Madam Lichtenstein's Cosmic World

Past Life Regression on November 30, 2018

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Hey Boss, You Don’t Want Your Employees to Meditate

An interesting opinion piece from the New York Times:

Mindfulness Meditation, a Buddhism-inspired practice in which you focus your mind entirely on the current moment, has been widely embraced for its instrumental benefits — especially in the business world. Companies like Apple, Google and Nike provide meditation rooms that encourage brief sessions during the workday. Chief executives publicly extol its benefits. And no wonder: The practical payoff of mindfulness is backed by dozens of studies linking it to job satisfaction, rational thinking and emotional resilience.

But on the face of it, mindfulness might seem counterproductive in a workplace setting. A central technique of mindfulness meditation, after all, is to accept things as they are. Yet companies want their employees to be motivated. And the very notion of motivation — striving to obtain a more desirable future — implies some degree of discontentment with the present, which seems at odds with a psychological exercise that instills equanimity and a sense of calm.

To test this hunch, we recently conducted five studies, involving hundreds of people, to see whether there was a tension between mindfulness and motivation. As we report in a forthcoming article in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, we found strong evidence that meditation is demotivating.

Some of the participants in our studies were trained in a few of the most common mindfulness meditation techniques. They were instructed by a professional meditation coach to focus on their breathing or mentally scan their bodies for physical sensations, being gently reminded throughout that there was no right or wrong way to do the exercise.

Other participants were led through a different exercise. Some were encouraged to let their thoughts wander; some were instructed to read the news or write about recent activities they had done.

Then we gave everyone a task to do. The tasks were similar to everyday workplace jobs: editing business memos, entering text into a computer and so on. Before embarking on the tasks, the participants were asked about their motivation: How much effort and time would they put into the assignment? Did they feel like doing it?

Among those who had meditated, motivation levels were lower on average. Those people didn’t feel as much like working on the assignments, nor did they want to spend as much time or effort to complete them. Meditation was correlated with reduced thoughts about the future and greater feelings of calm and serenity — states seemingly not conducive to wanting to tackle a work project.

Then we tracked everyone’s actual performance on the tasks. Here we found that on average, having meditated neither benefited nor detracted from a participant’s quality of work. This was bad news for proponents of meditation in the workplace: After all, previous studies have found that meditation increases mental focus, suggesting that those in our studies who performed the mindfulness exercise should have performed better on the tasks. Their lower levels of motivation, however, seemed to cancel out that benefit.

Mindfulness is perhaps akin to a mental nap. Napping, too, is associated with feeling calm, refreshed and less harried. Then again, who wakes up from a nap eager to organize some files?

By some accounts, motivation is just as important as intelligence and personality when it comes to an individual’s success, and has the advantage of being largely under an individual’s control. Companies benefit, too, when workers are motivated: A 2013 worldwide survey by Gallup found that companies with more engaged employees outperform other companies in growth and productivity.

Management theorists and organizational leaders often think about motivation in terms of financial incentives. So as part of our research, we studied whether offering a financial bonus for outstanding performance would overcome the demotivating effect of mindfulness: It did not. While the promise of material rewards will always be a useful tool for motivating employees, it is no substitute for internal motivation.

Mindfulness might be unhelpful for dealing with difficult assignments at work, but it may be exactly what is called for in other contexts. There is no denying that mindfulness can be beneficial, bringing about calm and acceptance. Once you’ve reached a peak level of acceptance, however, you’re not going to be motivated to work harder.

Kathleen D. Vohs is a professor of marketing at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Andrew C. Hafenbrack is an assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Católica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics.

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5 Crystals Every Traveler Should Have In Their Pocket

 Protection against lost luggage? Good luck making it through airport security with your sanity intact? There's a crystal for that.

Departures magazine takes a look athow crystals can help smooth our most difficult travel experiences:

We all have our tiny travel rituals. Be it rolling our clothing vs. folding when packing, always putting our passport in a certain pocket of our backpack, or indulging in a Cinnabon each time we’re at the airport (we all do that, right?), these specific movements help us feel calmer, and more collected through our journey. And while all of these practices are fine, there may be an easier, and tinier, way to both center ourselves and feel more at home no matter where in the world our travels take us.

“Remember when you were little, you’d go to the park, you’d go to a lake, you’d go to a beach, and you'd pick up pebbles and stones and shells. They were your little treasures. I think a lot of people resonate with the crystals for travel because they remember when they were little kids and went on trips, they would do the same thing,” Heather Askinosie, co-founder of the crystal healing business Energy Muse, told DEPARTURES.

In her new book, Crystal Muse, Everyday Rituals to Tune into the Real You, Askinosie, along with her business partner, co-author and best friend Timmi Jandro, explains how anyone can use the power of these little rocks to feel more centered in both their every day lives and along their travels. Askinosie and Jandro were also kind enough to break down a few key crystals and rituals people should be taking part in when they jet off to a new destination.

