Fight or flight

When we lived as hunter-gatherers in small tribes life was hard and much shorter than the average time we can hope to live for now. Tribes worked together to collect food, protect their young and defend their territory. From time to time a member of the tribe might face a life-threatening situation—like being chased by a sabre-toothed tiger. In order to meet the challenges of such an event their fight-or-flight mechanism would kick in preparing their body to stand and fight, or to run for their lives. We have just the same mechanism today to help us deal with stress but the thing is that most of us are very unlikely to meet a sabre-toothed tiger and much more likely to get frustrated by slow-moving lines at the supermarket checkout, long traffic jams, irritating bosses and moody teenagers. Our difficulty is that our body does the exact same things to help us deal with all this as it did for our ancestors facing that sabre-toothed tiger.

How to escape that tiger

Say our ancestor made the wise decision to run from the tiger what does the body do to help him/her? They would need to move very fast and work hard to outrun the tiger, so the main purpose of the stress response in this instance is to get energy to the muscles in the quickest and most effective way possible, so fat cells and the liver release their stored glucose. The heart rate, blood pressure and breathing rate all increase in order to transport glucose and oxygen to the critical muscles. The flip side of this is that when the body is mobilizing to face immediate danger it puts a halt on long-term projects, which would divert energy from the priority of the moment—to survive. Digestion is slow process and there is no time to benefit from it, so during times of stress it is shut down. Growth, reproduction, tissue repair and the immune function are all put on hold. All these activities are extremely important for our ancestor’s long-term continuation but will not help them if they want to run away from that tiger. In addition the experience of pain is blunted enabling them to continue to run, or fight, even if they are injured. Various shifts occur in cognitive and sensory skills improving memory and sharpening the senses so that they can draw on memories of similar emergencies and be totally alert to what is going on around them. All their energy would be focused on the moment and on staying alive.

What that means when there is no tiger

As we already pointed out, in our life as a hunter gatherer we would not have expected to live for more than thirty-five, or forty years and our encounters with hostile tribes and sabre-toothed tigers, although traumatic, would have been fairly infrequent. How different from our lives now when our life expectancy is more than doubled and stressors can come in a myriad of forms over and over again, so that this response is being activated repeatedly and over longer periods of time. The risks are obvious. If we keep mobilizing energy and never store it we will tire easily and put ourselves at risk of some form of diabetes. A cardiovascular system that is frequently activated will result in hardening of the arteries and increase the risk of heart disease. Continuously shutting down digestion leads to ulcers, colitis and irritable bowel syndrome. An interrupted reproductive cycle will take longer and longer to regulate itself resulting in amenorrhea and infertility. A suppressed immune system means we are more likely to contract infectious diseases and be less effective at combating them than we were.

Food for thought?

So what worked for us many thousands of years ago does not match a modern lifestyle and is possibly a cause of problems for us. Perhaps over the next several thousand years our nervous system will get the message but in the meantime we need a different look at how we react to the wide range of stressors we encounter.

• A good place to start is by noticing them and noticing the effect they have on us. That can help us choose how we want to react rather than just falling into our habits of reaction. 
• Another strategy is to try and make a session of meditation part of our daily schedule. In that way we are training our minds to clam down and become stable, so that we are less inclined to over-react to the irritations of life.
• Then we can also try and look at any stressful events we encounter from a bigger perspective than just how if affects us personally. We could try and see how the event is part of an inter-connected picture, rather than a random happening. We could try and think of the other people involved and see the situation from their point of view. 

Our fight-or-flight mechanism may be ancient and deeply entrenched but our minds are very powerful and capable of determining how we react. We just need to be working with them in the most adventitious way.

One of the aims of this blog is to share different voices and their experience of applying mindfulness, meditation and compassion in the workplace. This week I am very happy to introduce a blog from my friend and colleague Darran Trute. I hope you enjoy reading!

The training offered by Awareness in Action, provides the vision and ability to apply the techniques of mindfulness, meditation and compassion into our working life.  As well as feeling the immediate helpful benefits of such techniques myself, which is my own direct measure, I also find it useful to understand mechanisms of how such techniques actually benefit myself and others.    I thought I'd try and share some of  the research and insights, hopefully in an accessible way. 

Our brain is made of billions of tiny switches (called neurons) which fire hundreds of times per second like spark plugs in a car engine, when we move, have emotions, think or reflect.

A recent discovery of a smaller group of these neurons is called mirror neurons. They are beautifully described by eminent scientist Dr Ramachandran as ‘Ghandi neurons’.   Like a network of virtual reality simulators they recreate the sounds, perceptions and movements of others onto our own internal body representation – your emotions become my emotions your movements become my movements.  Through them we spontaneously empathise, relate and can respond to needs of others. They naturally map other peoples actions, moods and feelings onto ourselves - this also provides an efficient mechanism for us to learn quickly from others, as we embody the actions of others in ourselves through watching.

We are, simply speaking, hard wired to connect.

Mirror neurons respond, perhaps surprisingly, based on the goal or perceived intention of the person performing the action - random actions by others don’t seem to cause them to fire. This means we unconsciously copy or imitate the emotional states of others with a sense of their intentions, this is what provides us with social cues as to how to respond.  We have a felt sense of where someone’s at and therefore can respond accordingly.

This unconscious or implicit imitation also occurs more strongly when we are with people we like or for people we perceive to be powerful.  A leader will capture our attention so their emotions will be particularly contagious.  However, its impact is also more subtle, for instance college student subjects who watched a video about old people were unaware that they walk more slowly to the exit at the end of a study.

This implicit or unconscious imitation has profound implications for team dynamics.  It is the basis for emotional contagions – how we inherit people’s moods in a team meeting or why a workplace has a particular mood tone.  It’s also why stress can become such an infectious corrosive atmosphere or how an empathic nurturing environment can spread, both with their subsequent impact on team dynamics.

As we develop self awareness and transform our responses through mindfulness, meditation and compassion, the process immediately benefits ourselves as it ‘turns on’ part of the nervous and brain systems that calm us and allows us to see situations and ourselves clearly.  Conversely studies show that destructive emotions, distort our perception.   Both types of perception, distorted or clear has obvious subsequent consequences in what decisions we make and how we create, relate and work within teams.

