While finishing my training in Bangor I had the great fortune to be introduced to John Teasdale, one of the founders of MBCT, who lives – as my wife and I do – in Cambridge. John and I took the mindfulness programme I’d been working with in Bangor, a hybrid of MBSR and MBCT, and tweaked it more particularly towards stress. We then spent some time teaching that programme, along with our colleague Ciaran Saunders, in public courses held in Cambridge. We made video recordings of each taught session and in between sessions the three of us would meet up, replay the recording of ourselves teaching, and comment on what we saw one another doing: what worked and what didn’t work so well. That was one of the richest learning experiences of my whole engagement in the process of mindfulness teaching.
Soon after graduating I was invited to join the team of mindfulness teachers at the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice that is located in the School of Psychology at Bangor. I’m now an honorary lecturer there and for many years taught a module on the master’s programme as well as co-leading mindfulness teacher-training retreats.
In 2006 I founded a mindfulness training company, Mindfulness Works Ltd, and with my associates I have since led many public courses in London and elsewhere based on what I learned at Bangor and developed with John.
But my interest in the world of work and business never went away and I’ve found myself increasingly drawn into that field. Part of this is because of what I keep finding on my public courses.
The sense I get from the public MBSR courses I lead is that, for a very large proportion of participants, the greatest source of stress and distress in their lives comes from what they encounter each day at work. I am convinced that, if we can train more mindful leaders, if we can help to create more mindful workplaces, we can have a huge impact on the overall levels of well-being in our society.
I wrote a book on this theme – The Mindful Workplace – and have come increasingly to teach in workplace and leadership contexts, as well as continuing with the public courses. More recently I have become an adjunct professor at IE Business School in Madrid, where I am honoured to be part of an extraordinary faculty teaching an executive master’s in positive leadership and strategy (EXMPLS), which has mindfulness training at its heart. We draw in a high-powered student body from around the world and I’m deeply moved each time I meet the students to see the changes that their deepening engagement with mindfulness practice brings about.
It is because mindfulness works that it’s being found in so many different contexts these days. The variety of approaches and applications is extraordinary. NICE, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence that advises the UK National Health Service on appropriate clinical provision, recommends it as a front-line treatment in instances of relapsing depression. The United States Marine Corps, on the other hand, has found that it helps soldiers remain mentally flexible, cognitively clear and emotionally appropriate under pressure. Some people use mindfulness to help them manage chronic pain and there is good research evidence for its efficacy there. Others come to it because they want to be more focused and effective at work, or because they want to be more resilient, or more empathic.
In whatever way or for whatever reason you come to mindfulness training, there is now a large body of evidence that shows that with just eight weeks of training really substantial changes are possible.
There is a considerable and growing body of research evidence around the effectiveness of mindfulness training these days. Peer-reviewed research papers are currently emerging at a rate of around 40 per month. I won’t try to sum up all of that evidence here, but the UK’s Mental Health Foundation commissioned a report which examined the health benefits of mindfulness training. Their 2010 Mindfulness Report noted that evidence coming from mindfulness and well-being research shows that mindfulness confers significant benefits on health, well-being and quality of life in general:
According to the report, people who are more mindful are less likely to experience psychological distress, including depression and anxiety. They are less neurotic, more extroverted and report greater well-being and life satisfaction.
They have greater awareness, understanding and acceptance of their emotions, and recover from bad moods more quickly.
They have less frequent negative thoughts and are more able to let them go when they arise.
They have higher, more stable self-esteem that is less dependent on external factors.
They enjoy more satisfying relationships, are better at communicating and are less troubled by relationship conflict, as well as less likely to think negatively of their partners as a result of conflict.
Mindfulness is correlated with emotional intelligence, which itself has been associated with good social skills, ability to cooperate and ability to see another person’s perspective.
People who are mindful are also less likely to react defensively or aggressively when they feel threatened. Mindfulness seems to increase self-awareness, and is associated with greater vitality.
Being more mindful is linked with higher success in reaching academic and personal goals.
Practising meditation has repeatedly been shown to improve people’s attention, as well as improve job performance, productivity and satisfaction, and to enable better relationships with colleagues, resulting in a reduction of work-related stress.
People who are mindful feel more in control of their behaviour and are more able to override or change internal thoughts and feelings and resist acting on impulse.
Meditation practices more generally have been shown to increase blood flow, reduce blood pressure and protect people at risk of developing hypertension; they have also been shown to reduce the risk of developing and dying from cardiovascular disease, and to reduce the severity of cardiovascular disease when it does arise.
People who meditate have fewer hospital admissions for heart disease, cancer and infectious diseases, and visit their doctor half as often as people who don’t meditate.
Mindfulness can reduce addictive behaviour, and meditation practices generally have been found to help reduce use of illegal drugs, prescribed medication, alcohol and caffeine.
Neuroscience Research
We also know that mindfulness training has a significant impact on how the brain is shaped, wired and activated. After just eight weeks of mindfulness training we know from separate studies that one might expect:
increased brain grey-matter concentration in areas connected with sustained attention, emotional regulation and perspective taking;
increased cortical thickness;
decreased amygdala activation: the amygdala is a key component in the brain’s threat-detection system – when it is less active you feel more at ease with yourself and others;
increased activity in the left prefrontal cortex and less activity in the right prefrontal cortex: the ratio of left to right prefrontal activation is a good predictor of overall happiness and well-being – if the left prefrontal is more active then you’re likely to experience higher levels of well-being;
increased working-memory capacity: working memory is the system that actively holds information