Finding peace in a stressed-out, digitally dependent culture may just be a
matter of thinking differently
The raisins sitting in my sweaty palm are getting stickier by the minute.
They don't look particularly appealing, but when instructed by my teacher, I
take one in my fingers and examine it. I notice that the raisin's skin glistens.
Looking closer, I see a small indentation where it once hung from the vine.
Eventually, I place the raisin in my mouth and roll the wrinkly little shape
over and over with my tongue, feeling its texture. After a while, I push it up
against my teeth and slice it open. Then, finally, I chew--very slowly.
I'm eating a raisin. But for the first time in my life, I'm doing it
differently. I'm doing it mindfully. This whole experience might seem silly, but
we're in the midst of a popular obsession with mindfulness as the secret to
health and happiness--and a growing body of evidence suggests it has clear
benefits. The class I'm taking is part of a curriculum called Mindfulness Based
Stress Reduction (MBSR) developed in 1979 by Jon Kabat-Zinn, an MIT-educated
scientist. There are nearly 1,000 certified MBSR instructors teaching
mindfulness techniques (including meditation), and they are in nearly every
state and more than 30 countries. The raisin exercise reminds us how hard it has
become to think about just one thing at a time. Technology has made it easier
than ever to fracture attention into smaller and smaller bits. We answer a
colleague's questions from the stands at a child's soccer game; we pay the bills
while watching TV; we order groceries while stuck in traffic. In a time when no
one seems to have enough time, our devices allow us to be many places at
once--but at the cost of being unable to fully inhabit the place where we
actually want to be.
Mindfulness says we can do better. At one level, the techniques associated
with the philosophy are intended to help practitioners quiet a busy mind,
becoming more aware of the present moment and less caught up in what happened
earlier or what's to come. Many cognitive therapists commend it to patients as a
way to help cope with anxiety and depression. More broadly, it's seen as a means
to deal with stress.
But to view mindfulness simply as the latest self-help fad underplays its
potency and misses the point of why it is gaining acceptance with those who
might otherwise dismiss mental training techniques closely tied to
meditation--Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, FORTUNE 500 titans, Pentagon chiefs
and more. If distraction is the pre-eminent condition of our age, then
mindfulness, in the eyes of its enthusiasts, is the most logical response. Its
strength lies in its universality. Though meditation is considered an essential
means to achieving mindfulness, the ultimate goal is simply to give your
attention fully to what you're doing. One can work mindfully, parent mindfully
and learn mindfully. One can exercise and even eat mindfully. The banking giant
Chase now advises customers on how to spend mindfully.
There are no signs that the forces splitting our attention into ever smaller
slices will abate. To the contrary, they're getting stronger. (Now arriving:
smart watches and eyeglasses that will constantly beam notifications onto the
periphery of our vision.) Already, many devotees see mindfulness as an
indispensable tool for coping--both emotionally and practically--with the daily
onslaught. The ability to focus for a few minutes on a single raisin isn't silly
if the skills it requires are the keys to surviving and succeeding in the 21st
century.
REWIRING YOUR BRAIN
With Tiny Bits of raisin still stuck in my teeth, I look around at the 15
other people in my MBSR class, which will meet every Monday evening for eight
weeks. My classmates cite a wide variety of reasons they have plunked down $350
to learn about meditation and mindfulness. One 20-something blond woman said
back-to-back daily work meetings meant she couldn't find time to pause and
reset; she had been prescribed the anti-anxiety drug Klonopin. A mother on
maternity leave said "being present" with her infant seemed more important than
ever, but she was struggling. One man, a social worker, said he needed help
dealing with the stress of working with clients trying to get their lives on
track.
Although I signed up to learn what mindfulness was all about, I had my own
stressors I hoped the course might alleviate. As the working parent of a
toddler, I found life in my household increasingly hectic. And like so many, I
am hyperconnected. I have a personal iPhone and a BlackBerry for work, along
with a desktop computer at the office and a laptop and iPad at home. It's rare
that I let an hour go by without looking at a screen.