Any effort on our part to apply these techniques is also ‘seen’, by other peoples mirror neurons.  As mentioned, their nature is to automatically pick up on other peoples emotional states, whether it’s a state of balance and openness or in a more dysfunctional condition.   So by developing self awareness we immediately benefit ourselves and in the process help others.

Well-being for people at work is an important element of any Awareness in Action workshop. We go into the whole issue pretty thoroughly but to get people started we introduce these four simple ways of taking better care of themselves.

1.Changing your routine

Routines can help us accomplish tasks quickly and efficiently but if we hang on to them too tightly they can also be a way of getting ourselves into a rut and closing down possibilities.

Neuroscience is helping us understand a great deal about our brains—particularly the discovery of neuroplasticity: the capacity of the brain to change in relation to experience. Take the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is associated with pleasure, happiness, motivation and interest. When we engage in anything we like dopamine is released. However, from our teenage years onwards our brain’s capacity to produce dopamine decreases and if we consider that one of the characteristics of Parkinson’s disease is low dopamine production, we can see this is not beneficial.

Getting into a rut does not stimulate dopamine production—so it’s a case of ‘use it, or lose it’. It pays to make the effort to stimulate ourselves with small changes to our daily routine.

Take a few moments to think about your working day and ask yourself if there are some changes you could make. What about the journey to and from work—are there ways of varying it from time to time?

Then there is your workspace—can you bring in something from home to brighten it up, or change it around in a new arrangement? Think about how you spend your break times. What about making some useful new habits there—like cutting down on coffee, taking a breathe of fresh air, joining a work colleague for a few moments of relaxation, or taking the time for a few moments of silence?

The idea is not to replace one habit with another but to make it way of life to enjoy and stimulate change as part of your routine.

2.Taking more exercise

We all know that exercise is good for us but is seems it is also an excellent way to stimulate dopamine production. Maybe you do not see yourself becoming a member of a gym, or as wanting to do lots of organized exercise but there is still a lot you can do. A participant in a recent workshop shared that she had started taking her dogs for longer and more regular walks and was feeling tremendous benefit from it. Walking to work a few times a week, if it is feasible, can be another way. Doing yoga, attending a dance class—it’s a question of finding the type of exercise that works for you. Maybe you could start an exercise initiative during the lunch breaks in your workplace...

It helps us to feel more in control of our lives—instead of worrying about doing something about that extra weight, or flabby muscles we are actually taking action and it helps us to feel better about ourselves. Exercise time is also a time for oneself, and some quiet, reflective time. As soon as we start to feel the benefits our levels of well-being increase.

3. Making time to see friends

People always tell me that this is one of the first things to go when they are feeling too busy and work is particularly demanding and yet time spent with friends and loved ones is one of our greatest sources of support and nourishment. All the happiness studies show that the happiest people all have strong social networks and that it helps to be healthier and to live longer. From an evolutionary point of view, we would never have been able to survive as hunter gatherers without the strong social support of the tribe that hunted together, shared food and fought off their common enemies. We may not need to gather our food and fight sabre-toothed tigers any more but we all have worries, stress and problems that it can be wonderfully to supportive to discuss with someone who knows us well and cares about us.

If we have friends within work then it can just be a question of scheduling a lunch, or coffee break together a couple of time a week.

With friends outside of work, I have found the only way to ensure stuff happens is to sit down with my partner and our agendas every so often and schedule in times to meet up with people. At least that way there is a date to work with—even if someone has to change it, we can make another date. If there is nothing kin the agenda, there’s nothing to work with.

4.Expressing gratitude

We talked about gratitude in a recent blog posting but we can really sum up the benefits here by saying that appreciating what you have in your life and expressing gratitude for it helps us to move from a glass is half-empty kind of person, to a glass is half-full kind of person—with all the accompanying benefits to our well-being.

I recently met a man who had been a senior buyer for a large Irish retailer for almost thirty years. He was made redundant when the Irish economy crashed and at the time we met, was working as part of the airport assistance team in Dublin airport. He could have felt bitter about his change in status but in the half hour we spent together all he talked about was his gratitude for having work in an economy where over 35% of the workforce is unemployed and his pleasure and satisfaction in having such a worthwhile and interesting job.

In the last couple of months, trouble with first one knee and then the other necessitated a period of needing airport assistance when I fly. It’s a delicate situation where it is possible to feel quite vulnerable, even exposed and it has been a real discovery to meet the people whose job it is to deliver this kind of support.

Basically, you get put into a wheelchair, or on to a buggy and are zipped through passport control and security at top speed with minimum inconvenience—unless you feel being delivered like a package to your plane count as an inconvenience.

I only had to use this support a few times but I quickly saw the people who do it have a range of attitudes to their jobs. There’s the young person who is on the first rung of the ladder who just wants to get the job done and does not really want to spend their time imagining what it must be like to spend any time at all in a wheel chair—the prospect seems too remote from their own experience.

Then there is the more experienced worker who has been assigned to airport assistance temporarily and is enjoying the novelty. I spent the half an hour waiting for my gate to come up listening to and giving advice on the problems my ‘carer’ was having with another member of staff making unwanted advances to her. It was plain that I was expected to give back something for the privilege of being driven around the airport and for once, my assistance provider had a captive audience.

Make no mistake, once you sit in the wheelchair you are a captive audience for whatever comes to you. One of most unnerving encounters was with an airport assistance person who took immense pride in his work and tried his very best to give top quality support. As we transferred to the airport bus to take us from the ‘plane to the terminal, he tipped my wheelchair almost on its back to get me on to the bus and then spent the rest of our time together explaining how he liked to do without the lifts an pulleys that can be used to get people on and off planes and resort to the strength of his own arms. A sense of impending terror crept up on me as I envisaged being bodily lifted into the car my friend had waiting for me in the airport car park.

I have met people so solicitous of my feelings that I have felt concerned to reassure them that I am all right and do not expect to have to do this procedure more than a few times.

The whole experience has touched me very much in seeing how natural it is for us to wish to help others. Everyone who has helped me with as part of this service has been kind and polite and many have done more than was asked of them.

