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BREATHING BUDDIES

Drive to the dead end at the farthest reach of a street on the east side of New York City’s Spanish Harlem and you find an elementary school, P.S. 112, snuggled between the FDR Drive, a Catholic church, a parking lot for big-box stores, and the massive Robert F. Wagner low-income housing compound. The kindergartners through second graders who attend P.S. 112 come from hardscrabble homes, many in those low-income apartments. When a seven-year-old there mentioned in class that he knew someone who had been shot, the teacher asked how many other children knew a shooting victim. Every hand went up. As you enter P.S. 112, you sign in at a desk manned by a police officer, albeit a kindly older woman. But if you walk down the halls as I did one morning, what’s most striking is the atmosphere: looking into classrooms I found the children sitting still, calm and quiet, absorbed in their work or listening to their teacher. When I drop by Room 302, the second-grade classroom of co-teachers Emily Hoaldridge and Nicolle Rubin, I witness one ingredient in the recipe for the halcyon atmosphere: breathing buddies. The twenty-two second graders sit doing their math, three or four to a table, when Miss Emily strikes a melodious chime. On cue, the kids silently gather on a large rug, sitting in rows, cross-legged, facing the two teachers. One girl goes over to the classroom door, puts a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the outside knob, and closes it. Then, still in silence, the teachers hold up Popsicle sticks one by one, each with a student’s name—a signal for the pupils to go individually over to their cubbies and bring back their special, fist-sized stuffed animals: striped tigers, a pink pig, a yellow puppy, a purple donkey. The boys and girls find a spot on the floor to lie down, put their stuffed animal buddy on their belly, and wait, hands to their sides. They follow the directions of a man’s friendly voice leading them through some deep belly breathing, as they count to themselves, “one, two, three,” while they take a long exhalation and inhalation.1 Then they squeeze and relax their eyes; stretch their mouth wide open, sticking out their tongue; and squeeze their hands into a ball, relaxing each in turn. It ends with the voice saying, “Now sit up, and feel relaxed,” and as they do, they all seem to be just that. Another chime, and still in silence the kids on cue take their places in a circle on the rug, and report on what they experienced: “It feels nice inside.” “I felt very lazy because it calmed my body.” “It made me have happy thoughts.” The orderliness of the exercise and the calm focus in the classroom make it hard to believe eleven of the twenty-two kids are classified as having “special needs”: cognitive impairments like dyslexia, speech difficulties or partial deafness, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, points on the autism spectrum. “We’ve got many kids with problems, but when we do this, they don’t act out,” says Miss Emily. But the week before, a glitch in the school day meant Room 302 skipped this ritual. “It was like they were a different class,” says Miss Emily. “They couldn’t sit still; they were all over the place.” “Our school has some kids who are highly distractible,” says the school principal, Eileen Reiter. “This helps them relax and focus. We also give them regular movement breaks—all these strategies help.” For example, says Reiter, “Instead of using time-outs, we teach kids to take ‘time-ins,’ to manage their feelings,” part of an emphasis on teaching the students to self-regulate rather than relying on punishments and rewards. And when children do have problems, she adds, “We’ll ask them what they could do differently next time.” Breathing buddies is part of the Inner Resilience Program, a legacy of the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Thousands of chilnear the twin towers were evacuated as the buildings went up in flames. Many hiked miles up the emptied West Side Highway, their teachers walking backward to be sure the children were not looking at the horrific specter behind. In the months afterward, the Red Cross asked Linda Lantieri—whose conflict resolution program had already been successful in many schools—to design a program to help the children (and teachers) regain their composure after 9/11. The Inner Resilience Program, along with a range of social and emotional learning methods, “has transformed the school,” Reiter says. “It’s a very calm place. And when kids are calm, they learn better. “The biggest piece is getting the kids to self-regulate,” principal Reiter adds. “Because we are an early childhood school, we help students learn how to put their problems in perspective and develop strategies to resolve them. They learn to size up how big a problem is, like getting teased or bullied—it’s big when someone hurts your feelings. Or middle-sized, like being frustrated with your schoolwork. They can match the problem to a strategy.” The classrooms in P.S. 112 all have a “peace corner,” a special place where any child who needs to can retreat for time alone to calm down. “Sometimes they just need a