Powering down the internal urge to keep in constant touch with the outside
world is not easy. At the start of each two-hour MBSR class, our teacher, a
slight woman named Paulette Graf, hit two small brass cymbals together to
indicate we should begin meditating. During this agonizingly frustrating period,
which lasted up to 40 minutes, I would try to focus on my breath as Paulette
advised, but I felt constantly bombarded by thoughts about my family, random
sounds in the room and even how I would translate each evening's session into
this story.
One evening, we were introduced to mindful walking. In our small meeting
room, we formed a circle and paced together. "Feel your heel make contact with
the floor, then the ball of your foot," said Paulette. "One foot, then the
other." Anxious feelings about planning the week ahead and emails in my inbox
that might be waiting for replies crept into my head even though my phones were
off and tucked away. Mindfulness teachers say this kind of involuntary
distraction is normal and that there's no point in berating ourselves for
mentally veering away from the task at hand. Rather, they say, our ability to
recognize that our attention has been diverted is what's important and at the
heart of what it means to be mindful.
Some of this may sound like a New Age retread of previous prescriptions for
stress. Mindfulness is rooted in Eastern philosophy, specifically Buddhism. But
two factors set it apart and give it a practical veneer that is helping propel
it into the mainstream.
One might be thought of as smart marketing. Kabat-Zinn and other proponents
are careful to avoid any talk of spirituality when espousing mindfulness. Instead, they advocate a commonsense approach: think of
your attention as a muscle. As with any muscle, it makes sense to exercise it
(in this case, with meditation), and like any muscle, it will strengthen from
that exercise.
A related and potentially more powerful factor in winning over skeptics is
what science is learning about our brains' ability to adapt and rewire. This
phenomenon, known as neuroplasticity, suggests there are concrete and provable
benefits to exercising the brain. The science--particularly as it applies to
mindfulness--is far from conclusive. But it's another reason it's difficult to
dismiss mindfulness as fleeting or contrived.
Precisely because of this scientific component, mindfulness is gaining
traction with people who might otherwise find mind-body philosophies a tough
sell, and it is growing into a sizable industry. An NIH report found that
Americans spent some $4 billion on mindfulness-related alternative medicine in
2007, including MBSR. (NIH will release an update of this figure later this
year.) There's a new monthly magazine, Mindful, a stack of best-selling books
and a growing number of smartphone apps devoted to the concept.
For Stuart Silverman, mindfulness has become a way to deal with the 24/7 pace
of his job consulting with financial advisers. Silverman receives hundreds of
emails and phone calls every day. "I'm nuts about being in touch," he says.
Anxiety in the financial industry reached a high mark in the 2008 meltdown, but
even after the crisis began to abate, Silverman found that the high stress level
remained. So in 2011, he took a group of his clients on a mindfulness retreat.
The group left their smartphones behind and spent four days at a resort in the
Catskills, in upstate New York, meditating, participating in group discussions,
sitting in silence, practicing yoga and eating meals quietly and mindfully. "For
just about everybody there, it was a life-changing experience," says
Silverman.
The Catskills program was run by Janice Marturano, a former vice president at
General Mills who began a corporate mindfulness initiative there and left the
company in 2011 to run an organization she started called the Institute for
Mindful Leadership. (About 500 General Mills employees have participated in
mindfulness classes since Marturano introduced the concept to the company's top
managers in 2006, and there is a meditation room in every building on the
company's Minneapolis campus.) Marturano, who ran a well-attended mindfulness
training session at Davos in 2013 and wrote a book called Finding the Space to
Lead: A Practical Guide to Mindful Leadership, published in January, says most
leaders she encounters feel besieged by long work hours and near constant
connectivity. For these people, there seems to be no time to zero in on what's
important or plan ahead.
