Mindfulness: helping employees to deal with stress

Occupational health teams should be encouraged to get behind the concept of mindfulness, an alternative approach to helping staff cope with pressure experienced in the workplace, says Suzy Bashford.

The UK’s first Mindfulness at Work conference, organised by Mindfulnet, took place in February this year. The message from the event was that mindfulness, a meditation-based approach to stress management, can provide an antidote to the relentless pressure and information overload that exists in many UK businesses. It can also help employees thrive under stress and relate better to colleagues or clients.

The growing body of evidence in this area (there are approximately 30 to 40 peer-review papers published each month) is compelling and explains the increasing interest in mindfulness business training.

Organisations including Transport for London (see case study) eBay, Google, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Prudential, the Home Office, the NHS and London Business School have all launched mindfulness programmes.

However, while the conference attracted globally respected speakers such as Mark Williams, professor of clinical psychology at Oxford University, corporate occupational health practitioners were noticeable by their absence. Instead, the push to introduce mindfulness to the corporate environment is typically being led by individuals in senior management, who have personal experience of the benefits.

Coping mechanism

Kenneth Egelund Schmidt, vice-president and chief information officer of Carlsberg’s IT division, has just offered mindfulness training to all of the 400 employees he manages through The Potential Project. Having practised mindfulness for two years, he finds that it helps him deal with the continuous pressure that he experiences.

“I realised that the turmoil, the noise and the information flow would never stop,” says Schmidt. “It’s just a fact of life. So I needed the personal capability to cope with it on an ongoing basis. Mindfulness is a practical way to cope with all the noise in your head and the noise around you. It’s a way of letting go of it and not letting it control you. By offering all my colleagues access to mindfulness skills, I’m actually getting each employee to take responsibility for coping with reality themselves, rather than shouldering the entire burden myself.”

One of Schmidt’s biggest challenges was getting past misconceptions that mindfulness is synonymous with religion, hippies and sitting in the lotus position and chanting. He explains how he overcame this: “I called a mandatory meeting in work time.

“I said: ‘You need to have this information [the scientific argument and research around mindfulness] and afterwards you can choose whether to take a course. It’s your choice. If you’re not motivated, it won’t work’.” Nearly all 400 employees signed up immediately, and feedback so far has been positive.

Scientific studies

The field of neuroscience has produced some of the most convincing research to draw on when “selling” mindfulness to a business audience. This research uses brain scans to compare what happens when someone is stressed with when they are taking each moment at a time, ie being mindful.

When people are stressed, the part of the brain responsible for the “fight or flight” response – the amygdala – goes into a primitive survival mode.

In this high-alert state, instead of being able to cope with more activity, the brain actually starts shutting down. It develops tunnel vision, unable to think around a problem, only able to fixate on it agitatedly. Productivity, creativity, innovation, emotional intelligence when dealing with others and flexibility of thinking all plummet (Baldwin M et al, 2010; Arnsten, 2009).

Several studies confirm that mindfulness can act as an effective antidote to stress, calming the body down into a more productive state, with one even showing a reduction in the size of grey matter in the amygdala (Hölzel et al, 2010).

Another study shows that mindfulness meditation can lower the level of the stress hormone cortisol (Tang et al, 2008).

Positive results

The good news for those interested in corporate mindfulness is that there is growing evidence that participants do not need to practise for long to reap the benefits.

Studies have shown that as little as 10 minutes’ meditation, five days a week for four weeks can reduce signs of burnout and enhance wellbeing (MacKenzie et al, 2006; Hölzel et al, 2010).

In a related study, by some of the same researchers, novice meditators after the same course showed positive changes in the parts of the brain associated with learning, memory processes, emotion regulation, self-awareness and perspective taking (Hölzel et al, 2011).

Mindfulness appears to help individuals manage their emotions more effectively so that negative mind states pass quicker and have less of an impact. It is important to note that mindfulness does not eradicate moods, rather, it gives people tools to deal with them better; a key component of mindfulness is the process of actually experiencing emotions in their entirety.

This theory is backed by research among primary care physicians, a group at high risk of burnout, who showed sustained improvements in wellbeing following a mindfulness programme (Krasner et al, 2009). After training, these physicians were also shown to be more empathetic with, and caring of, their patients.

Indeed, increased levels of self-compassion and compassion towards others are outcomes that many research studies have picked up on. These may not initially sound like traits useful to the cut-throat business environment; however, there is growing pressure on corporations to act in a socially responsible way, with this proving a source of competitive advantage for some.

Development process

While there is much research, certain criticisms have been levelled at the type of ­research and the small number of participants involved.

While it is useful to look at what happens when people meditate and extrapolate what might happen if you took meditation into the workplace, there is a great shortage of corporate data.

As mindfulness increasingly moves from the margins to the mainstream, this situation looks likely to change.

Juliet Adams, conference organiser and founder of Mindfulnet, predicts that the next conference, which is planned for 2013, will feature many more concrete case studies.

She says: “Although a growing number of organisations are using mindfulness to increase resilience and productivity, there are still relatively few documented examples. I plan to draw together as many examples of workplace interventions as possible and facilitate opportunities to share knowledge and develop best practice.”

If mindfulness does continue to rapidly gain credibility as a powerful way to enhance workplace wellbeing, then OH professionals need to lead this charge from the front, rather than lagging behind, as is the case at the moment.

References

Arnsten AFT (2009). “Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function”. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10, pp.410-422.

Baldwin M, Way J, Creswell D (2010). “Dispositional mindfulness and depressive symptomatology: correlations with limbic and self-referential neural activity during rest”. American Psychological Association, vol.10, no.1, pp.12-24.

Hölzel BK, Carmody J, Karleyton C, Evans KC et al (2010). “Stress reduction correlates with structural changes in the amygdala”. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 5, no.1.

Hölzel BK, Carmody J, Vangel M, Congleton C, Yerramsetti SM, Gard T, Lazar SW (2011). “Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density”. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging vol.191, issue 1, pp.36-43, 30 January 2011.

Krasner MS, Epstein RM, Beckman H, Suchman AL, Chapman B, Mooney CJ, Quill TE (2009). “Association of an educational program in mindful communication with burnout, empathy, and attitudes among primary care physicians. MD Clinician’s Corner JAMA. 2009; 302(12): pp.1,284-1,293. doi: 10.1001/jama.2009.1384.

MacKenzie CS, Poulin PA, Seidman-Carlson R (2006). “A brief mindfulness-based stress reduction intervention for nurses and nurse aides”. Applied Nursing Research 19 pp.105-109.

Tang YY, Posner MI (2008). “The neuroscience of mindfulness”. The Neuroleadership Journal 1: pp33-37.

Recommended reading

Woods W. Meditating at Work: A New Approach to Managing Overload. This book references some good US corporate examples.

Chapman M (2011). “Mindfulness in the workplace: what is all the fuss about?”

Counselling at Work magazine, Autumn 2011.

Prof Williams M, co-authored with Penman D (2011). Mindfulness: A practical guide to finding peace in a frantic world. Piatkus.

The Mental Health Foundation 2010 report on mindfulness.

XpertHR offers a line manager briefing that provides guidance on how to prevent stress and help employees cope with stress and a good practice guide on stress management.