break, a few moments alone,” Reiter adds. “But you’ll see a child who is really frustrated or upset go over to the peace corner and apply some strategies they’ve learned. The big lesson is to tune in and know what to do to care for yourself.” While five- to seven-year-olds get instruction in the breathing buddies exercise, from eight and up they practice mindfulness of breathing, which has proven benefits both for sustaining attention and for the circuitry that calms us down. This combination of calm and concentration creates an optimal inner state for focus and learning. Evaluations of a one-semester version of the program found that the children who need greatest help—those at “high risk” for derailing in life—benefited the most: significant boosts in attention and perceptual sensitivity, and drops in aggressiveness, downbeat moods, and frustration with school.2 What’s more, teachers who used the program increased their sense of well-being, auguring well for the learning atmosphere of their classrooms. THE STOPLIGHT

In a preschool, songs play as eight three-year-olds sit at a low table, each one coloring in the thick outline of a clown. Suddenly the music stops—and so do the kids. That moment captures a learning opportunity for any three-year-old’s prefrontal cortex, the site where executive functions like squelching an unruly impulse take root. One of those abilities, cognitive control, holds a key to a well-lived life. Stopping on cue is the holy grail of cognitive control. The better children are at stopping when the music stops—or making the right move and not the wrong one while playing Simon Says—the stronger their prefrontal wiring for cognitive control becomes. Here’s a test of cognitive control. Quick now, in what direction is the middle arrow pointing in each row? arrows.jpg

When people take this test under laboratory conditions there are detectable differences (as measured in thousandths of a second—not so detectable by you or me) between them in the speed with which they name the middle arrow’s direction. The test, called the “Flanker” for the distracting arrows that flank the target one, gauges a child’s susceptibility to distractions disrupting concentration. Focusing on the middle arrow going to the left and ignoring all the others headed right takes lots of cognitive control for a youngster, especially over the arduous course of a series of arrays like this. Kids gone wild—the ones whom frustrated teachers kick out of their class, or want to—suffer from a deficit in these circuits; their whims dictate their acts. But rather than punishing kids for this, why not give them lessons that help them manage themselves better? For instance, preschoolers who had sessions learning to focus on their breath showed more accurate and faster performance on the Flanker.3 Perhaps no mental skill—as the New Zealand study found—matters as much in life success as executive control. Kids who can ignore impulse, filter out what’s irrelevant, and stay focused on a goal fare best in life. There’s an education app for that. It’s called “social and emotional learning,” or SEL. When second and third graders in a Seattle school are getting upset, they’re told to think of a traffic signal. Red light means stop—calm down. Take a long, deep breath and as you calm down a bit, tell yourself what the problem is and how you feel. The yellow light reminds them to slow down and think of several possible ways they might solve the problem, then choose which is best. The green light signals them to try out that plan, and see how it works. I first encountered stoplight posters when I was touring the New Haven, Connecticut, public schools while writing an article for the New York Times—well before I appreciated the crucial attention training the poster guides kids through. The stoplight rehearses the shift from bottom-up, amygdala-driven impulse to top-down, prefrontal executive-driven attention. The stoplight exercise was the brainchild of Roger Weissberg, a psychologist then at Yale who in the late 1980s developed a pioneering program called “social development” for New Haven’s public schools. Now that same image can be found on the walls of countless thousands of classrooms worldwide. And for good reason. Back then there was only spotty data suggesting that getting kids to respond this way to their anger and anxiety had positive impact. But now that case has become about as strong as any in social science. A meta-analysis of more than two hundred schools with social and emotional learning programs like New Haven’s social development curriculum compared them with similar schools without such programs.4 The findings for those with the programs: classroom disruption and misbehavior down 10 percent, attendance and other positive behavior up 10 percent—and achievement test scores boosted by 11 percent. In that Seattle school the stoplight exercise was coupled with another. The second and third graders were regularly shown cards of faces with different expressions and their names. The kids talked about what it’s like to have one of those feelings—to be mad or scared or happy. These “feeling face” cards tone up a seven-year-old’s emotional self-awareness; they connect the word for a