Below is Part 2 of a three-part series of articles I wrote for Poets & Quants, the premier website destination for MBA applicants. While this article was written with MBA applicants in mind, it is relevant to all business professionals.

In my last article, I proposed that you could alleviate stress, improve your health and energy level, and cultivate competencies that I contend will give you a leadership advantage in the 21st century by practicing meditation. In this installment of this three-part series, I’ll discuss how meditation can significantly boost your cognitive/intellectual performance. In particular, I’ll address how it can enhance your ability to pay attention and focus (which I’ll show may be more important than you think), increase mental flexibility and ability to take numerous perspectives, and help the brain enter states associated with breakthrough perceiving and insight.

My Attention Has Been Hijacked; or Help, I Think I Have ADD! (1)
I have a question for you. How long can you read this article before you switch to do something else, whether it’s to check your email or Facebook, text a friend, do a Google search, watch a YouTube video, or play Angry Birds on your phone? (Actually, do keep track of this as you read this entire article. Be honest with yourself. I’ll admit I checked email while writing this.) How often do you think you switch tasks, more generally speaking? One study found that office workers focused on a project for an average of 11 minutes and then switched to something else; another determined that employees switch activities (type an email, pick up the phone, get something out of the drawer) 20 times per hour. While we human beings are fortunate to have our sophisticated prefrontal cortex—the executive center of the brain involved in planning, pursuing goals, making decisions, focusing, judgment, emotional control, and learning from mistakes—using it is very energy intensive and it has a limited capacity. (Think tiny amount of RAM with big hard drive.) When we change activities, there are switching costs: an increased cognitive load and the release of stress hormones. Because of our processing constraints, repeatedly switching tasks can render us effectively dumber. A University of London study found that frequent emailing and texting reduced mental capability by 5 IQ points for women and 15 points for men!

Why would any rational person behave this way? Scientists such as Jaak Panksepp at Washington State University propose that our stimulation-rich Internet/device environment is highly attractive to the brain’s novelty-seeking mechanism (which scientists speculate developed as a way to get us up out of the cave in the morning to hunt for food way back when). We get a pleasurable rush of dopamine from responding to gadget-generated stimuli, but according to Kent Berridge at the University of Michigan, there’s no satiation threshold for dopamine, so we just keep wanting more. Moreover, dopamine distorts time, so we can easily find ourselves wasting huge amounts of time online or with our devices. Apparently, they weren’t kidding when they called it a Crackberry! I bring this up because as a leader, you want to be in control of your media usage, not have your media in control of you. I’ll say more later about ways to address this.

With three times the amount of information to process in 2008 than we had in 1960 and 24/7 connectivity, we also feel inundated with too much content and too much to do. I’d bet good money that you’ve taken to multitasking to try to get a handle on this. But as pre-Internet philosopher Seneca noted, “To be everywhere is to be nowhere.” Scientists have determined that you can focus on doing only one conscious task at a time. Add another and you’ll experience a sharp decline in accuracy and performance, or you’ll take the same amount time it would have to do them separately. For example, one study found that when adding a second physical task to another physical task, performance degraded by 20%. When a mental activity was added to a physical task, performance fell by 50%! According to research undertaken by Eyal Ophir at Stanford University, it’s also harder for multitaskers to ignore irrelevant information, leading his colleague Clifford Nass to say, somewhat sardonically, “Multitaskers are lousy at multitasking.”

A Non-Prescription Rx
Because they’ve become so integral to how we do business and conduct our lives, the Internet, email, smartphones, and texting are unlikely to go away any time soon. So how do we handle the neurological consequences of having all of this information, connectivity, choice, and speed? Meditation is one of the best antidotes to the problems I’ve just discussed as it builds the parts of the brain associated with attention, particularly strengthening our conflict attention—our ability to continue to attend to something in the face competing stimuli. A number of research studies support this.

In the first article in this series, I mentioned Sara Lazar’s research at Harvard wherein she compared the structures of the brains of long-term meditators with those of non-meditators. In this study, she determined that the parts of the brain that were associated with attention were thicker in the meditators than the non-meditators. Previous studies have established that differences in gray-matter thickness are associated with performance abilities, suggesting that an increase in thickness corresponds to improved functioning in the relevant area. Meditating seems to pump up the attention muscles.