However, it has also shown me that wanting to be a help is not enough. You can tell instinctively if someone has cared for a friend or relative with mobility problems because you have to be able to put yourself in another person’s shoes—or in this case, wheelchair. You have to drop you own ideas of how you think the job needs to be done and imagine what you would need if you were in that position. It’s not easy but those who can do it stand out a mile from the rest.

Again, it is a pity that the people who do this work do not receive some basic training on mindfulness and empathy skills. They give so much already it would be great for them to have support to know how to do it even more effectively.

Thank for supporting the launch and early weeks of the Awareness in Action BLOG. It has been great to receive so many comments and so much support.
In the new year we’ll be absorbing some of the feedback you’ve shared and making some changes to the presentation of the BLOG.

Have a wonderful holiday period and look forward to blogging with you in 2012!

We all know that meetings can be a challenge in so many different ways from trying to get a project idea approved, to simply surviving the boredom but they can also be an opportunity to apply some techniques of mindfulness, empathy and kindness.

Getting started

Some of the groups we work with in Awareness in Action have made it a habit to begin a meeting with a few moments of silence to help people arrive and settle but this is not always something you can make happen. However, you can take a moment yourself while other people are settling and chatting to just allow yourself to arrive in the room and become fully present. At such moments it helps to try and drop any preoccupations you came in with because you cannot do much about them while you are in the meeting and thinking back to them will only prove tiring. You may also be harbouring worries, or concerns about the meeting that is about to begin which cloud your attitude. Try to drop these too and just maintain an open, spacious, non-judgemental approach that is willing to respond to things as they arise.

Looking at who is in the room

As the meeting gets started take some time to look around and notice who is there and how they are. Remember, that just like you, each person in the room has worries both inside and outside of work—bring to mind any specific problems that you are aware people might be facing. Allow yourself to feel a sense of common humanity with what they are going through—it will really help if things get intense and difficult to remember how much in common we all share.

Keeping focused

As you work through the agenda notice when your attention wanders and you stop being fully present to what is going on. You can use your breath as an anchor of it helps—simply notice where you can feel your breath entering and leaving your body and rest your attention there for a moment, or two until you feel you are ‘back’.

Keep a look out for when you feel irritation, or frustration rising and recall your scan of the room at the beginning and try to see everyone as simply doing their best. Again, you can use your breath to help you settle.

Be mindful of how much you are speaking and the tone of voice you use. Are you making it easy for people to listen to you and to hear your point, or are you pushing them away with an impatient tone, or hurried explanation?

How are you listening?

Listening can be a good mindfulness practice. Rest your attention on what is being said at any given moment. Try to keep your attention there and not let it stray off into thoughts and rumination. By bringing your full attention to what is being said you will find that you get less tired, will stay in closer touch with the progress of the meeting and can contribute more. Notice when opinions and judgements come into how you are listening and try to drop them and keep your attention open and receptive. Pay particular attention to how you listen to people in the meeting you do not agree with—it is so easy to mentally dismiss what you think they are going to say before they have even started to speak.

Try to stay aware of your facial expression as you listen. I know my concentrated face can look pretty grim—I don’t mean to but my expression gets kind of stuck and I need to consciously relax and assume a more neutral, pleasant expression.

If things get difficult

If you feel that the meeting is getting bogged down and stuck you may find it possible to introduce some skilful humour to allow people to relax for a moment and let off steam.

A participant in a recent workshop we did shared that her husband regularly baked a cake to take along to share in his most difficult meeting to help people relax and be normal together while they ate it. He found it helped them accomplish the work quicker.

Another person we worked with—a CEO of a non-profit—shared how on one occasion she found herself in a meeting that was becoming acrimonious. She was not a main player at the table and did not see how she could skilfully intervene to turn things around, so she simply stayed quiet and looked around the room wishing everyone in it happiness and well-being. She said that normally she would have left a meeting like that exhausted and unhappy but after this one she felt invigorated. A few days later she met up with another participant from the same meeting who asked her what she had been doing and commented, ‘I felt the meeting was deteriorating so badly and then I looked over at you and you looked so calm and focused it helped me settle and feel better.’ Just as anger and irritation can pollute the atmosphere of a meeting, self-awareness and kindness are also contagious but in a healthy way.

Finishing up

As the meeting closes check with yourself to make sure you are not leaving any unfinished business in the room that will sour your working relationship with another participant next time you meet up. Take time to say goodbye to people in a friendly way.

Allow yourself a moment to acknowledge all the effort that you and everyone in the room has made to have a useful meeting and wish for its successful outcome.

In this short, readable book the author John Kralik tells the story of how he turned his life around by focusing his attention on what he had of value in his life rather than on what was missing. In Kralik’s case that was no hypothetical shift—a middle-aged, overweight divorcé, estranged from his older children, on the point of loosing his current girlfriend and possibly his business too, he felt things had come to such a point that he needed to make major changes in his life. Inspired by a thank-you note that he received himself he decided to spend the year writing at least one thank you letter a day to cover all the things in his life he could feel grateful for. The book tells the story of how this process did in fact change his life.

My favourite story concerns Scott, the guy who serves the author in his local Starbucks. Not only does Scott remember how Kralik likes his coffee but he greets him everyday by name in a genuine and friendly way. When Kralik delivers his thank you note, Scott assumes it is a complaint letter and is momentarily dismayed only to be delighted on realizing his has received appreciation and gratitude instead.

It made me more aware of how I interact with the ‘routine’ people in my life—cab drivers, waitresses, shop assistants—all the people it can be so easy to glaze over while my attention is focused elsewhere. Just because we are paid to do a job, or offer a service it does not mean that we no longer need to feel appreciated for what we do. Like Kralik, I also quickly saw how much better I feel in taking the time to properly acknowledge the services I receive.

In her book, The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky details research her department of psychology in the University of California has carried out on the power of gratitude. Subjects are required to keep a ‘gratitude’ journal every Sunday for six weeks in which they record five things that they could feel grateful for during the previous week. Their levels of happiness and well-being were found to have increased as a result.