feeling with its image, and then with their own experience. That simple cognitive act has neural impact: the brain’s right hemisphere recognizes the feelings depicted, while the left understands the name and what it means. Emotional self-awareness requires putting all that together via cross-talk in the corpus callosum, the tissue that connects the brain’s left and right sides. The stronger the connectivity across this neural bridge, the more fully we can understand our emotions. Being able to name your feelings and put that together with your memories and associations turns out to be crucial for self-control. Learning to speak, developmental psychologists have found, lets children call on their inner don’t to replace the voice of their parents’ in managing unruly impulses. As a duo the stoplight and the feeling cards build two synergistic neural tools for impulse control. The stoplight strengthens circuitry between the prefrontal cortex—the brain’s executive center, just behind the forehead—and the midbrain limbic centers, that cauldron of id-driven impulses. The feeling faces encourage connectivity across the two halves of the brain, boosting the ability to reason about feelings. This up-down, left-right linkage knits a child’s brain together, seamlessly integrating systems that, if left to themselves, create the chaotic universe of a three-year-old.5 In younger children these neural connections are still budding (these brain circuits don’t finally finish maturing until the mid-twenties), which explains kids’ zany, sometimes maddening antics, where their whims drive their actions. But between ages five and eight, children’s brains have a growth spurt in their impulse control circuits. The ability to think about their impulses and just say “no” to them makes third graders less wild than those boisterous first graders down the hall. The Seattle project’s design took full advantage of this neural building boom. But why wait until grade school? These inhibitory circuits start tobirth. Walter Mischel taught four-year-olds how to resist those luscious marshmallows by seeing them differently—for example, focusing on their color. And Mischel is the first to say that even a four-year-old who just can’t wait and grabs the marshmallow right off the bat can still learn to delay gratification—impulsivity is not necessarily something he’s stuck with for life. In a day when online shopping and instant messages encourage gratification now, kids need more help with that practice. One strong conclusion by the scientists who studied the Dunedin, New Zealand, kids was the need for interventions that boost self-control, particularly during early childhood and the teen years. The SEL programs fill the bill, covering the years from kindergarten through high school.6 It’s intriguing that Singapore has become the first country in the world to require every one of its students go through an SEL program. The tiny city-state represents one of the great economic success stories of the last fifty years, as a paternalistic government built a diminutive nation into an economic powerhouse. Singapore has no natural resources, no great army, no special political sway. Its secret lies in its people—and the government has intentionally cultivated these human resources as the driver of its economy. Schools are the incubator for Singapore’s outstanding workforce. With an eye toward the future, Singapore has partnered with Roger Weissberg, now president of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, to design emotional intelligence–based lesson plans for its schools. And for good reason: one conclusion by economists involved in the Dunedin study was that teaching all kids these skills could shift an entire nation’s income up a few notches, with added gains in their health and a lower crime rate. MINDFULNESS-BASED EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

The attention training that kids get at P.S. 112 mixes well with the rest of the Inner Resilience Program, which stands as a model of best practices in the social and emotional learning movement. I became a cofounder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning—the group that has facilitated these programs’ spread to thousands of school districts throughout the world—while writing my book Emotional Intelligence. I saw lessons in emotional intelligence—that is, in self-awareness, self-management, empathy, and social skills—as synergistic with standard academic courses. Now I’m realizing that the basics of attention training are a next step, a low-tech method for boosting neural circuitry at the heart of emotional intelligence. “I’ve done SEL for years,” Linda Lantieri tells me. “When I added the mindfulness piece, I saw a dramatically quicker embodiment of calming ability and the readiness to learn. It happens at earlier ages, and earlier in the school year.” There seems to be a natural synergy between SEL and attention training like mindfulness. When I spoke with Weissberg, he told me the organization had just undertaken a review of the impacts of mindfulness in SEL programs. “Cognitive control and executive function seem crucial for self-awareness and self-management, as well as academics,” Weissberg