Attentional performance improves as well. Researchers have found that continuity of attention and the ability to process incoming information improve with meditation training. In one study, participants were asked to visually identify two target numbers embedded in a rapid stream of distracter letters. When the second number appeared within a half second after the first number, most participants didn’t notice it prior to receiving meditation training. This phenomenon, known as attentional blink, is believed to result from competition between the two targets for limited attentional resources. After three months of meditation training, participants were better able to detect the second target without compromising their ability to detect the first target, thereby significantly reducing their attentional blink.

Scientists have also begun to investigate if meditation training can help address ADHD proper, which is on the rise. In one feasibility study (no control group), adults and adolescents diagnosed with ADHD participated in an eight-week program modeled in part on the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training. Seventy-eight percent of those participating reported a reduction in total ADHD symptoms and 30% reported at least a 30% reduction in symptoms, with the most significant changes being the reduction of attentional conflict. While there’s more research to be done in the field of attention, I’m hopeful that meditation will become recognized as a powerful antidote to distraction, allowing us to fully attend to our responsibilities, challenges, passions, and relationships.

Before we continue, let’s just take a moment to come back to ourselves. First, notice what it feels like to be reading this article. When I’m reading online, it can sometime feels like my attention and energy have gone up into my eyes and head and even into my screen—I’m not aware of my body sitting on the chair or anything else in my environment. See if you can bring your attention back down into your body if it isn’t already there. Notice your feet on the floor, your butt on your chair, your overall sense of weight. Feel into your hands, your shoulders, your abdomen, your thighs, noticing whatever there is to notice there. Tension? Numbness? Tingling? Relaxation? Whatever is there, let it be as it is. Take the time to reinhabit yourself. When you’re ready, let’s shift gears.

I’m Innovating as Hard as I Can
Feeling compelled to innovate to maintain a competitive advantage and address unprecedented challenges and opportunities such as climate change and globalization, many 21st-century leaders have attempted to foster innovation, be it through brainstorming, sticking lots of colored Post-Its on a wall, or offering employees courses in design thinking. In reviewing the research, I believe that meditating could take innovation to the next level.

For one, research suggests that meditation promotes mental flexibility. In experiments regarding cognitive rigidity, or the tendency to overlook novel and adaptive ways of responding to situations due to past experience, researchers in Israel found that meditators had lower rigidity scores than non-meditators. Both groups were first given a task involving a complex problem-solving method; when faced with a second similar task, the meditators, not blinded by their previous experience, were better able to find a simple novel solution. Think of companies committed to sustainability. Having to radically reconsider what to make, how to make it, and how to deliver it to customers, organizations such as these could greatly benefit from cultivating this capacity.

Second, being able to get into your customers’ and other stakeholders’ shoes is a critical competency when it comes to innovating. In a 2009 study performed on previous non-meditators who participated in an eight-week MBSR training, scientists observed that the grey matter in the regions of the brain associated with being able to assume the perspectives of others increased. Wouldn’t it be an added bonus if you could actually come to understand your partner’s, parents’ or kids’ points of view!

Finally, it also appears that meditation may promote breakthrough thinking and perception. Let me explain how. Mark Beeman of Northwestern University and Stellan Ohlsson of University of Illinois–Chicago have studied the neuroscience of insight.(2) They observed that when people try really hard to solve a problem, their brains aren’t in a state conducive to generating solutions. There appears to be a link between relaxing the mind, generating gamma waves, and having insights. Beeman also noted that those he dubbed “insight machines” tended to have the ability to observe their own thinking and not be trapped by it, which is what I’ll be guiding you to do in the meditation instructions below. One of the leading neuroscientists studying the effects of contemplative practice, University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Richard Davidson, examined the brainwaves of power meditators (long-term Tibetan Buddhist monks) compared to a group of novice meditators. (3) The monks showed off-the-charts gamma-wave activity compared to the novice group, generating a signal of up to five minutes compared to milliseconds for the novices. You don’t have to be a power meditator, however, to generate more gamma waves. Not long after starting to practice meditation, the novices in the study lengthened their signal. It seems that gamma-wave activity is a signature of neuronal activity that knits together far-flung brain circuits, creating an aha! moment. I draw from this that meditation could put our brains in a state in which we’re more susceptible to breakthrough thinking and perceiving.

