part0018

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.”

I don’t know about you, but a lot of my stress comes from a nonstop stream of thoughts, worries, judgements, criticisms, and an endless mental to-do list. Our mind-chatter is exhausting for our brains, and the best way to give them a break is through meditation and mindfulness. In addition to all of the strategies shared in the previous chapter, research has found that practicing gratitude, meditation, and mindfulness can increase our happiness and decrease our stress.

It’s worth spending time every day noticing the good things in our lives and feeling grateful because gratitude is an antidote to stress. The same goes with meditation and mindfulness. Even spending just a few minutes a day in a state of mindfulness, particularly in the midst of stress, can help us feel calmer and more able to handle whatever challenges we are faced with. Mindfulness and meditation can help us be more present in the moment, which can reduce our stress. I often feel anxious or worried when I’m thinking about the future. I can’t tell you the amount of stress I’ve caused myself worrying about things that never came to pass. Meditation and mindfulness have helped me spend less time in the future and more time in the present. When I’m actually paying attention to the present moment, I usually feel calm and relaxed (unless I’m at a children’s birthday party). I began to practice meditation and mindfulness more regularly during the last few years of my mother’s illness, and I was able to find calm and peace in spite of the incredibly stressful circumstances.

Gratitude is something that I’ve come by quite naturally in my life, primarily because I grew up with a younger brother with severe cerebral palsy who had no control over his body. He couldn’t walk or talk or hold his own head up. He had serious medical challenges throughout his entire life, and he was one of the happiest, most loving people I’ve ever known. I learned from him to be grateful for the simplest of things, to love well and to choose happiness in the most challenging of circumstances. I share a lot more of that story in my book Nine Strategies for Dealing with the Difficult Stuff .

Because I grew up with an awareness of how fortunate I was to do basic things like walk and run and talk, I’ve always naturally practiced gratitude.

When we choose a perspective of gratitude, we fight our natural tendency to spend too much time and energy consumed by what’s stressing us out.

Research has consistently shown how gratitude can have huge mood and health benefits for us. An article by Amy Morin called “7 Scientifically Proven Benefits of Gratitude” in Psychology Today shares research about how gratitude is good for us:

Practicing gratitude has helped me come through many challenging times and appreciate the wonderful moments that happen on a daily basis. I’ve kept a gratitude journal off and on over the years. These days, I feel too busy to actually write anything down, but I do make time during my day to notice and express what I’m grateful for.

When you can take a few deep breaths and concentrate on generating feelings of gratitude in your body, rather than just thinking grateful thoughts, you feel even happier. When we feel gratitude, we change the chemistry in our body. Generating feelings of gratitude rather than just thinking about what you’re grateful for is the difference between thinking something is funny and laughing.

The fact that you can take a breath without a ventilator, that you can read these words, that you’re able to drink your favorite drink, or eat your favorite food, or talk to your favorite person are all reasons to feel grateful in any moment.

I have frequently used gratitude as an antidote to some of those life stresses that I can’t control. I was working with a very difficult client for a while, and I could do nothing to influence or change his behavior. So I focused instead on what I felt grateful for.

Every time I came home from seeing this person, I would catch myself beginning to complain to my husband about him, then I would stop and say, “I’m so glad I’m not married to him!” We would both laugh, then I would be filled with gratitude that I was married to my husband. Our focus goes where we allow it to go.

Unlike gratitude, meditation has never come naturally to me. Meditation sounds simple but I find it quite challenging. But it’s worth figuring out how to make it work for you because meditation and mindfulness have amazing mental and physical health benefits. Research shows that “regular meditation can permanently rewire the brain to raise levels of happiness, lower stress, even improve immune function.” 2

Just spending five minutes a day meditating and focusing your mind can significantly decrease your stress, enable you to better manage your emotions and relationships, and can help you be more productive. Companies everywhere are embracing the benefits of mindfulness and meditation: Google, Nike, Apple, General Mills, HBO, Deutsche Bank, and Target to name just a few.

Dr. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist and author of Words Can Change Your Brain , says “the type of focusing involved in meditation activates the brain’s frontal lobe, which is involved in concentration, planning, speech and other executive functions like problem solving. Studies have shown meditation can bolster all of these mental tasks. But the greatest benefits may spring from the interplay between your brain’s focus centers and its limbic system—a set of structures that manage your emotions and regulate the release of stress and relaxation hormones.” 3

When we can slow down and take some time to focus our minds on a single object, thought, or movement, our minds get a rest from their usual busy brain state. This mental relaxation helps us perform our work better and feel less stress. Not only that, but, over time, we’ll get more skilled at handling our emotions and difficult interactions with coworkers, family members, and friends.