said. Deliberate, top-down attention holds a key to self-management. The parts of the brain for such executive function mature rapidly from the preschool years to about second grade (and the growth of these neural networks continues into early adulthood). These circuits manage both “hot” processing of emotional moments and “cool” processing of more neutral information, like academics.7 This circuitry seems surprisingly plastic throughout childhood, suggesting that interventions like SEL can enhance it. One study taught attention skills to four- and six-year-olds in just five sessions of playing games that exercise visual tracking (guessing where a duck swimming underwater will surface), spotting a target cartoon character within an array of distractions, and inhibiting impulse (clicking if a sheep comes out from behind a bale of hay, but not if a wolf emerges).8 The finding: the neural scaffolding for both emotional and cognitive abilities was enhanced. The brains of four-year-olds who got this brief training resembled those of six-year-olds, and those of the trained six-year-olds were well on their way to neural executive function seen in adults. Though a gene controls the maturation of the brain regions that handle executive attention, such genes are in turn regulated by experience—and this training seems to have sped their activity. The circuitry that manages all this—which runs between the anterior cingulate and the prefrontal areas—is active in both emotional and cognitive varieties of attention regulation: managing emotional impulse as well as aspects of IQ like nonverbal reasoning and fluid thinking. An older dichotomy in psychology between “cognitive” and “noncognitive” abilities would put academic skills in a separate category from social and emotional ones. But given how the neural scaffolding for executive control underlies both academic and social/emotional skills, that separation seems as antiquated as the Cartesian split between mind and body. In the design of the brain they are highly interactive, not fully independent. Kids who can’t pay attention can’t learn; they also can’t manage themselves well. “When you have elements like regular quiet time,” says Lantieri, “a Peace Corner where kids can go on their own when they need to calm down, and mindfulness, you get more calmness and self-management on the one hand, and enhanced focus and the ability to sustain it on the other. You change their physiology and self-awareness.” By teaching kids the skills that help them calm down and focus, “we lay a foundation of self-awareness and self-management on which you can scaffold the other SEL skills like active listening, identifying feelings, and so on. Back when SEL started, Lantieri tells me, “We were expecting kids to use their SEL skills when they were hijacked, but they couldn’t access them. Now we realize they need a more basic tool first: cognitive control. That’s what they get with breathing buddies and mindfulness. Once they experience how this can help them, they get the confidence, ‘I can do this.’ “Some kids use it during tests—they wear a Biodot,” a small plastic dot that changes color as skin temperature (and so blood flow to that area) shifts. This “tells them when they are getting too anxious to think well on the test. If it says they need to, they use the mindfulness to calm and focus themselves, and then go back to the test when they can think more clearly. “The kids understand that when they don’t do well on a test, it’s not because they are stupid, but that ‘When I’m super-nervous it’s in there but I can’t access it. But I know how to focus and calm—then I’ll get to it.’ They have the attitude I’m in charge of myself now—I know what to do that can help.” The Inner Resilience Program is in schools from Youngstown, Ohio, to Anchorage, Alaska. “It works best,” Lantieri says, “when combined with an SEL program—all these places do that.” CUTTING THROUGH THE HODGEPODGE

The scientific literature on the effects of meditation amounts to a hodgepodge of bad, good, and remarkable results in a mix of questionable methodologies, so-so designs, and gold-standard studies. So I asked the dean of contemplative neuroscience, Wisconsin’s Richard Davidson, to sort through it all and summarize the clear benefits for attention of mindfulness practice. He immediately ticked off two big ones. “Mindfulness,” he said, “boosts the classic attention network in the brain’s fronto-parietal system that works together to allocate attention. These circuits are fundamental in the basic movement of attention: disengaging your focus from one thing, moving it to another, and staying with that new object of attention.” Another key improvement is in selective attention, inhibiting the pull of distractors. This lets us focus on what’s important rather than be distracted by what’s going on around us—you can keep your focus on the meaning of these words instead of having it pulled away by, say, checking this endnote.9 This is the essence of cognitive control. Though so far there are just a few well-designed studies of mindfulness in children, “[i]n adults there seems to be strong data on mindfulness and attention networks,” according to Mark Greenberg, professor of human