At work it is all too easy to take our colleagues for granted, or to feel unappreciated ourselves. Lyubomirsky points out that, among other things, gratitude helps us appreciate what we have rather than yearn for what we do not have and so increases our sense of self-worth and self-esteem. When we see how much we have to be grateful for it increases our confidence and helps us to unlearn the habit of over-focusing on our weaknesses and failures. So, a work team that is able to share appreciation for each other’s work and gratitude for each individual’s contribution has to be a healthier, stronger and more effective operating force. Take a look at Kralik’s book if you need convincing.

There are friends of mine who would make a big deal out of saying how yucky the idea is of walking around with a big photo of your smile and showing it to people but I would challenge them to watch this video and not feel moved by the responses that the artist Claire Lemmel inspires with her photo.

It brought home to me how easy it is to forget to smile when we get absorbed at work. There’s always so much to do in such short amount of time, as well as worrying about all the things to be done once we get out of work and all the demands of ‘real life’ begin. Everyone has their head down with their specific tasks and smiling is not necessarily top of the list—or on some days, even on the list at all.

The power of a smile

One of my favourite stories from our recent workshops is one that I heard in the UK from a woman working in the voluntary sector. She explained that she had not been getting on well with her boss. She felt he was overly critical and slow to appreciate her work, and was frequently dismissive of her input. Things had become so uncomfortable that she dreaded meetings with him and tried to avoid running into him in the office.

Eventually she realized that she had backed herself into a corner and was feeling stressed and unhappy, so she made the decision to change tactics. When she went into work the next day she made a point of greeting her boss with a friendly smile and a warm ‘good morning’. She kept it up for several days until she noticed that her boss began to respond—cautiously at first but gradually relaxing and even sharing a joke, or friendly comment with her.

Her experience showed her that when communication gets tricky, then things are ripe for misunderstanding and projection and we can turn another person into a monster-like figure of unreasonableness and unpleasantness. By cutting through the pattern of miscommunication with friendliness and warm smiles she gave her boss the opportunity to become a human being again—an opportunity he was glad to take.

How do we feel when we smile?

If our smile is authentic we usually feel good, don’t we? Smiling relaxes us and so relaxes the people we are in contact with. It’s hard to stay annoyed with someone who genuinely smiling at you—the effect is completely disarming. Isn’t this what a smile can do in a work environment—disarm a lot of the misunderstanding and projection that can clog up the environment so easily?

Smiling is good for you

There is plenty of current research that explores the benefits of smiling—lowering blood pressure, easing stress, possibly strengthening the immune system but if we connect with our experience we do not even need to look so far. If we can be sufficiently self-aware to consider how we appear to others at work and our effect on them, and as a result we take the time to smile then we immediately feel good ourselves. That feeling is contagious and can spread through a whole room lifting the atmosphere for everyone—not bad for a simple smile.

Recently I was doing a piece of work in a rural area of the south of France—very pleasant in some ways but in terms of communication and internet, frequently frustrating. After two interminable days of not even being able to use a dial-up system to retrieve email I turned, in some desperation, to an acquaintance who runs a small IT unit in the area, and who had helped me out before. Over the phone, as I explained my situation and asked for advice on how to get on even a slow-line, I could sense his reluctance and eventually impatience with my request for help. He was extremely busy, he said and was squeezed in between several conflicting demands already. My cry for help, based on our previous satisfactory interactions, was simply making him feel bad and pushing him further into a situation of stress.

In vain were my arguments that it was an indication of the seriousness of my plight that I was bothering him at all, that all he needed to do was to set me in the direction of who to talk to, that it is hard to sort out how to get online without being on line. We had two or three rather tense phone calls before he used the excuse of taking an hour to check out something and did not call me back.

Eventually, through some miracle, I got on to a local provider with a line for non-French speakers and they confirmed that yes, it is still possible to go on dial-up in that part of France but I would have to travel to the nearest office to register—the nearest office being in a town two hours away. At my gasp of dismay, the agent on the phone offered to look further and within five minutes had provided me with all the coordinates to get me online. There should be a way of ringing back people who provide help at such times and telling them how they have changed your day.

This story has stayed in my mind for quite some time because it seems to speak to many of the themes that come up in looking at how we are at work. My IT acquaintance spent more time on the phone with me telling me how he could not help than the person who eventually solved the problem. His experience of being over-worked and under pressure made him resent my asking him anything in the first place. This sense of grievance deepened in the face of my refusal to give up, so that his ability to solve my relatively small problem became limited and constrained by emotional resentment. The person who solved the problem was relatively relaxed and able to see if the situation could be flexible and accommodating—which it could.

For my part, my anxiety at being out of touch with the people I was working with, as well as the world at large made me more brittle than I would normally be and perhaps less able to read the signs my acquaintance was sending me. Just as my IT acquaintance’s stress closed him down, my anxiety undermined my ability to see the situation clearly and to ask for help in the best way.

So often, the frustrations and limitations we experience at work can be traced back to our mood at the time, to how we place our mind as we try to negotiate our way around them, to our conviction that how we experience a situation is the way it is. We can waste a lot of time this way, as well as disappointing people and limiting our capacity to contribute creatively to what is going on around us.

Do you have any examples of this happening to you recently? How did you resolve it?

On a recent return flight to Amsterdam from the UK I overheard a fellow-passenger giving a flight attendant a really bad time. It was hard to catch the full story from where I was sitting but it involved the passenger asking for hot water in a plastic, see-through cup. Apparently cups of this sort are not safe to hold hot water and the only alternative was the purchase—for three euros—of a polystyrene cup. Not surprisingly the passenger found this rather excessive. What was more surprising was his response—he proceeded to cross-examine the flight attendant in increasingly aggressive tones, applying the kind of ruthless logic that would not have been out of place in a courtroom.

The flight attendant did his utmost best. He remained polite, consistent and managed not to react to the escalating tone of complaint and anger that he was subjected to. He had a kind of party line that he could fall back on: ‘sorry sir, this is company policy, I am not allowed to give you this cup…’ and so on. After some time he managed to get away and push his trolley on to the next customer. As he came past me our eyes met and I murmured, ‘breathe’. He looked at my rather desperately but did not respond.