Shungite: For Going Through Security

“That's really good for when you have to go through the scanner,” Askinosie said of carrying shungite, a dark, dense mineral rock that comes from the village of Shunga in Karelia, Russia. “The shungite is a kind of energy protection. I have that on my body because I want to go through that machine and be able to have some kind of shield.”

Moonstone: For Protecting Your Luggage

“Moonstone has a reputation,” Askinosie explained of the colorful, popular rock that has long been believed to carry healing properties. “You want to either wear moonstone on your body or have a piece of moonstone in your luggage because there is a rumor that if you have a piece of moonstone in your luggage, your luggage won't get lost.” And, according to Askinosie, it’s worked for her every single time she’s hopped on a plane.

Blue Lace Agate: For Turbulence

“For up in the sky turbulence, I don't go very far without my blue lace agate, which is an amethyst stone,” Askinosie said of the stunning lavender stone that allows people to think more clearly in stressful situations. “So that when the turbulence is happening I have something to hold on to and to rub. I could look down on it and it's soothing and know it's going to be okay.”

Salt: To Cleanse a Hotel Room

“We always bring a little bag of salt with us so that when we get to the hotel room we put a little pinch in the four corners of the bed frame,” the partners said. And typically, travelers will want to go for a Himalayan salt rock, which also comes with its own purifying properties. “It creates an energetic protective shield around your bed that you could sleep better.”

Selenite: To Ward Off Jet Lag

“I also always bring selenite because it's something you could lay on your chest and it helps with jet lag,”  Askinosie explained of the milky white crystal known for its ability to remove negative energy. “These are minor tweaks that make the room feels more grounded. When you're traveling, you want to do little things that help you feel at home so that you could really tap into the environment that you're now in.”

Looking to learn more? You can, of course, pick up a copy of their new book, but if you happen to be in Southern California, Askinosie and Jandro also welcome any and all visitors to check out their showroom. There, you can take a tour and even build your own jewelry pieces so you can bring a little magic with you wherever you go.

I Was A Skeptic of Mindfulness Until ....

 

The science staff at fivethirtyeight is trying to lead a more scientific life in 2018. Throughout the week, they’ve been questioning whether some of our habits and hobbies are based on junk science or real evidence. Here’s an entry on the merits of mindfulness.

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Sometime around, oh, my 60th panic attack last year,¹ I figured it was time to see a therapist. On top of weekly cognitive-behavioral therapy, she mentioned that I should really try this mindfulness thing people keep talking about. It sounded simple — you sit, you concentrate on your breathing, and you try to find some solace in the modern world. My therapist told me that meditation could make me feel better and that it had been shown to change the physiology of the brain.

Hmmmm, I thought.

Skepticism is a FiveThirtyEight staffer’s currency. The only mantras we chant around the office are: Wait for the evidence; wonder if the evidence has something wrong with it; trust the good evidence only until better evidence comes along.² I was especially distrustful because mindfulness and meditation have been having a moment — meditation apps occupy some of the top spots on the App Store’s rankings of most popular health and fitness apps; Anderson Cooper has profiled the merits of mindfulness on “60 Minutes”; mindfulness is being used in schools as a way to help manage classrooms. Given the hype and this publication’s natural aversion to health trends, I figured I was safe disregarding my therapist’s big claims.

One can overcommit to skepticism, just as one can overcommit to certainty.

But as FiveThirtyEight’s science team assembled the junk science we wanted to shed in 2018, I started to wonder whether mindfulness really was bunk. So I dove into the scientific literature and discovered I was wrong: There is some limited evidence to suggest that meditation might help with some ailments and may produce measurable changes in the brain. It’s no miracle cure, and there’s still a lot of science left to do, especially about the kind of casual meditation people may fit into a busy day. But in my rush to doubt my therapist’s advice, I forgot that skepticism can sometimes be as flawed as the science it seeks to temper.

Western researchers have been thinking empirically about the efficacy of meditation only for a few decades, and they largely study it in two ways: how subjects say meditation makes them feel and how it might shape the brain. Importantly, meditation can be any of a number of things — a focus on breath, a silent chanting of a mantra, a focus on feelings of love and kindness — and it’s still unclear whether some types of meditation are more effective than others.

That creates a problem for the science, since it’s difficult to draw broad conclusions if different trials all test for the effects of “mindfulness” but don’t treat “mindfulness” as the same thing. “It’s this loose enough definition that it allows for anyone to say what they’re doing is mindfulness,” said Nicholas Van Dam, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne and one of the authors of a new paper about the limitations of mindfulness science. What’s more, the mindfulness regimens that researchers study are likely very different from what you’d casually do at home. Apps like Headspace, which offers as little as three minutes a day of directed meditation, are a far cry from the eight-week, 20-plus-hour mindfulness training that is used in the best studies.

With all those caveats on the record, let’s look at what we do know.