Dr. Newberg found that when we meditate, “‘There’s also a softening effect when it comes to emotional responses.’ Just as weightlifting allows your muscles to lift a heavier load over time, working out your brain with meditation seems to fortify its ability to carry life’s emotional cargo. That stress-dampening effect has tied meditation to improved mood and lower rates of heart disease, insomnia and depression.” 4

I’ve never found meditation easy, but it sure sounds a lot easier than weightlifting to me. I tried mindfulness meditation when my mom got sick. I was terrible at it. I couldn’t calm my mind, and I felt like I was failing at meditation. I gave up.

Then, after my brother died, I was in such a deep state of grief that I was having trouble functioning. A friend offered to take me to a ten-day loving-kindness meditation retreat. Ten days! Of total silence. But I went because I didn’t know what else to do. And for whatever reason, perhaps because I was so broken open and ready to surrender to meditation, or perhaps because it was just the right kind of practice for me, it worked. My meditation practice carried me through the final devastating years of losing my mother and the grief that came after she died. I’ve practiced loving-kindness meditation off and on for fifteen years (more off than on if I’m completely honest), and it’s my favorite kind of meditation.

There are a few different apps you can use to guide you through meditation: Calm, Headspace, and Smiling Mind are some of the more common ones. I’ve placed those apps and the websites of some of the leaders in the field of meditation in the resources section. I also have a short six-minute video that guides you through my morning meditation and gratitude practice in the Working Well companion video on my website , if you’d like to use it. I’d suggest trying out different meditation styles and practicing five to fifteen minutes a day for a week or two to find the right type for you. Keep trying different kinds until you find one that feels like a match for you and your busy brain.

In terms of the more common meditation practices that I have been exposed to, they seem to fall into three different categories:

A concentration meditation practice enables you to calm down your monkey mind by concentrating on one thing over and over again. In some situations, this focal point might be your breath: every time you notice a thought, you simply bring your attention back to your breath. Box breathing is an example of concentration meditation: we focus on our breathing and can come back to it every time we get distracted by thoughts.

Another way that you can practice concentration meditation is by looking at an object like a candle flame. Every time you notice a thought arise, you bring your attention back to the candle flame.

You can also practice concentration meditation by choosing a word or a phrase to repeat in your mind. You can use a simple word like “peace” or “calm” or “happiness” or “ease.” You can also use a phrase like: “May I be peaceful, may I be at ease, may I live with gratitude.” When I do my morning meditation, I use a concentration practice called loving kindness, and I send peace and love and ease to people who I love (including myself). I also use this practice as a way to manage the stress I feel when I’m worried about someone. I think of them and repeat the phrases: “May you be peaceful; may you be at ease; may you live with gratitude.” Doing this helps me reduce my anxiety and send them some loving energy when I can’t do anything else to help them.

This type of meditation is focused on noticing and paying attention to our thoughts and our patterns of thinking. In insight meditation, we notice our thoughts, but we don’t identify with them or judge them; we simply observe what’s happening. It’s called insight meditation because you can get a great deal of insight from slowly and mindfully observing your thoughts. When I first started to meditate, I slowed down enough to see that most of my thoughts were sad, and some were fearful.

Rather than identifying with the sad thoughts and becoming sad, I simply noticed that there was a lot of sadness in me. I didn’t judge my thoughts as good or bad; whereas normally, I would think of sadness as a negative feeling. Instead, I let the thoughts roll by and brought my attention to my breath as often as I could. When practicing insight meditation, we observe ourselves with compassion the way we might observe a friend. The goal is not to fix or judge or identify with our thoughts and feelings but simply to notice the patterns we fall into. When we can pay attention to the litany of thoughts running through the mind without judging them, we become more self-aware and compassionate with ourselves.

There are plenty of ways to meditate through movement. Doing yoga, tai chi, or qigong are all forms of moving meditation. You can also just go for a mindful walk, slowing down and noticing your thoughts as well as paying deep attention to everything around you. In a moving meditation, our thoughts will often naturally disappear because we are focused on the physicality of the task at hand. When I’m doing yoga, I’m too focused on not falling over to think about anything. Sometimes, I’m in a particularly painful pose (like pigeon) and I’m pretty sure that I’ll die if it doesn’t end soon. But when I can slow down and notice the thought, I can remind myself that it’s only a sensation. I only feel like my hips will break. They haven’t yet. Likewise, when I’m in tree pose and feeling strong and healthy, I can notice that thought and see how it energizes me.