The thirsty passenger had two more goes at getting his way during the short flight. He tackled a female flight attendant, perhaps hoping she would be more malleable but she was having none of it. I noticed the same party line and suppressed air of martyrdom as with her male colleague. Although unflinchingly professional both flight attendants adopted the slightly world-weary attitude of people who have seen and heard the full range of human unreasonableness in their time, and who feel that their jobs do not carry sufficient reward in either status or payment that demonstrates an acceptable appreciation of what they suffer. Neither of them danced with the situation, or seemed to try and put themselves in the shoes of the disgruntled passenger.

His final attempt to get his own way was daring—he simply marched up to the refreshment trolley and started all over again. He returned to his seat carrying a bottle of cold water.

I happened to be one of the last off the ‘plane and exchanged a few words with the male flight attendant. Remembering my attitude of sympathy—but not my advice to focus on his breath—he asked me what I thought of the sort of thing they had to put up with. During our short conversation my earlier hunch was confirmed—when dealing with a stressful situation he relied on his determination to stay professional, rather than adopting any strategy to manage his stress. Instead of de-hyping the situation for himself and easing the strain he was feeling, he took up the burden as a way of demonstrating to himself how efficient he was at enduring one of the downsides of his job.

He gritted his teeth in the face of trouble, rather than try to bring ease to the situation. It would probably have been how he was trained.

Stress in the workplace is an increasing concern. Studies show that between 50% and 60% of all lost working days in the EU are due to stress. In 2002 these lost days cost in the region of 20 million euros.

The kind of stress I witnessed on this occasion was not major but it was nasty. The man I spoke to looked very tired by the end of the flight and I doubt if it was his last of the day. His training could so easily include some simple mindfulness and meditation exercises to apply when dealing with demanding passengers and it would enable him to learn to deal with stress in a sustainable way. The tension he was holding looked like it was heading towards a stiff drink and a good moan—not so bad in small doses but not a good long-term strategy for stress-management.

People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy.

This the conclusion of recent research carried out by psychologists Professor Daniel Gilbert and Doctoral student Matthew Killingsworth of Harvard University.Killingsworth and Gilbert write, ‘A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.’

iPhone app

How did they arrive at this conclusion? Killingsworth designed an iPhone app that contacted 2,250 volunteers over an age range of 18—88 and a variety of socio-economic backgrounds.

At random intervals during the day people were asked

• how happy they were at that moment
• what activity they were engaged in
• if they were thinking about their current activity
• if they were thinking about something else that was pleasant, neutral or unpleasant

The result was that for almost half their time, the volunteers were simply not present to what they were doing.

Does this sound familiar?

Automatic pilot

Unlike other mammals, we human beings have the capability to ruminate about things that happened to us in the past, or to worry and daydream about what may, or may not happen to us in the future. In short: we are able to be in one place with our bodies and have our minds operating somewhere else altogether. In mindfulness training this is often referred to as being on automatic pilot. It’s the state of mind we are particularly prone to when we are engaged in activities that do not draw on our full intellectual or emotional participation. [Not surprisingly Gilbert and Killingsworth found that people were considerably less distracted while making love.]

It’s how we go around the supermarket, or travel home on the bus, or drive to work. When we’re engaged in routine, or mechanical activities such as preparing vegetables, washing up or doing housework we tend to be on automatic pilot. At work the amount of routine tasks will depend to some extent on the kind of job we have but whatever we do there will be repetitive talks to see to every day and the same people to work with.

Changing from automatic to manual

So, when we begin to practice mindfulness a good starting point is to notice how often we are simply not present to the activity we are engaged in and then, when we have noticed, to gently bring our attention back. We’re aiming to match our attention to our activity—to notice what we are doing without wanting it to be different. We could think of this as disconnecting the automatic pilot and going on to manual—it takes more effort but it guarantees that we are with ourselves, and what we are doing.

What effect does this have? For starters, it focuses our energy. Instead of doing one thing and thinking another, now we are supporting our doing with our attention. It means the task gets done quicker, with less chance of error and we are less tired by it. The decisions we make will be based on a fuller understanding of our options—if we are more present to what is happening then we are clearer about the real choices facing us.

As a bonus, it can also mean we enjoy things more because we are there while they are happening—so we notice the autumn colours as we walk to work, we appreciate the morning greetings from our colleagues and we actually taste the sandwich we’ve chosen for lunch. As we go home at the end of the day there is sense of having lived through a working day, rather than letting it carry us along. It could even be a reason to feel happy.

Luckily I like Schipol airport—my local airport and the main one for Amsterdam—because I find myself there quite often travelling for work. It’s light and airy, with plenty of good places to drink coffee. Recently I was waiting at the gate for my flight and had the opportunity to observe an incident that seemed to encapsulate several themes from any working day.

The first player in the scene was an airport cleaner—a small, quiet man who was sweeping the floor with a wide broom that was able to gather up a generous arc of rubbish. He worked diligently, pushing the broom methodically across the floor and seeming to take some satisfaction in the effectiveness of his work. I enjoyed watching him work. He was focused, self-contained and effective. He did not draw attention to himself in any way, and almost seemed to expect to be invisible to others.

It occurred to me that he must have swept this same expanse of floor many times and had probably never actually been thanked for the quality of his work. His pay was probably low but he did the job thoroughly from a sense of self-respect, rather than for any outside acknowledgement. I found it restful to watch him but a bit sad also. He seemed to expect so little.

My reverie was interrupted by a couple running towards a neighbouring gate where a flight to the States had just been called. There was no great rush but they were obviously concerned to arrive well in time. They ran right through the pile of rubbish the cleaner had so painstakingly gathered, scattering it all over a wide expanse of floor. The woman checked her steps for a fraction of a second and I thought she would see the cleaner and apologize but instead she picked up her pace and quickly followed her companion towards their destination.

I understood then the man’s attitude of not expecting to be seen—this must happen to him over and over again. It is so easy isn’t it, when you’re pressured [as we so often are at work] to simply put your own agenda centre-stage and not even see that others may have an agenda of their own that needs your attention. There was a power imbalance in this incident too—the customer’s needs taking precedence over a mere cleaner getting on with his job. That often happens at work too when we have dealings with a manager, or team leader who may, or may not choose to see our contribution clearly, or as important as their own.