development at Pennsylvania State University.10 Greenberg, who himself is leading studies of mindfulness in young people, is cautious but optimistic.11 One of the bigger benefits for students is in understanding. Wandering minds punch holes in comprehension. The antidote for mind wandering is meta-awareness, attention to attention itself, as in the ability to notice that you are not noticing what you should, and correcting your focus. Mindfulness makes this crucial attention muscle stronger.12 Then there are the well-established relaxation effects, such as the calm emanating from a breathing buddies classroom. This physiological impact suggests a downshift in the set point for arousal in the vagus nerve circuitry, the key to staying calm under stress and recovering quickly from upsets. The vagus nerve manages a host of physiological functions, most notably heart rate—and so the quickness of recovery from stress.13 Higher vagal tone, which can result from mindfulness and other medto greater flexibility in many ways.14 People are better able to manage both their attention and their emotions. In the social realm they can more easily create positive relationships and have effective interactions. Beyond such benefits, mindfulness meditators show symptom lessening in a remarkable range of physiological disorders, from sheer jitters to hypertension and chronic pain. “Some of the biggest effects found with mindfulness are biological,” says Davidson, adding, “It’s surprising for an exercise that trains attention.” Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, which triggered a worldwide wave of mindfulness deployed in thousands of hospitals and clinics, and in society at large, from prisons to leadership development. He tells me, “Our patients typically come in because they’re overwhelmed by stress or pain. But there’s something about paying attention to your own inner states, and seeing what needs to change in your life. People on their own stop smoking or change the way they eat and start losing weight, though as a rule we never say anything directly about these.” Almost any variety of meditation, in essence, retrains our habits of attention—particularly the routine default to a wandering mind.15 When three kinds of meditation were tested—concentration, generating loving-kindness, and open awareness—each technique quieted the areas for mind wandering. So while gaming offers one promising venue for enhancing cognitive skills, mindfulness and similar attention-training methods present an alternative or complement. The two training approaches may be merging, as in the breathing game Tenacity. When I spoke to Davidson he told me, “We’re taking what we can learn from meditation research and adapting it for games, so the benefits can spread more widely. Our research on attention and calming informs the games’ design.” Still, methods like mindfulness seem to offer an “organic” way to teach focusing skills without the risks that endless hours of gaming pose for de-skilling kids in the social realm.16 Indeed, mindfulness seems to prime brain circuitry that makes us engage the world more, not withdraw.17 Whether a well-designed game can do the same for the brain’s social circuitry remains to be seen.18 Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel of the University of California, Los Angeles, describes the wiring that links attuning to ourselves and attuning to others as a “resonance circuit” that mindfulness practice strengthens.19 A well-connected life, Dr. Siegel argues, begins with the circuitry for mindfulness in the brain’s prefrontal executive centers, which do double duty: they are also at play when we attune in rapport. Mindfulness strengthens connections between the prefrontal executive zones and the amygdala, particularly the circuits that can say “no” to impulse—a vital skill for navigating through life (as we saw in part 2).20 Enhanced executive function widens the gap between impulse and action, in part by building meta-awareness, the capacity to observe our mental processes rather than just be swept away by them. This creates decision points we did not have before: we can squelch troublesome impulses that we usually would act on. MINDFULNESS AT WORK

Google is a citadel of the high IQ. I had heard that no applicants get a job interview there unless they can show test scores putting them in the top 1 percent of intellect. So when I gave a talk on the emotional kind of intelligence at Google some years ago, I was surprised to find an overflow crowd in one of the biggest meeting rooms at the Googleplex, with monitors broadcasting my talk to people in overflow rooms. That enthusiasm was later channeled into a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence course at Google University called Search Inside Yourself. To create that course, Google’s employee No. 107, Chade-Meng Tan, teamed with my old friend Mirabai Bush, founder of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, to design an experience that enhances self-awareness—for example, by using a body scan meditation to tune in to feelings. An inner compass helps greatly at Google, where many business innovations have come from the company’s policy of giving its employees