In 2014, a team of researchers led by Madhav Goyal, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, put together a meta-analysis of 47 trials featuring 3,515 participants and examined whether meditation consistently helped various ailments. The meta-analysis, which was published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, mostly came up empty — there wasn’t sufficient evidence in the scientific literature to say for sure that meditation had an effect on, say, sleep problems, substance abuse or inattentiveness.

Still, a few benefits did emerge. Subjects in several studies reported being less anxious, feeling less depressed and suffering through less physical pain than before they began a mindfulness-based stress reduction program, compared with participants who received no structured therapy. The effect wasn’t huge, but it was there.

For the anxious, depressed or pained among us — so, all of us? — that seems like promising news. But it’s important to note that there was not evidence that mindfulness was superior to other treatments, such as cognitive-behavioral group therapy or progressive muscle relaxation.

Meditation’s effect on the brain is similarly promising but preliminary. Studies show a consistent trend that meditation can alter brain structure. A 2016 meta-analysis of 30 studies in the journal Brain and Cognition showed that mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques stimulated development in areas of the brain related to regulating attention and keeping perspective on a situation. It also found changes in the participants’ amygdalae indicative of an improved ability to regulate emotions. In 2014, a different meta-analysis published in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews also found structural changes in participants’ brains after they meditated.

Still, scientists urge caution when interpreting the results. The 2014 meta-analysis was careful to note that “any firm claims about whether meditation truly causes differences in brain structure are still premature.” Mindfulness research is also easily misrepresented. In 2005, Sara Lazar, a professor at Harvard and researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital, and others published a study that found differences in the brains of people who practice mindfulness, compared with those who don’t. But that’s all it showed — not that mindfulness caused differences in brain chemistry. Since then, Lazar said, the science has reached the point where we can show that meditation has a direct effect. But her experience is a reminder that mindfulness science can fall victim to the media hype cycle.

So where does all this leave a skeptic like me? I’ve tried mindfulness, and I think it has plenty to teach me about how to fight life’s undertow and come up for air. Still, I’m unlikely to fold mindfulness into my own routine. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has made my panic attacks almost nonexistent, and the science doesn’t suggest that mindfulness as a dedicated practice is necessarily better than talk therapy anyway. Plus, it’s not clear that the brief, app-led mindfulness I’d do at home would replicate the longer, more integrated mindfulness that most studies have tested.

But after looking at the research, I’ve come to realize that my dismissal of mindfulness was premature — and likely informed by my own biases against any number of things: science fads, non-Western medicine, things that could actually make me stop having panic attacks, etc.

And so I’m also taking away another lesson: that one can overcommit to skepticism, just as one can overcommit to certainty. In my research for this article, I came across an interview with Catherine Kerr, a neuroscience researcher who died in 2016: “The mistake is investing 100-percent certainty in a result and not holding a probabilistic view of scientific truth or risk and benefit. When people are making decisions for their own well-being, they need to hold that uncertainty in mind.” The same goes for investing 0-percent certainty in something. When I took a breath and stepped outside my normal thought process, I gained a different perspective. Mindfulness really can have its merits.

Chadwick Matlin is a senior editor at FiveThirtyEight.

Stay Present with Mindful Meditation

 

This from Live Health Online.

Research shows that people who habitually practice mindfulness reap numerous health benefits. But what exactly is mindfulness, and why should it be a part of your daily routine?

Mindfulness is the term used to describe the ability to be completely present in the moment, aware of your surroundings, and fully engaged in an activity. Those who habitually practice mindfulness have experienced:

• Decreased stress
• Better responses to stressful situations and feelings
• Better overall emotion regulation tactics
• Lowered heart rate and blood pressure
• Increased immune function
• Improved attention, focus, and awareness
• Lowered depression and anxiety symptoms

While we all have moments of mindfulness each day, working to transform these moments into habits can improve our overall well-being. Here are some tips to start you on your journey to a more mindful life: 

• Shift out of autopilot. It can be easy to slip into routine when working through tasks. Instead, try engaging one task at a time. Whether eating an apple or washing dishes, focusing on one task at a time keeps you mindful and engaged.
• Focus on your body. Take a moment to notice things you usually wouldn’t. Engage your five senses. Think about your breathing. Look inward, instead of outward.
• Let judgement go. No one is perfect! When difficult thoughts and emotions come up, acknowledge them, then release them.
• Wander, then refocus. As you reflect inward, your mind will inevitably wander. When this happens, accept it. Then, gently remind yourself to come back to your focus on the present and on your breath.

Although it can be difficult to engage in the present moment with life’s constant distractions, taking time out of each day to focus on yourself, your breath, and the current moment gets easier with practice. By challenging yourself to transform mindful moments into mindful habits, you can set yourself on track for a healthier life.

Comments and opinions are from Dr. Lindsay Henderson, Psy. D., alone. She is a licensed-psychologist who treats patients using LiveHealth Online Psychology.