Why Meditate?
Decades of scientific research have validated meditation’s benefits for human health, well-being, and performance. Below is a brief summary of findings presenting a compelling argument for why meditation can benefit you, your cause, or your organization.
Attention
Technology has given us access to unparalleled power, but it has also left us exposed to endless distraction! Billions of dollars are spent every year by politicians, marketers, and technologists in an all out brawl for the scarcest resource on the planet: our attention!
In order to leverage the power of technology for positive change, we must be able to maintain focus even when we are continually ambushed with with red icons, aggressive notifications, and click-bait headlines specifically designed to hijack our hindbrains and take us off-course. Mindfulness strengthens our ability to quickly recognize when we’ve strayed from our intention and realign to our goal, with laboratories showing that the regular practice of focus meditation thickens grey matter in the pre-frontal cortex, the area of the brain responsible for attention, memory, and conscious decision-making.
Resilience
The western world is seeing an epidemic of stress-related illness and “Diseases of Despair”. Depression and anxiety disorders have been on a steady rise, with suicides and overdoses increasing as a result. While the human suffering alone should prompt us to take action, these diseases also have a severe economic impact. Burnout can strike anyone, disrupting careers and business goals, and organizations routinely report insurance costs for hypertension, anti-anxiety, antidepressant drugs as a top driver of personnel expense.
We can’t change stress, but we can change our relationship to it. Research has shown that an 8-week course in mindfulness meditation can decrease stress, depression, and anxiety symptoms at the same strengths as pharmaceutical solutions with fewer side effects. Additionally, meditation reduces hyperactivity in the amygdala, our brain’s stress center. Meditation is empowering pathway to relief from these psychological ailments, and companies like Google, Aetna, Intel and others are now offering mindfulness training to employees with powerful results.
Innovation
“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein
In a 2015 survey by Harvard Business Review of more than 5000 board members from 60 companies, 30% ranked a lack of innovation as a top challenge to achieving their strategic goals. To stay current or disrupt major industries and cultural trends, we must be nimble of mind to see beyond “the way it’s always been done” and discover ways it can possibly be done to advance our causes and values.
Research has shown meditation increases the presence of “gamma-wave oscillations”, a brain pattern associated with “Aha!” moments of insight. In meditation practice, we train ourselves to maintain a “beginner’s mind”, treating every moment, no matter how mundane with the full curiosity we would devote to a new experience. This allows us to escape our tendency to run on the autopilot patterns we’ve developed through habit and observation, creating the space for new solutions to be discovered.
Self-Awareness
In recent decades, behavioral economists have detailed a long-list of unconscious processes that bias our decision-making without our awareness. Mindfulness meditation allows us to curiously observe our own inner workings, and research has shown that regular practice increases the size and activation of our insula, the area of the brain responsible for interpreting the visceral signals from our bodies that communicate our emotional state.
Meditation empowers us to become aware of unconscious forces so we may gain mastery over them, leveraging our emotions to inform our decisions rather than allowing ourselves to be governed by them. With regular practice, we can choose how we want to show up, shed destructive habits, and structure our environments to support our ambitions.
Empathy
“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” - Theodore Roosevelt
In a world that is growing increasingly politically and socially polarized, change-makers must be able to empathize with the perspectives of those whose minds and hearts they wish to change. Mindfulness helps us develop the presence and curiosity to listen fully to others as well as mastery over our reactivity to ideas that we find threatening or disagreeable.
Effective leaders must be able to listen to those they disagree with them and speak to them in a language that resonates. Regular meditation practice has been shown to increase activity in the tempo-parietal junction, an area of the brain associated with compassion, perspective-taking, and empathy.
Additional Reading
To learn more about the research and case for meditation described above, I recommend the following books:
Meditation Interventions to Rewire the Brain: Integrating Neuroscience Strategies for ADHD, Anxiety, Depression & PTSD (2017)
Jeff Tarant, PhD, BCN
An incredibly rich and practical guide to using meditation for self-improvement. I personally find the greatest contribution to be Tarrant's work to be his detailing of how different types of meditation (i.e., focus vs open-monitoring) are ideal for specific goals. This corrects an oft-levied criticism of meditation research as generalizing findings across different meditation styles and types in an unsystematic way.
For more of Jeff’s work, check out the NeuroMeditation Institute in Eugene, Oregon, USA!
Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body (2017)
Daniel Goleman, PhD & Richard Davidson, PhD
A fantastic, encompassing historical review and “state-of-the-field” from two renowned mediation research pioneers. These authors bucked pressure early in their careers and risked academic suicide to apply the scientific method to meditation at a time when the topic was considered taboo in scientific circles, planting the seeds for the explosion of interest in the topic today.
Mindfulness in Organizations: Foundations, Research, and Applications (2017)
Edited by Jochen Web and Paul W. B. Atkins
An academic presentation reviewing the history and current state of the intersection of meditation and Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Chapters review workplace applications of meditation including stress-reduction, creativity, and leadership development.
Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2015)
Sam Harris, PhD
While meditation is often associated with Buddhist and Hindu traditions, even atheist philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist Sam Harris is a fan. If you have an interest in meditation but get the heebie-jeebies from its religious roots, this book is for you.
For more of Sam’s work, check out his podcast and meditation app at his website.
A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit (2014)
Congressman Tim Ryan
Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan presents his case for why mindfulness is crucial at this moment in American History, with suggestions and applications for our education system, political system, and treatment of veterans. The book also contains an impressive list of mindfulness related resources of organizations.
Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace) (2014)
Chade-Meng Tan
A lighthearted exploration of mindfulness from Google’s “Jolly Good Fellow”. Chade-Meng documents the underlying philosophy of Google’s Search Inside Yourself program, a leadership and wellness program that develops mindfulness, self-awareness, and emotional intelligence.
Thinking Fast and Slow (2013)
Daniel Kahneman, PhD
The bible of behavioral economics, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman lays out in painstaking detail with hundreds of examples the many ways in which the human brain unconsciously takes shortcuts that bias our decision-making. Be warned, once you learn what this book has to teach, you can’t forget it! This book radically shifted how I approach every human interaction.
The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them (2012)
Richard Davidson, PhD with Sharon Begley
Davidson lays out his model for Emotional Style, detailing how our neurological wiring impacts our emotional patterns and their impact on our behavior. A champion of neuroplasticity, Davidson offers practical techniques for shifting our emotional styles, with meditation being a powerful tool for doing so.
For more of Richard’s work, check out the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Madison Wisconsin, USA!