but only in the past 30 years have researchers been working to unleash its beneficial qualities. The focus is on treating our brains to some well-needed TLC and retraining through practice, much as athletes reshape their bodies through exercise.

Mindfulness as a tool

At the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where Dr. Richard Davidson has been conducting groundbreaking work on emotion and the brain, mindfulness is proving to be an important tool in the work-life balance.

Social Psychologist and Assistant Scientist Pelin Kesebir, Ph.D., works with Davidson at the Center. “Work requires high levels of emotional and attentional resources, the effective management of which is critical to both employee well-being and performance, and mindfulness can help with both,” she explains. “We know from scientific work accumulated over the last 30 years that mindfulness-based practices can reduce anxiety and stress, improve focus and memory, help with creativity, problem solving, and decision-making, and strengthen the immune function.”

Global research is beginning to hint at other potential benefits that could be of particular interest in the business world, Kesebir notes. “Some early studies indicate that mindfulness has the potential to reduce unconscious bias toward stigmatized groups.” Unconscious bias may already exist in our brains and affect our views on race or age or social status.

“Mindfulness is supposed to decrease automatic processing and responding, so in this study, too, presumably it reduced the activation of negative automatic associations like ‘old = bad,’” Kesebir explains. “A different meditation practice, called loving-kindness meditation, has also been documented to reduce unconscious bias toward blacks and homeless people.”

While in their infancy, these studies suggest that such meditation could one day positively contribute to diversity and inclusion issues. Kesebir cautions that these early studies can only be considered suggestive at this point. “We need more study in this area.”

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Teaching mindfulness

It’s that kind of research that excites Ed Maxwell, founder of Third Left Wellness. “The implications for not only less turnover and better recruitment, but also for reducing the risks of lawsuits [in the future] as they pertain to discrimination are huge,” he notes. “So there are good financial incentives for companies to put these programs in place.”

Maxwell has been practicing mindfulness on his own for nearly a dozen years. A couple of years ago, while employed in the corporate finance department at Springs Window Fashions in Middleton, he asked the human resources department if he could offer a course for employees. After a pilot program and requests from Springs employees, HR asked Maxwell for a second go-round to get even more employees involved. Participants, he reports, noticed reduced stress, better sleep, and most felt happier. In fact, Maxwell says there is a strong connection between an ability to focus and happiness. “The positive feedback at Springs is what really catapulted me forward to launch my own business,” he states.

He left Springs about a year ago to pursue mindfulness in the workplace full-time. [Full disclosure: Maxwell blogs for IBMadison.com.] Admittedly, most of his time is devoted to educating people about the benefits of mindfulness. “Some people know what it is and others have never heard of it,” he notes.

There are also misconceptions he must plow through. Some think mindfulness is religious (it is rooted in Buddhism), or complicated, or even easy. “In fact, I practice it in a very secular way,” Maxwell says. “It’s not complicated, but it’s not necessarily easy, either, because it’s about developing more focus, and our minds like to wander. It’s training for your brain.”

Maxwell prefers to use the term “practicing mindfulness” rather than “meditation” in his work because of the latter’s connotation with religion. The difference, he explains, is that meditation is the primary way to increase mindfulness. “Mindfulness replaces a person’s view of the world through a lens of judgment and evaluation with a lens of curiosity and eagerness to learn,” he explains. “The way to develop that mindset is through meditation.”

Kesebir says mindfulness has been criticized as an “upper class, white, liberal” practice and she admits there might be some truth to the claim, but only in the sense that vulnerable populations with worse health outcomes tend to benefit less from the practice. Perhaps they have less access to it, and if that’s true Kesebir suggests employers reach out and bring mindfulness to them. Workplace mindfulness programs, she says, “should be socially and culturally sensitive and be led, at least part of the time, by leaders or teachers who come from diverse backgrounds” in order to attract more diversity.

Whatever the stigma, experts argue that 30 years of research is proving that it can alter the brain to the positive. Engaged employees report stress reduction, increased focus, happiness, and greater emotional intelligence, Maxwell says, while employers can benefit from reduced turnover rates and better recruitment because of higher job satisfaction. “At least one study shows that workplace mindfulness programs really increase employee job satisfaction and employees are more likely to stay and talk positively about their workplaces to others,” he cites. “Millennials are very interested in a positive workplace environment, so offering mindfulness programs has helped employers recruiting the younger generation.”

Some studies have shown that people in customer service jobs, in particular, tend to benefit from mindfulness training because by increasing emotional intelligence, they are able to relate better to customers and deal better with strong emotional reactions they might receive on the job. “That’s true in any industry,” Maxwell notes, “but people don’t need to be going through a rough time to benefit from mindfulness.”

Mindful class in session

What does a mindfulness session entail? First of all, throw out any preconceived notion of incense, bells, drums, or dancing around a fire — at least at work. All Maxwell needs is a relatively quiet space in an office. He prefers a room that is not dark — to stave off the occasional napper — and an ideal class size of up to 24 people. Participants can choose whether they want to close their eyes. “It’s really just about blocking out distractions,” he says. To ward off skeptics, Maxwell explains the science first in an effort to move beyond any unconscious bias toward meditation.