Perhaps it will not surprise you at all that the cleaner simply gathered up the scattered dirt and debris and continued with his work almost as if there had been no interruption. He did not react in any way. He could have called out, he could have cursed under his breath, he could have looked around for a sympathetic eye [I admit, I was ready to provide one] but he did none of those things. He simply continued with his job.

It occurred to me that he considered dealing with that kind of lack of awareness from the people using the airport around him as part of his job, rather than as an annoying incident to be stored up to take home and tell the wife about. By having that attitude he was ensuring that he was keeping his own stress levels under control. Imagine if he had reacted every time someone failed to see him working how tired and exhausted he would be at the end of every day.

It brought home to me strongly the power of being able not to react when irritating things happen, and the beneficial effect for oneself and the people one is working with.

Many of you will be familiar with the wonderful work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programmes. I recently came across an article by Saki F. Santorelli, one of the MBSR instructors at the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. The article is called, Mindfulness and Mastery in the Workplace. It presents 21 ways to reduce stress during the working day.

I picked out a few that suggest more ways we can engage in mindfulness and meditation without drawing a lot of attention to ourselves, or taking a lot of time out of work, as we were discussing in the last blog entry.

You can easily adapt them to suit your circumstances: 

• While your car is warming up [or you are waiting for bus], try taking a minute to quietly pay attention to your breathing.
• While sitting at your desk, keyboard, etc., pay attention to your bodily sensations, again consciously attempting to relax and rid yourself of excess tension.
• Use your breaks to truly relax rather than simply "pausing." For instance, instead of having coffee, a cigarette, or reading, try taking a short walk -- or sitting at your desk and renewing yourself.
• Decide to stop for one to three minutes every hour during the workday. Become aware of your breathing and bodily sensations, allowing the mind to settle in as a time to regroup and recoup.
• Choose to eat one or two lunches per week in silence. Use this as a time to eat slowly and be with yourself.
• At the end of the workday, while your car is warming up, sit quietly and consciously make the transition from work to home -- take a moment to simply be -- enjoy it for a moment.

Like most of us, you're heading into your next full-time job -- home!

So how do we bring awareness into action and learn to ‘be’ at work—while still getting the job done?

One of the biggest misunderstandings in our line of work is when people think that practicing techniques such as mindfulness and meditation can only happen in one’s personal time and if anyone tries it out at work they’ll either get laughed at, or fired for time-wasting! Nothing could be further from the truth. These techniques can be integrated into a working day without taking out time from essential tasks and will actually add to our focus, productivity, ability to think creatively and well-being.  Companies such as Google, Starbucks, IBM, Apple and Yahoo run in-house programmes for their staff and mindfulness and meditation is now widely taught and practiced in schools, hospitals, prisons and among a variety of professional disciplines.

Consider this quotation from Daniel Goleman, the architect of Emotional Intelligence:

I think there is a very large amount of conversion data on meditation across all brands and all varieties. There is a generic benefit, largely because it helps people get into a parasympathetic nervous system state, which is restorative as the body's recuperative mode, as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system, which gets us into the stress-arousal system. I think that if you are a daily meditator, you let your body get into a way of being that it can reconstitute itself instead of being driven over the edge by constant stress arousal.

The highlighted section is mine. I wanted to draw attention to this aspect of meditation as an anti-dote to burn-out. Stress is an increasingly large factor for working people in Japan, the US and western Europe costing large amounts of money on lost working days, and medical care. Here Goleman is talking about the positive effects of the body but the mind benefits if anything, even more through the regular practice of meditation.

Here is a quotation from an article by Colin Allen published in Psychology Today 1 April 2003:

Neuroscientists have found that meditators shift their brain activity to different areas of the cortex - brain waves in the stress-prone right frontal cortex move to the calmer left frontal cortex. This mental shift decreases the negative effects of stress, mild depression and anxiety. There is also less activity in the amygdala, where the brain processes fear.

So meditation works on the source of stress as well as its manifestation in the body. Which employer would not want that for their staff? A work team that can incorporate meditation practice into their working day is going to be less stressed and more productive because of it.

One simple idea is to initiate short sessions of sitting meditation at the beginning and end of all meetings. Instead of time spent shuffling papers and catching up on gossip, a few moments of silence will allow people to arrive at the meeting and bring their attention to what they are about to do. How often does a meeting take time to get going while everyone is trying to pull their attention from their own agenda to focus on the group agenda? Mediation provides a simple way to bring everyone together and help them become present to what needs to be done. In the same way, at the end of a meeting a few moments of sitting will help provide closure in an atmosphere of harmony and give a pause before the next set of tasks.

On an individual level there are many times in any working day when you can take a couple of moments to bring your attention back to your breath and re-focus your attention. Take an extra few moments in the cloakroom, walk from one work area to another a little more slowly, choose to drink your coffee by yourself—you’ll be able to think of lots of opportunities in your working day. The trick is to make use of them, to remember to make a few spare moments into time for meditation and not to just let the time float by. No-one need ever know you are taking time for meditation.

If you did not need to earn a living, would you still want to do your job? Unless you are one of a fortunate minority of people who do their job because they absolutely love it, then your answer would probably be ‘no!’ Right from that point—the point where we have no option but to work in order to live—we feel that our choices with regard to work are narrow.

Then, on top of that most people have a boss, or perhaps several bosses, all of who seem to hold the cards when it comes to making decisions that affect our jobs and how we do them. We can give input but the final decision is not our’s to make. That’s true for so much of our working life isn’t it? We don’t choose the people we work with, or the decoration of the room we work in. If we wear a uniform, chances are that we did not have a say in the design, even though we are the ones wearing it. In every type of work there are endless compromises to make and repeated efforts to accommodate directives, and decisions that can seem arbitrary and even unfair. Behind it all is the vague and uncertain world of politics and economic fluctuations that seem to fall on us from a great height and leave us very little room for manoeuvre.