In the companion video to this course, my phenomenal yoga teacher Hillary Keegan shares some quick, easy poses and stretches you can do throughout your workday. I’ve also included her fifteen-minute video of yoga poses that will put you in a powerful, positive state to start your day.

Yoga is both meditation and exercise, and in my opinion it’s magic exercise: you get stronger and calmer and lose weight, all without breaking a sweat! I’ve included Hillary’s online yoga classes in the resource section and I highly recommend you check them out. Her classes are fun, energizing, and powerful, and I always feel like my body, mind and spirit have all been nourished after one of her classes (and I actually have bicep muscles now!).

This year, I’ve committed to practicing meditation again because I know it’s so good for me. I’ve been practicing fifteen minutes of loving-kindness meditation most mornings and I’m getting to yoga at least twice a week.

Starting to practice again was not easy, and I had to make some different decisions: I chose to allow my children to watch half an hour of TV every morning. It felt like the only way to get that time to myself, and I knew it was worth it for me—for all of us.

I don’t meditate every day and sometimes I set the timer for only five minutes, but I’m meditating far more often than I have in many years, and it’s having a good impact.

On the days when I meditate, I am so much happier because I start each day in a relaxed and loving place. Sometimes that loving happy state lasts about five minutes, until I check my e-mail or try to get the kids out the door for school. Other days, it carries me through the whole day. I find that when I’m meditating more consistently, I can respond to life’s various stressors with ease rather than anxiety.

Similar to the insight-meditation practice, when we practice being mindful, we don’t get caught up in the drama of our thoughts, we simply notice them and don’t judge them. We can apply the same approach to all that is happening around us. Rather than getting caught up in our coworker’s rant about how awful management is, we simply notice that our coworker is feeling upset, without getting upset ourselves. With mindfulness, when our manager appears frustrated and is difficult to interact with, we simply notice the behavior; we don’t judge it, and we don’t take it personally. You can see that mindfulness is at the core of many of the concepts I’ve already shared.

As neuroscientist David Rock explains, research has shown that “mindfulness turns out to be very important for workplace effectiveness.” 5

We only have a sliver of an instant to choose our reaction to an event. Being mindful allows us to slow down enough to make a conscious choice about how we react to stressful situations or people rather than slipping into an automatic response.

Going through our days more mindfully helps us be more thoughtful about how we approach our work, our colleagues, and any stressful situations we encounter.

One of my favorite descriptions of how to become more mindful came from an Eckhart Tolle lecture I attended, in which he suggested that to be mindful is to “come to our senses.” To slow down and be more present, all we need to do is tune into our senses: what are you seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting?

A common exercise to help people reduce their anxiety is to ask them to focus on their five senses. When we pay attention to our physical experiences, we become more grounded in the present moment.

In our fast-paced, always-on world, we never give our busy brains a break. Although it feels counterintuitive, slowing down and taking a deep breath can actually help you be more productive (and more pleasant to be around).

A New York Times article by David Gelles titled “How to Be More Mindful at Work” suggests:

As David Gelles reports in the same article, at Aetna, a large health insurance company, more than ten thousand employees have participated in a mindfulness or yoga class that the company offers, resulting in a healthier and more effective workforce. In a study conducted with Duke University, Aetna found that among those who took part in the classes, there was a 28 percent reduction in their self-reported stress levels, a 20 percent improvement in their sleep quality and a 19 percent reduction in pain recorded in surveys of the participants. They also became more effective, gaining an average of sixty-two minutes per week of added productivity. 6

There are plenty of benefits to slowing down, making some time to meditate, and becoming more mindful on a daily basis. Having attempted various versions of meditation and mindfulness for nearly fifteen years, I’m the first to admit that it’s not easy but it is worth it. When we can find ways to be more mindful in the moment or to practice meditation on a regular basis, we can significantly reduce our stress. And, can you imagine having an extra hour of productivity every week? Not to mention better sleep.

While it can feel challenging to fit gratitude, meditation, and mindfulness into our daily schedules, if we can find ways to do it, we’ll feel better, get more work done and be happier. When we can slow down, we can better manage our emotional reactions, be more thoughtful about our choices and be more present.

Take a few minutes and think of how you can bring more gratitude and mindfulness into your ways of thinking and interacting with others, as it will significantly reduce your stress and improve your relationships .

Let’s all take a few deep breaths, appreciate what’s good in our lives, and give ourselves a reprieve from all those asteroids that are bombarding us. We’ll be calmer, happier, and more capable of whatever challenges come our way.