one free day a week to pursue their own pet projects. But Meng, as he’s known widely, has a larger vision: to make the course available far beyond Google, particularly to leaders.21 Then there’s the newly formed Institute for Mindful Leadership, which is located in Minneapolis and which has trained leaders from Target, Cargill, Honeywell Aerospace, and a host of other companies around the world. Another mecca has been Center for Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, in Worcester; it has a training center for executives. Miraval, a posh resort in Arizona, has offered an annual CEO mindfulness retreat for several years, taught by Jon Kabat-Zinn, whose work at the center he founded unleashed the mindfulness movement. Mindfulness programs have been deployed by groups as diverse as the chaplaincy unit of the U.S. Army, Yale Law School, and General Mills, where more than three hundred executives are applying mindful leadership methods. What difference does it make? At a biotech firm where the Google Search Inside Yourself program was delivered, early data suggests mindfulness boosts both self-awareness and empathy. Those who took part in the training showed increases in specific mindfulness skills, including a greater ability to observe and describe their own experience, and to act with awareness, said Philippe Goldin, a psychologist at Stanford, who assessed the program’s effects. “The participants said they had become better able to use self-regulation strategies—like redirecting their attention to less upsetting aspects of loaded situations—in the heat of the moment when their attention was being hijacked,” Goldin added. “They’re building the muscle of attention deployment so they can choose what aspect of experience to attend to. It’s a volitional redirection of attention. And they’re more able to use these attention skills when they are really needed. “We also found a boost in empathic concern for others, and being able to listen better,” Goldin said. “One is an attitude, the other the actual skill, the muscle. These are vitally important in the workplace.” One division head at General Mills came to the mindfulness course there to get a breather from feeling overwhelmed. She brought a taste of mindfulness back to work, where she asked her direct reports to take a reflective pause before asking her to a meeting. The aim of that pause was to question the need for the division head to spend her time at that meeting in the first place. The result: What had been a nine-to-five schedule of back-to-back meetings opened up into three hours daily for her own priorities. These questions are designed to provoke a person to reflect on his or her level of mindfulness:22 • Do you have trouble remembering what someone has just told you during a conversation? • Have no memory of your morning commute? • Not taste your food while eating? • Pay more attention to your iPod than the person you’re with? • Are you skimming this book?

The more “yes” answers, the greater the likelihood you zone out rather than tune in. Mindfulness gives us a greater level of choice in focus. Mindlessness, in the form of mind wandering, may be the single biggest waster of attention in the workplace. Focus on our experience in the here and now—like the task at hand, the conversation we’re having, or the building of consensus in a meeting—demands that we tune down the all-about-myself murmurs of mind stuff irrelevant to what’s going on right now.23 Mindfulness develops our capacity to observe our moment-to-moment experience in an impartial, nonreactive manner. We practice letting go of thoughts about any one thing and open our focus to whatever comes to mind in the stream of awareness, without getting lost in a torrent of thoughts about any one thing. This training generalizes, so that in those moments at work when we need to pay attention to this and drop our stream of thought about that, we can let go of the one and focus on the other. Mindfulness training decreases activity in me-circuitry centering on the medial prefrontal cortex—and the less self-talk, the more we can experience in the moment.24 The longer people have been mindfulness practitioners, the more their brain can decouple the two kinds of self-awareness and activate circuits that foster a here-and-now presence for the task at hand free of the mind’s “me” chatter.25 Building executive control helps especially for those of us for whom every setback, hurt, or disappointment creates endless cascades of rumination. Mindfulness lets us break the stream of thoughts that might otherwise lead to wallowing in misery, by changing our relationship to thought itself. Instead of being swept away by that stream we can pause and see that these are just thoughts—and choose whether or not to act on them. In short, mindfulness practice strengthens focus, particularly executive control, working memory capacity, and the ability to sustain attention. Some of these benefits can be seen with as little as twenty minutes of practice for just four days (though the longer the training, the more sustained the effects).26 Then there’s multitasking, the bane of efficiency. “Multitasking” really means switching what’s filling the capacity of