Sessions usually last a half-hour and begin with basic breathing techniques. The goal is to help people “learn to regard their thoughts as thoughts,” Maxwell states. “Often, we conflate our thoughts with reality, but the truth is, a thought is just a thought.” It takes practice, he cautions, because people must learn to observe their thoughts objectively and separate them from their emotions.

But mindfulness, he says, is also about recognizing how the brain and body influence each other and how to positively impact both. “There’s a kind of feedback loop between the brain and your body, so it’s about taking advantage of that loop rather than letting yourself spiral downward. It’s about building yourself up.”

Brain change

Research has shown that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. In fact, a 2010 Harvard University study found that humans spend about 47% of their waking hours worrying about what isn’t going on. Imagine that amount of brain energy refocused on more positive thoughts and behaviors.

Maxwell explains that the wandering mind tends to gravitate toward the negative because of a negativity bias humans have. From an evolutionary perspective, that makes sense in terms of threats to our survival, he notes, but it also results in a lot of unhappiness. “The more we can consciously control our focus, the better we can focus on positive or at least neutral things.”

It doesn’t take long because the brain is amazingly receptive to change. In fact, Kesebir says the human brain is changing all the time. “Even the smallest amount of mindfulness training would change our brains,” she asserts. More robust changes have been noted after practicing mindfulness for just 30 minutes a day over a two-week period. “The more time one devotes to practicing mindfulness, the more benefits one will experience,” she says, comparing it to physical exercise.

Some employers have designated meditation rooms where employees can escape from the daily noise and gain a few moments of quiet reflection. Kesebir notes that while mindfulness rooms are wonderful, mindfulness is something that can be practiced all day long. Employees can benefit from something as simple as taking a couple of minutes every day to stop, breathe, or take mindful walks to reconnect with their senses.

Kesebir suggests people set an alarm on their phones or display a picture on their desks to remind them to be mindful. “Although longer, formal practices are very helpful,” she says, “the positive impact of little mindful moments scattered throughout the day should not be underestimated.”

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Mindful engagement

Every business has to be mindful of culture. LSM Chiropractic operates throughout Greater Madison and southern Wisconsin, and with nearly 60 employees, president and chiropractor Jeff Lyne was looking for ways to keep staff engaged and enhance the office culture. “Because of the tight labor market, I’m trying to create a better, less stressful environment for our staff to give them the tools to deal with situations as they come up,” Lyne states.

Looking for ideas at a brainstorming session one day, one employee suggested getting involved in mindfulness training. “I didn’t know anything about this prior,” Lyne admits.

He contacted Ed Maxwell and signed the company up for an eight-week course. “I like it,” Lyne reports, and he says others do, too. “It’s what I wanted and what I thought I was buying. Of course, it’s also what you make of it, but I’ve found that mindfulness is good for so many things, even in my personal life, and I’ve seen almost immediate results.”

With 15 offices, Lyne’s challenge was offering the voluntary benefit to all employees. He brought the entire staff together for an introductory meeting with Maxwell, and each session is videotaped so employees throughout the LSM network can participate as often as they desire. “Even if they did half of the programs they’ll get something out of it,” Lyne says confidently. “I have to focus on [offering] the intangibles because I can’t pay my employees what the [others] pay their employees.”

At this writing, LSM Chiropractic was about halfway through its mindfulness program. Lyne especially appreciates the fact that each session is only 25 to 30 minutes long, so it doesn’t require an extraordinary amount of time out of the workday. He’s learned breathing techniques to help relieve stress and practices those techniques on his lengthy commute home each night. “I don’t close my eyes, though,” he laughs.

Making time for mindful meditation

You don’t have to sell Firoz Khimani on the benefits of mindful meditation. He’s already sold thanks to mindfulness-based cognitive therapy training at UW Hospital. As a result, Khimani, a sales performance analytics senior specialist at American Family Insurance, wanted to make mindfulness meditation an integral part of his schedule.

He was fortunate to be employed at a company with a reputation for being in tune with its employees. In 2014, American Family was looking to relocate and renovate its wellness room when an in-house interior designer suggested the idea of a “restorative room.”

Since opening in 2015, AmFam’s restorative room has provided a quiet respite to employees needing to decompress, and it serves as a regular meeting place for mindfulness training as well, led by Khimani and others.

“When a meditation room was offered here, I put a sign outside the room [for semi-weekly sessions] and people showed up!” Khimani reports.

Now he and Mark Walker, another employee, co-lead as many as 10 employees in meditation each Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Another staff member conducts Wednesday morning sessions.

Khimani says practicing mindfulness “has immensely helped me slow down. After the 20-minute session, I am generally able to focus better. Within the meditation room, I can sense people leaving with smiles and a gentler demeanor.”

American Family’s restorative room is just part of a broader company strategy, notes Linda Wagener, media relations consultant. “A big part of our wellness program is to have a more positive influence on employee health and well-being,” Wagener states. “Studies show that healthy employees tend to be happier and more productive. If we want our employees to bring their best for our customers, it makes sense to support their goals, not just in terms of physical health but also stress management.”

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