How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life pdfdrive com

MINDFULNESS MOMENTS
In The Science Essentials I talked about the evidence that the practice of
mindfulness enhances all the functions of our brain’s deliberate system by
improving connectivity between key parts of the prefrontal cortex. That’s a big
deal when it comes to workplace resilience, because our deliberate system isn’t
just what enables smart thinking, insight, and focus—we also rely on our
deliberate system for emotional self-control and flexibility. It’s what stops us
from shouting “That’s not fair” when something manifestly unfair happens, and
it’s what enables us to reappraise our interpretation of a difficult situation. In
fact, researchers analyzing brain scans of people using mindfulness have seen
how it reduces their survival circuits’ reactivity to negative events, so that
there’s less defensive behavior for them to overcome in the first place.
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 In other
words, people who use mindfulness are harder to tip into defensive mode. So
mindfulness is as powerful in boosting our emotional stability as it is in
improving our thinking.
What do those benefits look like in a modern working environment? One
group of researchers at the University of Washington recruited a bunch of HR
professionals and then asked them to juggle multiple workday demands.
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In the
middle of the experiment, they gave some people basic mindfulness training.
Others got relaxation training, while a third group got nothing. The tasks that
people had to complete included scheduling a meeting with multiple attendees
while facing limited conference room availability, and designing a creative
agenda for the meeting. They received the information they needed through a
flow of emails, instant messages, calls, documents, and comments from people
dropping by unannounced. Some information was incomplete, and the meeting
attendees changed their minds about their schedule (yes, the researchers were
impressively committed to making the study feel like real life). Unsurprisingly,
the volunteers reported feeling drained by the experience—that was the idea. But
the group that got the mindfulness training coped markedly better, and reported
less stress, than the other two groups.
So let’s remind ourselves—what 
is
mindfulness? It’s centered on the
following steps: 
pause
for a moment; choose to 
focus
on something with all of
your attention; and if your attention drifts away, just 
return
it to your point of
focus without judging yourself. Most people who practice mindfulness choose to
observe their breath, because it’s entirely portable and something we never have

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to fumble for. So breathing exercises have come up several times in the book so
far. But our single point of focus can be just about anything. We can pay close
attention to a picture or a plant in our workplace, or each mouthful of the food
we’re eating. Whatever we choose to observe, we’re being mindful of something
that we might not have otherwise stopped to notice, and we’re creating a
moment of stillness in the daily whirlwind of our lives.
As the benefits of mindfulness become more widely known in business, eight-
week mindfulness courses are proving increasingly popular. But if the thought of
attending a course seems incompatible with the demands of your life, the good
news is that you don’t have to make a big commitment to get results.
Neurobiologist Fadel Zeidan and colleagues at the University of North Carolina
had volunteers practice twenty minutes of mindfulness for just four days, and in
that short time great things happened. People reported less fatigue and anxiety,
and had more self-control. Using a battery of puzzles and tests, the researchers
also found that measures of their working memory and of their visual and spatial
processing improved significantly.
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What if you don’t have twenty minutes a day? I liked a study at the University
of Wisconsin–Stout that asked its volunteers to try to meditate for twenty-five
minutes a couple of times a week, but where the reality ended up being more like
five to fifteen minutes for many people. Even those at the five-minute end of the
scale were seen to have shifts in patterns of brain activation consistent with the
positive results seen in longer-term studies.
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What if you don’t have five minutes? What if it’s more like a minute, or even
less? Can that be mindfulness, too? I say yes. Kira, our communications director,
says: “I learned this meditation technique for workaholic people like me. It’s just
twenty-eight breaths, and even I can do that. The counting helps keep you
focused. I do it most days. Sometimes I think, ‘Well, that didn’t work,’ because I
feel like I wasn’t able to settle my mind. But then it gets to be 6:00 p.m. and,
magically, I’m still feeling calm. And on the days I skip my twenty-eight
breaths, I’m anything but calm at that point in the day.”
You might remember that Anthony, our digital marketing expert from 
Part II
,
has a quick “mindful pause” routine to better handle his workload. He also
occasionally uses one of the many mindfulness smartphone apps that now exist.
“Even though the introductions can seem slightly cheesy, they work well. You
can listen to them on your headphones wherever you are. You don’t have to
close your eyes, so you can use them while you’re sitting at your desk, and

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nobody knows what you’re doing.” The suggestions that pop up on the app can
be as discreet as reminding him to focus on the way his toes feel on the floor for
a few seconds.
Ros, the healthcare manager, had a similar breakthrough with mindfulness
when she realized “it can be as small as properly noticing what I’m doing now,
really paying attention to the thoughts I’m having and the way I’m feeling—
whether I’m in the middle of something at work or reading a bedtime story to
my kids.” As for me, I like focusing on the way each foot hits the ground when
I’m going for my morning walks.
So it’s worth experimenting until you find a pause-and-focus routine that fits
your personality and lifestyle. And if that means you find yourself gazing
intently at a glass of wine or an ice cream—well, you can tell everyone that
meditation takes many forms.