working memory—and routine disruptions from a given focus at work can mean minutes lost to the original task. It can take ten or fifteen minutes to regain full focus. When human resources professionals were trained in mindfulness, then tested on a simulation of their daily frenzy—scheduling meetings for conference attendees, locating available meeting rooms, proposing a meeting agenda, and so on, while receiving random phone calls, texts, and emails telling them what’s possible—the mindfulness training improved their concentration noticeably. What’s more, they stayed on task longer and more efficiently.27 I was at a meeting in the office of More Than Sound (a production company run by one of my sons) when our focus meandered: there were parallel conversations going on, and some people discreetly checked their email. That disintegration of our shared focus was a moment familiar from hundreds of other meetings—a signal that the group’s efficiency was tanking. But suddenly one of the people there said, “Time for some mindful moments,” got up, and rang a small gong. We all sat there together in silence for a few minutes until the gong rang again, and then resumed our meeting—but with renewed energy. A remarkable moment for me, but not at More Than Sound, where, it seems, the team assembles at irregular intervals to share some minutes of mindfulness, signaled by that ringing gong. The group pause, they say, clears their heads and gives them a new burst of energized focus. It’s no surprise this small publisher recognizes the value of mindfulness; when I dropped by it had just released Mindfulness at Work, an audio instruction by Mirabai Bush, the woman who introduced mindfulness to Google. SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE

Business leaders are increasingly pressured by the acceleration of complexity in the systems they need to navigate: there’s the globalization of markets, suppliers, and organizations; the hyperspeed of evolving information technologies; impending ecological dangers; products coming to market and becoming obsolete faster. It can make your head spin. “Most leaders just don’t pause,” a seasoned leadership coach tells me. “But you need the time to reflect.” His boss, the head of a mega-sized investment management firm, put it this way: “If I don’t protect that kind of time, I really get thrown off.” Former Medtronic CEO Bill George agrees. “Today’s leaders are besieged. They’re scheduled every fifteen minutes throughout the day, with thousands of interruptions and distractions. You need to find some quiet time in your day just to reflect.” Setting aside some regular reflective time in the daily or weekly schedule might help us get beyond the firefight-of-the-day mentality, to take stock and look ahead. Very diverse thinkers, from Congressman Tim Ryan to Columbia University economist Jeffrey D. Sachs, are calling for mindfulness as a way to help leaders see the bigger picture.28 They propose we need not just mindful leaders, but a mindful society, one where we bring a triple focus: to our own well-being, that of others, and the operations of the broader systems that shape our lives. Mindfulness of self, Sachs argues, would include a more accurate reading of what makes us truly happy. Global economic data shows that once a country reaches a modest level of income—enough to meet basic needs—there is zero connection between happiness and wealth. Intangibles like warm connections with people we love and meaningful activities make people far happier than say, shopping or work. But we can be poor judges of what will make us feel good. Sachs argues that if we are more mindful of how we use our money we will be less likely to fall prey to seductive ads for products that will not make us any happier. Mindfulness would lead us to more modest material desires and to spend more time and energy fulfilling our deeper, more satisfying needs for meaning and connection. Mindfulness of others at the societal level, Sachs says, means paying attention to the suffering of the poor and to the social safety net, which is badly fraying in the United States and many other advanced economies. He argues that while now the poor are helped just enough to barely survive, that simply creates intergenerational poverty. What’s needed is a one-generation boost in education and health for the poorest children so they can go through life with higher levels of skills and so not need the same kind of help their families did. To that end I’d add programs, like mindfulness, that boost the brain’s executive control. In Dunedin the kids who happened to improve their self-control over the course of childhood derived the same earnings and health benefits for life success as those who always were adept in delaying gratification. But those impulse control upgrades were due to happenstance, not achieved by plan. Wouldn’t it make sense to teach these skills to every child? Then there’s awareness of systems at the global level, like the human impact on the planet. Solving systems-level problems takes systems focus. Mindfulness of the future means taking into account the long-term consequences of our own actions for our children’s generation and their children’s, and beyond.