I remember in my days as a teacher that a new head teacher was appointed to our badly resourced, inner-city school. The teaching staff, many of whom had worked tirelessly to make something welcoming and inspiring from their grim classrooms, were eager to see what this new head was made of and to see how much she could affect the changes we were longing for. The first thing she did was to find a forgotten source of funding that a head teacher could use to improve the standard their office and to embark on a make-over of her own office space. I can still recall the sense of shocked dismay and helplessness that pervaded the staff room during those weeks that her office received new decorations and furniture.

This sense of helplessness, or not being able to determine one’s own path at work can be corrosive in its affect on morale, stress levels and even health. We may hope that as we progress up the career ladder and become more senior we will have more possibility to affect the course of how our work unfolds but experience shows that the constraints just change—from one boss to another, from individuals to boards and committees, from one decision-making tier to another.

However, this is not the whole story. There are important ways in which we can make choices at work and take matters into our own hands.

Here are three questions we can ask ourselves:

1. What habits have I got into at work that are not helping me?
2. What strengths do I have that I am not using to support myself at work?
3. How do I behave towards the people I work with?

Let’s take them one by one.

1. What habits have I got into at work that are not helping me?

We may have started our working life with all sorts of aspirations to do well, to make a difference, to enjoy what we do but the wear and tear of turning up day after day can knock the glitter off the best intentions. Perhaps we have got tighter than we would want and more inclined to show impatience. We could be feeling that we are always running and never catching up, that there is always more to do and we have never done enough. Maybe we’ve got into the habit of checking email late at night and then not sleeping so well. There could be a pervading feeling that work is creeping into all aspects of one’s life and that there is less and less time for family and friends.

Each of us knows ourselves best and if we take some time to reflect quietly on our habits at work we are likely to come up with some important insights. The temptation will be to try and change everything all at once but that will just become another stress. Just choose the one that you think is causing you real problems and start with that. Take time to see how the habits manifests, think about how you could act differently and then try it out in different situations. Each time you catch yourself it will become easier.

2. What strengths do I have that I am not using to support myself at work?

I have a friend who is a wonderful listener but when she speaks she hardly gives herself time to say properly what she means as if what she has to say cannot be as important as the what the other person is saying. She does not listen to herself with the same sensitivity and empathy that she listens to others and often ends up making poor choices. She is not unusual. If we are being led by unhelpful habits that we’ve built up at work to help us survive, then often some of our strengths have somehow got buried. Perhaps you are a naturally friendly person but have felt that to spend time checking in with people at work would be seen as frivolous, and so you’ve closed down. Maybe you have a gift for improving the environment with a poster, or some plants but have felt that it would not be appreciated and so have not bothered. It could be that you have a gift for harmony that you could apply in work politics but are afraid to get involved. Again, take time to think about your strengths and to check whether you are using your full range of skills to support during your working day. Start small and choose one to start focusing on. It will be a good counterpart to working on your unhelpful habit.

3. How do I behave towards the people I work with?

Because of the stress of everyday work pressures, exacerbated by the fact that we do not choose who we work with and yet spend at least at much time with them as the people we love, we can find that we have got offhand with our work colleagues, or perhaps just indifferent. When you come to reflect on this, think about how you like to be treated at work and spend some time asking yourself which people you like to be around at work and why that is. Ask yourself if you are pleasant to be around at work and check if there is any room for improvement.

Working on answering these three questions for ourselves does not need anyone’s permission, or a memo from anyone. It is something we can take on quietly in our own time, in our own way. The effect can be considerable though. By deciding to engage with our habits at work we are taking responsibility for ourselves and making the choices that matter for our own well-being. This is turn will have a positive impact on how we are at work—both for ourselves and for those we work with.

It must be one of the most dreaded moments in life—the moment when the worry that there is something wrong with your car turns into a certainty and you have to head for the hard shoulder of the motorway and search for the nearest emergency phone. It happened to us last month on our way back from spending two months in our cottage in the south of France. We were fifty kilometres south of Orleans with a hotel booked in Paris, it was starting to get dark and we were waiting for the road service to arrive. Our joy on seeing the truck draw up in front of us was short-lived. The car needed a new dynamo. It was Saturday evening and nothing would be open until Monday afternoon. There was nothing for it but for the car to go on the back of the truck and us to be transported with it. We felt pretty miserable as we tried to mentally re-juggle all our plans for the next few days, and there was a definite sense of being very alone and far from home. We had to stumble along the edge of the hard shoulder to get to the truck. I have been having problems with my knees for some time, which meant that I limped along well behind my partner and wondered how on earth I was going to get on board. The maintenance man spotted my difficulty and came round to help me. By guiding my feet on to the steps he helped me make the climb. In those few moments, I felt less alone and the maintenance man became another human being, rather than a deliverer of unwanted news.

In fact, he turned out to be a bit of a hero all round. He drove us to his garage and let down our car. Telling me to stay where I was, he directed my partner to gather together the things we would need for an over-night stay. He phoned several local hotels until he found one that could accommodate us and then he drove us there. He gave us his phone number and directions on when and how to contact him and drove off to continue his work of rescuing stranded motorists throughout the night.

The hotel we found ourselves in was a small, family-run hotel on the main street. We were greeted warmly by the lady of the house and shown to our room. As my partner struggled up the stairs with all our various bags I followed along with my rucksack but found the stairs difficult because of my knee problem. I felt my bag lifted from my shoulders and turned to see someone who I presumed to be the daughter who had come to help. She took the bag all the way to our room. One of the things that I find challenging about certain parts of France is that after nine o’clock it is impossible to find anything to eat. As it was now well after nine o’clock we feared we would go to bed hungry. The hotel had a restaurant run by the husband of the family. We timidly asked his wife if there was any chance of an omelette and after consulting her husband, they agreed to keep the restaurant open and to serve us a simple meal. Rarely has an omelette tasted so good as when it is eaten in a strange town you never meant to visit and is served with such generosity, while you car sits in an unfamiliar garage waiting to be repaired. This generosity was a feature of our enforced stay at the hotel. It carried on in all kinds of small ways culminating in the chef-husband driving us to another hotel nearer to the garage, because his hotel closed on Sunday nights and there were no taxis to take us. When we thanked him, he replied simply, ‘It’s normal.’