There's evidence they're correct. Researchers have found that multitasking
leads to lower overall productivity. Students and workers who constantly and
rapidly switch between tasks have less ability to filter out irrelevant
information, and they make more mistakes. And many corporate workers today find
it impossible to take breaks. According to a recent survey, more than half of
employed American adults check work messages on the weekends and 4 in 10 do so
while on vacation. It's hard to unwind when your boss or employees know you're
just a smartphone away. Says Marturano: "The technology has gone beyond what we
are capable of handling."
It might seem paradoxical, then, that Silicon Valley has become a hotbed of
mindfulness classes and conferences. Wisdom 2.0, an annual mindfulness gathering
for tech leaders, started in 2009 with 325 attendees, and organizers expect more
than 2,000 at this year's event, where participants will hear from Kabat-Zinn,
along with executives from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Google, meanwhile,
has an in-house mindfulness program called Search Inside Yourself. The
seven-week course was started by a Google engineer and is offered four times a
year on the company's Mountain View, Calif., campus. Through the course,
thousands of Googlers have learned attention-focusing techniques, including
meditation, meant to help them free up mental space for creativity and big
thinking.
It makes sense in a way. Engineers who write code often talk about "being in
the zone" the same way a successful athlete can be, which mindfulness teachers
say is the epitome of being present and paying attention. (Apple co-founder
Steve Jobs said his meditation practice was directly responsible for his ability
to concentrate and ignore distractions.) Of course, much of that world-class
engineering continues to go into gadgets and software that will only ratchet up
our distraction level.
But lately there's been some progress in tapping technology for solutions
too. There are hundreds of mindfulness and meditation apps available from
iTunes, including one called Headspace, offered by a company of the same name
led by Andy Puddicombe, a former Buddhist monk. Puddicombe, 40, co-founded
Headspace in the U.K. in 2010 and opened a new office in Los Angeles in 2013
after attracting venture capital. The company offers free content through an app
and sells subscriptions to a series of web videos, billed as a "gym membership
for the mind," that are narrated by Puddicombe and explain the tenets of
mindfulness and how to meditate.
"There's nothing bad or harmful about the smartphone if we have the awareness
of how to use it in the right way," says Puddicombe. "It's unplugging by
plugging in."
THE SCIENCE OF DESTRESSING
Jon Kabat-Zinn, the father of MBSR, doesn't look like the kind of person to
be selling meditation and mindfulness to America's fast-paced, stressed-out
masses. When I met him at a mindfulness conference in April, he was dressed in
corduroys, a button-down shirt and a blazer, with wire-rimmed glasses and a
healthy head of thick gray hair. He looked more like the professor he trained to
become than the mindfulness guru he is.
But ultimately, a professor may prove more valuable than a guru in spreading
the word on mindfulness. The son of an immunologist and an artist, Kabat-Zinn,
now 69, was earning a doctorate in molecular biology at MIT in the early 1970s
when he attended a lecture about meditation given by a Zen master. "It was very
moving. I started meditating that day," he says. "And the more I meditated, the
more I felt like there was something else missing that science could say in
terms of, like, how we live as human beings."
By 1979, Kabat-Zinn had earned his Ph.D. and was working at the University of
Massachusetts Medical Center studying muscle development and teaching anatomy
and cell biology to medical students. On a meditation retreat that year, he had
a revelation. What if he could use Buddhism-based meditation to help patients
cope with conditions like chronic pain? Even if he couldn't alleviate their
symptoms, Kabat-Zinn speculated that mindfulness training might help patients
refocus their attention so they could change their response to pain and thereby
reduce their overall suffering.
With three physicians, Kabat-Zinn opened a stress-reduction clinic at UMass
based on meditation and mindfulness. "It was just a little pilot on zero
dollars," he says.
Almost immediately, some of the clinic's patients reported that their pain
levels diminished. For others, the pain remained the same, but the mindfulness
training made them better able to handle the stress of living with illness. They
were able to separate their day-to-day experiences from their identity as pain
patients. "That's what you most hope for," says Kabat-Zinn, "not that you can
cure all diseases, but you could help people live in a way that didn't erode
their quality of life beyond a certain point." Eventually Kabat-Zinn's program
was absorbed into the UMass department of medicine and became the MBSR
curriculum now used by hundreds of teachers across the country.