Let’s Try It
In this installment, I’m going to provide instructions for shamatha, or “peaceful abiding,” meditation, which is a good mindfulness practice for beginners. (If you want to experiment with other approaches, I’ll be happy to talk to you about them.) Shamatha is particularly well suited for calming the mind and developing concentration. Essentially, you’ll be focusing on the sensations of breathing in your body. Picking a place in the body where the sensations of breathing are quite obvious for you—typically the nostrils, chest area, or abdomen—you’ll pay attention to the inhalation and exhalation, the rising and falling that naturally occurs during breathing. You’ll allow your breath to be exactly however it is. If it’s speedy and shallow, that’s what you notice; if it’s slow and deep, that’s what you notice. Whenever you realize your mind has wandered off into thought, you’ll gently bring your attention to the feeling of breathing in your body. If you find it helpful, when you notice you’ve been thinking, you can mentally label this by silently saying to yourself, “Thinking,” and then return your attention to the breath. If an emotion arises, you’ll just allow it to run its course, feeling the emotion while letting the breath be in the foreground of your attention. Sounds simple, right? I’d say this is a classic example of “simple, but not easy”!

You’ll find detailed audio instructions here, but before you give it a try, I want to explain how to approach meditation and address some common myths about the practice.

As I mentioned in my first article, I define mindfulness as “the art of paying attention to present-moment experience in a kind, open, and curious way.” I find it useful to approach mindfulness meditation like a child, a scientist, and a mother. Like a child, you see things freshly; you may encounter each breath, feeling, or thought that arises with a sense of wonder. There’s no right or wrong experience or right or wrong way to experience what’s going on inside you. You’re just playing, but you’re totally engaged. Like a scientist, you use your powers of observation nonjudgmentally (to the extent you can!). I often think of anthropologists who are studying an exotic culture. When noticing some behavior or practice considered quite unusual by our cultural standards, they’d respond, “Hmm, that’s interesting!” rather than “Wow, these people are really screwed up!” In this case, you’re going to be the exotic tribe being studied, and when you think for the twentieth time about how you’re going to tank on the Integrated Reasoning section of the GMAT, you’ll go, “Hmm, that’s interesting!” Like a good mother, you’re kind and gentle with yourself. When you realize your mind has wandered, be like the mom who takes her lost child by the hand and says, “Honey, come back over here.” While I don’t have any hard data to support this, I think that how we come back to the breath is perhaps as important as staying focused or recognizing we have drifted away. I can’t emphasize this enough.

I’d like to dispel two misconceptions that have led many beginning meditators to quit. Many people believe that having thoughts during meditation is a sign of failure. They also think that they should be in a blissed-out state the whole time. These are both myths. Minds generate thoughts, some of which are quite useful, and it’s extremely unlikely that this is going to stop. You may well experience some blissful states and there’s no problem with that. Enjoy them! What we’re aiming to do when meditating, however, is to pay attention to and be with what is actually going on as it is, rather than trying to make anything happen. This may include noticing that there are lots of thoughts and feelings streaming by, some of which may be irritating, negative, heavy, or utterly surprising. I realize this seemingly passive approach is completely counter to most of what seems to have made you successful to date, so bear with me for a moment.

The Tibetan word for meditation is “gom,” which means to “become familiar with.” In this case, we’re becoming familiar with what’s going on inside us without trying to change it; allowing thoughts and feelings to flow through us without suppressing them or acting them out; slowing down enough to see our reactive, habitual patterns, which start to unwind; beginning to have enough space inside to see more clearly what’s really going on around us and responding appropriately; and letting go of the ways we may have tried to control or manipulate our world or have maintained a rigid persona because we no longer feel the need to protect ourselves from feeling certain feelings anymore. This ultimately gives us way more freedom and the courage to live more fully. Perhaps surprisingly, when we attend to our experience in this way, our minds naturally quiet down and we can feel more peace and joy, but this is through allowing, rather than striving. If you find you’re making a project out of meditating, tensing up and trying hard, see if you can let that go. Never take yourself too seriously when you are meditating (or doing anything, for that matter!). At the same time, you aren’t just zoning out or being sloppy. You want to be relaxed yet alert and bring some precision to what you are up to.

For the purposes of this practice, treat all thoughts equally. That means that whether “I wonder who will be at the party” or “I think I’m getting the hang of meditation—I could be good at this” cross through your mind, they’re both thoughts. As such, you let both of them go, perhaps labeling them as “thinking,” and then bring your attention back to the experience of the breath in your body. It’s amazing how many thoughts try to pass themselves off as not thoughts! If you’re like me, to-do items repeatedly arise or you get some great ideas you’re afraid you’re going to forget while meditating. Feel free to keep a pad next to you where you can jot down such persistent thoughts; when you commit them to paper, they stop coming up.