The family in the hotel, and the maintenance man were all doing their jobs. We paid for the services we received and yet there was a distinct feeling that we received something we could not have paid for, or put a price on. Without fuss they all offered small acts of kindness that transformed their services into more than a business transaction. By being prepared to see us as human beings—and even human beings in a difficult situation—they became more human to us and we could be comforted by their kindness and generosity. When I remember being stuck in that town for three nights it is this that I remember more strongly than all the inconvenience. No-one did anything very out of the ordinary—as the chef said, it was normal—but by infusing their work with kindness they helped to transform a worrying and stressful situation into something manageable. Not a bad result for a day’s work!

Always treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself

The Golden Rule (first formulated by Confucius 551-479 BCE)

Are you sharing an office with someone who talks very loudly when they are on the phone. Or do you feel you do more than your fair share of washing up in the staff kitchen, because you don’t like mess? Is there someone in the work car park who consistently parks sloppily over two spaces and makes life hard for the other drivers? If you answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’, and that ‘yes’ causes you irritation then ask yourself—if I was annoying someone like that person is annoying me, what would I want them to do?

It’s a good question, isn’t it? It immediately defuses a sense of the other person as the source of all the trouble and puts you and them on a much more equal footing. As often as not, you would like someone to tell you that you were causing them irritation because you would rather not be upsetting them and chances are that if you know you are, then you can do something about it—if your phone shouter realizes what they are doing, they can learn to talk more quietly; there could be a staff rota for clearing up and the bad parker could get some help in parking properly. It’s all got to be much better than resentment staying under the surface and building up over time.

Applying the Golden Rule in our work place is an excellent foundation for good communication and conflict resolution. Few of us would want to be gossiped about, ignored, not consulted, or made fun of and get we may find ourselves tending to do that towards a work colleague. We began this discussion by looking at how to show respect to others by finding a way to let them know about their antisocial habits because we would like to know ourselves but what about the more subtle stuff, the behaviour we do not easily see? If we ever find ourselves indulging in a piece of gossip about our boss, or an associate; if we keep our distance from someone because we get the feeling we won’t like them, or if tend to over-look a team member’s input because it challenges our own, then right there we are not applying the Golden Rule. We may dress gossip up as a bit of harmless fun, or justify not liking someone, or call it being skilful to avoid confrontation with opposing views but in fact we need to ask ourselves how we would feel if we over-heard some gossip about our own life, or were told someone did not like to be around us, or were consistently passed over in team discussions. It pretty much certain that it would not make us feel more motivated to get to work each day.

The Golden Rule is not a magic wand. It will not make all the difficulties we have with people at work go away in one clean sweep. What it will do is to help bring the other people closer, to put them on the same level as ourselves. We just need to keep asking ourselves the question: how would I feel if this was happening to me? The answer we get back will give us an accurate and reliable indication of whether we are behaving in the most appropriate way

The person we are at work is often slightly different from the person we feel ourselves to really be—a little more serious, and self-conscious; focused on appearing at our best advantage and trying to keep things right with the people who can effect our working lives. We don’t let our guard down in the same way we can at home, or among friends in case this undermines our sense of being in control, of seeming capable and reliable. In this way our lives become somewhat compartmentalized—who we are at work, at home, with friends, when we are alone. Maintaining all these compartments and the demands of each one is tiring—we may wonder where there is room just for oneself, just to be. Although this may sound like an attractive idea, we may even be unsure what it means to simply be with oneself. We promise ourselves more time to relax, to exercise, to read those books we were interested in as soon as we are past the current demands we’re facing but somehow once those are tackled instead of space opening up on the other side, there’s another list of things that cannot wait. our life, work plays a dominant role in defining how we live, where we live, how happy we are and, to some extent, how healthy we are. The majority of our mornings will be ones in which we get up earlier than we want and get ready for work—some of us will do this as well as getting children to school on time and managing childcare. We’ll negotiate traffic jams and rush hour crowds, grab lunch on the run, and work later more often than is good for us. Holidays will come and go and never quite be long enough, or frequent enough to help us settle into a different, more nourishing rhythm. If we are lucky, our work will stretch and inspire us and we’ll feel as if we can make a difference, offer something back to the world. For others work will stay as something routine—a necessary evil, a means to an end. In any case, we will all get frustrated with work from time to time. We’ll feel pressure to live up to what is wanted from us. Sometimes we’ll find our bosses unreasonable, or overly demanding. We’ll have to work with people that we have nothing in common with and perhaps do not even like. There’ll be arguments and problems and disappointments, as well as times of satisfaction and camaraderie.

Most of the time we are just so busy. Even the devices designed to make life easier seem to add to the amount of activities we need to engage in.

Our mobile phones and computers connect us to the world but they also connect the world to us and it wants our attention 24/7. It gets easier and easier to access a complex range of information via the internet but this also means that we have no excuse for not being informed. Our in-baskets are full of links to articles and U-Tube video clips that work colleagues send us to check out. Unless we consciously switch off all our gadgets, we are constantly available, constantly ‘on’ and if we do take the leap and switch off, there is that nagging sense that we’ll miss something important, and fall behind. We are always engaged in doing something and nowhere is this more apparent than at work, where we may worry that not-doing would seem like a dereliction of responsibility and a way of attracting the disapproval of our boss. Looking busy has come to be equated with being efficient and productive. Taking time to simply be is seen as something for people who have the time to do less—hippy-types, part-time workers, retired people—rather than a vital aspect of our personal well-being and the well-being of the community.

The work of Awareness in Action is about demonstrating that not only are these assumptions not based on experience, or scientific fact but that the opposite holds true—taking time to learn how to be is the basis of a healthy and productive working life. Through working with simple techniques of mindfulness, meditation and training in kindness and empathy it is possible to change our habits at work and learn to accomplish more, with less effort and stress. We are starting this blog in order to share our experience in this area and to provide a forum for people to explore and discuss how they are integrating these techniques into their working lives. We look forward to the exchange—so please write to us and help form the discussion.