Mindfulness ‘can make all the difference to our working day’

Tuning in and finding stillness can help us cope with a working day filled with non-stop deadlines, meetings, and instant messages

Mindfulness and meditation practices can be quickly and discreetly incorporated into our working lives, say experts. File picture: iStock

THE pace of the modern workplace is often frenetically fast. Non-stop deadlines, meetings, emails, and instant messages can all too quickly become overwhelming, impacting our productivity, affecting our relationships, and even leading to burnout. Could mindfulness help?

Norma O’Kelly certainly believes so. The Dublin-based systemic coach worked in marketing for 22 years and “experienced corporate burnout.”

She discovered mindfulness and meditation following the loss of her mother in 2019 and a series of surgeries she herself had to undergo for endometriosis.

“That was a difficult chapter,” she says. “But I learned a range of practical mindfulness tools that helped me rebuild my life. Eventually, I left the corporate world and set up my own practice to teach other professionals those tools to help them navigate life’s challenges with more ease and resilience.”

Jacob Eisenberg, an associate professor of organisational psychology at University College Dublin who has been practising mindfulness for more than a decade, explains that the practice originated “about 2,500 years ago and has different definitions depending on tradition and context”.

Jacob Eisenberg: Mindfulness is all about becoming aware of our mind’s activity.

The definition that resonates with him is “having the most clear and direct connection with reality as it’s happening, while also being aware of anything that distorts that connection with reality”.

That reality consists of what is happening externally around us at any given moment, as well as the thoughts, emotions, and sensations we feel internally. But, says Eisenberg, we can easily be distracted. “Our mind has the wonderful ability to time travel, back to memories and regrets and forward to hopes, worries, and tasks to be done. We need to find a way to anchor it in the present, and mindfulness practice is all about becoming more aware of our mind’s activity.”

Mindful workplace

Carmel Farnan is the founder and course director of the Irish Mindfulness Academy and the British Mindfulness Academy. She believes that a mindful workplace is a better workplace and cites a 2010 Harvard University study that proves it.

“It showed that most people are mentally absent for 47% of their working day due to their mind wandering,” she says. “It also showed that people who spend more time in the present moment were happier. So, we’re missing almost 50% of our working lives, and we don’t even feel better for it.”

Other research has uncovered other potential workplace benefits to mindfulness. A 2016 study found associations between mindfulness and more rational decision-making. An earlier study reported a direct relation between mindfulness and enhanced problem-solving and creativity. While a 2017 study found that practising meditation could improve emotional regulation, which could enable people to better manage stress and improve focus at work.

Pádraic Dunne: Meditation can lead to real physiological changes in the body.

Mindfulness may even affect us physically. Dr Pádraic Dunne, a research scientist at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in his teens that caused chronic pain.

“Meditation was one of the things that helped manage it, and it’s since become a non-negotiable for me, like sleep,” he says. “And I don’t just have personal experience to vouch for its effectiveness. There’s scientific data to show that meditation can affect anti-inflammatory processes and lead to real physiological changes in the body.”

Dunne and his colleagues carried out their own study in 2019, which found that meditation helped reduce anxiety and burnout in emergency medicine doctors.

Considering what mindfulness has to offer, Dunne is not surprised it is becoming an increasingly popular practice in the workplace.

“I’ve heard that Ray Dalio, a top New York hedge fund manager, starts his meetings with 60 seconds of mindfulness,” he says. “He believes that becoming fully present makes him more engaged with what’s happening around him and more likely to make better decisions.”

One of the ways it does this, says Farnan, is by training us to pause. When we pause, we no longer “react from the fight-or-flight part of the brain that is induced by stress, and we are able to consider our options more clearly”.

That pause “creates a buffer between unwelcome emotional stimuli such as your manager scolding you or an encounter with a rude customer and your reaction”, says Eisenberg. “It gives you the opportunity to choose how you respond rather than reacting on impulse.”

Eisenberg believes that pausing can also enable you “to see your own habits more clearly and become aware of which ones are ineffective”.

When he took time to pause, he realised the multi-tasking he had always prided himself on was not helpful to this work. “Jumping from one thing to another came with a heavy cognitive toll, so slowly and steadily, I tried to stop doing it,” he says.

Focus on the body

So how can we incorporate mindfulness into our daily lives?

Eisenberg recommends starting by focusing on the body. “Unlike our minds, our bodies are always in the present moment,” he says. “Connect with some physical aspect. The most traditional way of doing this is by following the breath.”

Dunne adds that “relaxing the body helps create the conditions for the mind to meditate. We don’t have to be in an ashram in India to do it. We can do it discreetly at work". 

So sit down with a pen and paper and find places in your work schedule to insert breaks of as little as 60 seconds to devote to mindfulness. You’re more likely to do it if you write it down.

During those 60 seconds, you can practise what Farnan calls “two feet, one breath”. This involves placing both feet on the ground and taking one slow conscious breath in and another out. “This brings you out of your head and into your body,” she says.

Or you can practise the “4-6 vagus nerve breath”, which involves inhaling through the nose for a count of four and exhaling slowly through the mouth for a count of six.

“The longer exhale activates the vagus nerve, easing the nervous system out of fight or flight and into calm,” says O’Kelly. “It’s a breath everyone can take at their desks, between meetings, or even before or after difficult conversations.”

The body scan is another option. Dunne describes this as systematically bringing awareness to and noticing the sensations in different parts of the body, “from the tips of the toes to the top of the head”.

“If the focus on the breath doesn’t suit you, you may prefer a mantra,” he says. “You could chant something like ‘I am here now’ or direct your attention to a picture or candle flame, whatever helps you focus.”

He acknowledges that maintaining focus isn’t always easy, even for 60 seconds. “People often say that meditation and mindfulness aren’t for them because they can’t stop thinking,” he says. 

But it’s not about stopping thinking. It’s about accepting the thoughts that cross your mind. Whether it’s a worry, an itchy foot, or hunger, you acknowledge those thoughts and let them go. 

"And remember, there is no such thing as good or bad meditation or mindfulness practice. It’s all just practice.

“So take those little micro moments during the day, whether it’s at your desk or in the loo. Over time, it will help clear your thinking process.”

Mindfulness and meditation may once have been considered ‘woo-woo’ in the workplace, but says O’Kelly, this is increasingly not the case.

“More and more people are realising that the times we think we can’t stop because we are so stressed are the times we will benefit most from pausing to reconnect to the present,” she says. “A mindfulness exercise can be quickly and discreetly done, and it can make all the difference to our working day.”