Establishing a Practice
It’s common knowledge that if you want to gain mastery at something, you have to practice it regularly. The same is true with meditation. If you’d like to reap its brain-changing benefits, I recommend establishing a daily practice. You may say you have no time for it, but I assure you that you can eke out 5 or 10 minutes a day to get started. Pick a length of time that’s doable; it’s better to build up your sitting time gradually than to set the bar too high, get discouraged that you can’t hit it, and give up prematurely. Most of the scientific studies have had participants meditating for at least 20 minutes a day five to six days a week, and we’ve seen benefits resulting at that duration, so it would be great to ultimately shoot for at least that amount of time.

Establish a place to practice where you’ll not be disturbed by emails, phone calls, other people, or pets. It can be helpful to set a regular time, as your body will come to expect to meditate then, but this isn’t critical. Some people like to do it first thing in the morning to set the tone for the day. Others like to do it in the evening after they’ve taken care of their to-do list. I prefer to sit in the late afternoon when I can arrange it. Experiment to determine your ideal time of day. I recommend setting an alarm so that you won’t be checking the time every few minutes to see if you’re done yet. (Check out the Insight Timer app.) You may prefer having the structure guided meditations provide, so please make use of the audio files I’ve provided. You may also get the hang of the practice and choose to do it solo. Whatever gets you to practice!

Some people find they can get themselves to meditate if they do it in a group context. If this sounds appealing, contact me about group teleclasses I’ll be offering and courses that may be available in your area. While daily(ish) practice will benefit you tremendously, you can take a quantum leap if you do daylong or longer retreats, where you can go much deeper, and have more time and space to unwind. I can help you identify programs and retreat centers that will be appropriate for your level of practice.

This Week’s Informal Mindfulness Practices
As I noted in the first article in this series, you’ll amplify the results of your formal sitting time if you also practice mindfulness during the rest of your day. Here are two more informal practices with which you can experiment this week. Please feel free to continue to play with the ones I provided in the last article as well.

No doubt, several times a day you’re waiting, whether for your double latte at Starbucks, at the grocery store, on the subway platform, or in traffic. I also suspect that you spend this time on your smartphone, reading email, texting, reading the New York Times, or checking in via Foursquare or Facebook. What if you used your waiting time to put down that device, feel your feet on the ground, take a few conscious breaths, and check in to see what you’re feeling? I can already hear your objections—this email is urgent, I’ve got a lot of reading to catch up on, waiting is so boring—but I invite you to try this at least once daily. Think of it as giving yourself a personal spa moment to regenerate in the middle of a hectic day. If you feel resistant to doing this, I ask you to try an experiment. As you observe yourself beginning to reach for your device, see if you can determine where the urge to do so arises. Where in your body do you register this? Then pause for a few moments. What does it feel like in your body not to automatically use it? Maybe you feel tightness somewhere, a rush of hot angry energy? Is the feeling strong or mild? Now take out your gadget and notice what you’re feeling as you get ready to use it. Do the sensations in your body shift as you begin to engage with the device? Be really curious about what you experience. Even if you still end up using your device, you’ll have engaged your mindfulness muscles and gained insight into what’s compelling you to use it. Do this repeatedly, and you may find yourself having greater choice about how you want to spend your time.

The other informal practice I’d like you to try this week is called “Defining and Defending,” which I discovered in and have modified from Janet Chozen Bays’s book How to Train a Wild Elephant and Other Adventures in Mindfulness. This will help you become aware of the persona(s) you try to maintain. Become aware of how you define yourself and defend your image of yourself. Do you think of yourself as a staunch liberal, conservative, or moderate? Are you proud of having “green” values (and judge those who don’t)? Do you identify yourself as an investment banker or engineer first and foremost? Do you put energy into defending or maintaining these identities? If you get angry or irritated with someone or a situation, check to see whether this is because you feel like your identity is being questioned or threatened. Are there ways you are limiting yourself or your perspective by putting yourself in a particular box? If so, what does this feel like in your body? And who would you be without this label or identity? Would you be willing to drop it for a few hours or days to see what might happen?

I’ll be really curious to see what you discover this week as you try on these practices. Please let us know below. And join me next week as I wrap up this series, discussing how meditation can help you boost your EQ (emotional intelligence).

Recommended Reading:
Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom, Rick Hanson, PhD
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr
Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves, Sharon Begley
Turning the Mind into an Ally, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche
Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long, David Rock

(1) Most of the information in this section comes from David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009), 32–38, 47, 80–83; http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/; and http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2009/08/seeking.html.
(2) Rock, 75–83.
(3) Sharon Begley, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves (New York: Ballantine Books, 2007), 233–39.