In the years since, scientists have been able to prove that meditation and
rigorous mindfulness training can lower cortisol levels and blood pressure,
increase immune response and possibly even affect gene expression. Scientific
study is also showing that meditation can have an impact on the structure of the
brain itself. Building on the discovery that brains can change based on
experiences and are not, as previously believed, static masses that are set by
the time a person reaches adulthood, a growing field of neuroscientists are now
studying whether meditation--and the mindfulness that results from it--can
counteract what happens to our minds because of stress, trauma and constant
distraction. The research has fueled the rapid growth of MBSR and other
mindfulness programs inside corporations and public institutions.
"There is a swath of our culture who is not going to listen to someone in
monks' robes, but they are paying attention to scientific evidence," says
Richard J. Davidson, founder and chair of the Center for Investigating Healthy
Minds at the Waisman Center, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Davidson
and a group of co-authors published a paper in the prestigious Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences in 2004 that used electroencephalography to
show that Buddhist monks who had logged at least 10,000 hours of meditation time
had brains with more functional connectivity than novice meditators. The monks
also had more gamma-wave activity, indicating high states of consciousness.
Of course, most people will never meditate at the level of a monk. But
neuroscientists have shown that even far less experienced meditators may have
more capacity for working memory and decreases in mind-wandering.
Many of the studies on mindfulness and meditation have been funded by
individual private donors and have not met the highest scientific standards,
leading the NIH to declare in 2007 that future research had to be "more
rigorous." Perhaps to this end, the NIH has funded some 50 clinical trials in
the past five years examining the effects of mindfulness on health, with about
half pertaining to Kabat-Zinn's MBSR curriculum alone. The NIH trials completed
or now under way include studies on how MBSR affects everything from
social-anxiety disorder to the body's immune response to human papilloma virus
to cancer-related fatigue. Altogether, in 2003, 52 papers were published in
scientific journals on the subject of mindfulness; by 2012, that number had
jumped to 477.
MINDFULNESS GOES MAINSTREAM
Tim Ryan, a democratic Congressman from Ohio, is among those pushing to use
more federal funds for mindfulness research. Stressed and exhausted, Ryan
attended a mindfulness retreat led by Kabat-Zinn in 2008 shortly after the
election. Ryan turned over his two BlackBerrys and ended the experience with a
36-hour period of silence. "My mind got so quiet, and I had the experience of my
mind and my body actually being in the same place at the same time,
synchronized," says Ryan. "I went up to Jon and said, 'Oh, man, we need to study
this--get it into our schools, our health care system.'"
In the years since, the Congressman has become a rock star among mindfulness
evangelists. His book A Mindful Nation was published in 2012, and Mindful,
launched in May 2013, put Ryan on the cover of its second issue after he secured
a $1 million federal grant to teach mindfulness in schools in his home district.
Ryan has hosted meditation sessions and a mindfulness lecture series on Capitol
Hill for House members and their staffs. The effort, says Ryan, is all about
"little candles getting lit under the Capitol dome."
Elizabeth Stanley, an associate professor at Georgetown, is trying to do the
same for those in uniform. Stanley was an Army intelligence officer deployed to
the Balkans in the early 1990s. After she left active duty, Stanley enrolled in
a doctoral program at Harvard and pursued an MBA at MIT--at the same
time--planning a career studying national-security issues.
But as the demands of two graduate programs combined with leftover stress
from her time deployed, Stanley found herself unable to cope. "I realized my
body and nervous system were constantly stuck on high," she says. She underwent
therapy and started practicing yoga and mindful meditation, eventually
completing both of her degree programs as well.
"On a long retreat in 2004, I realized I wanted to pull these two sides of me
together and find a way to share these techniques with men and women in
uniform," Stanley says. She teamed up with Amishi Jha, a neuroscientist at the
University of Miami who studies attention, and together they launched a pilot
study with private funding that investigated whether a mindfulness program could
make Marines more resilient in stressful combat situations. The findings were so
promising, according to Jha, that the Department of Defense awarded them two $1
million grants to investigate further, using an MBSR-based curriculum Stanley
developed called Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training. Stanley has been
involved in two additional mindfulness studies with Marines since, and Jha has
been awarded $3.4 million more in federal grants to study how mindfulness
training affects stress among other populations, including undergraduates facing
exams and accountants slogging through tax season.
Educators are turning to mindfulness with increasing frequency--perhaps a
good thing, considering how digital technology is splitting kids' attention
spans too. (The average American teen sends and receives more than 3,000 text
messages a month.) A Bay Area--based program called Mindful Schools offers
online mindfulness training to teachers, instructing them in how to equip
children to concentrate in classrooms and deal with stress. Launched in 2010,
the group has reached more than 300,000 pupils, and educators in 43 countries
and 48 states have taken its courses online.
"It was always my intention that mindfulness move into the mainstream," says
Kabat-Zinn, whose MBSR bible, Full Catastrophe Living, first published in 1990,
was just reissued. Lately, the professor has also been spreading the gospel
abroad. On a November trip to Beijing, he helped lead a mindfulness retreat for
about 250 Chinese students, monks and scientists. "This is something that people
are now finding compelling in many countries and many cultures, and the reason
is the science," he says.
LISTENING TO LIFE
The MBSR class I took consisted of 21 hours of class time, but there was
homework. One week, we were assigned to eat a snack mindfully and "remember to
inhale/exhale regularly (and with awareness!)," according to a handout. Since we
were New Yorkers, another week's assignment was to count fellow passengers on a
subway train. One student in my class said he had a mindfulness breakthrough
when he stopped listening to music and playing games on his phone while riding
to work. Instead, he observed the people around him, which he said helped him be
more present when he arrived at his office.
After eight weeks, we gathered one Saturday for a final exercise, a five-hour
retreat. We brought our lunches, and after meditating and doing yoga, we ate
together silently in a second-floor room overlooking a park. After the meal,
Paulette led us into the park and told us to walk around for 30 minutes in a
meditation practice known as aimless wandering. No phones and no talking. Just
be present, she said.
As I looked across a vast lawn, I easily spotted my fellow MBSR students.
They looked like zombies weaving and wandering alone through groups of friends
and families lounging on picnic blankets or talking and barbecuing. I saw a
group of 20-something men playing Frisbee, young kids riding bikes and a pair of
women tanning in the sun.
I had lived close to this park for three years and spent hundreds of hours
exploring it, but what struck me as different on the day of the retreat were the
sounds. I noticed the clap, clap of a jogger's sneakers going by on a paved
path. I saw a group playing volleyball on the lawn, and for the first time, I
heard the game. The ball thudded when it hit the grass and whapped when it was
being served. The players grunted when they made contact. Thud, whap, grunt.
Whap, whap, thud. I heard a soft jingling, and I knew just what it was. A dog
with metal ID tags came up behind me and passed by. Jingle, jingle.
After the prescribed half hour, we returned to our meeting room with
Paulette. We had a brief group discussion about how we could continue our
mindfulness training through other classes, and then we folded our chairs and
put them away in a closet. Silently, we eased down a set of stairs and out the
front door. I made it all the way home before I turned on my phones.
In the months since, I haven't meditated much, yet the course has had a
small--but profound--impact on my life. I've started wearing a watch, which has
cut in half the number of times a day I look at my iPhone and risk getting
sucked into checking email or the web. On a tip from one of my MBSR classmates,
when I'm at a restaurant and a dining companion gets up to take a call or use
the bathroom, I now resist the urge to read the news or check Facebook on my
phone. Instead, I usually just sit and watch the people around me. And when I
walk outside, I find myself smelling the air and listening to the soundtrack of
the city. The notes and rhythms were always there, of course. But these days
they seem richer and more important.
Time
