EP#7- Mindfulness Beyond Meditation with Erik Dane, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Researcher at Washington University in St. Louis

(gentle music) - Hi everyone, welcome back to Everyday Endorphins. This week I spoke with one of my professors for a class I took this semester called Mindfulness in the Workplace. Professor Eric Dane is an associate professor of organizational behavior at Wash U in St. Louis. In addition to his teaching, Dr. Dane studies managerial cognition. Through conceptual and empirical research projects, he explores how managers focus their attention, solve problems, and make decisions. Topic's central to his research in this area include creativity, epiphanies, expertise, intuition, mindfulness, and mind wandering. Naturally, I was so excited to see this course being listed, so I immediately signed up and I'm so glad to have taken it because I feel like I've just learned so much about what it means to think mindfully and how to understand mindfulness as focusing and honing in on your qualities of attention. I think oftentimes we can flate mindfulness with meditation and not everyone may be so keen to want to meditate for various reasons and I think mindfulness really extends so far beyond what it means to meditate. I hope you guys like this episode. We had such a wonderful conversation. Before we actually get into the episode, I'm going to give a little shout out to Inker, which is the app I use to produce these episodes. I also want to give a little shout out to strive coffee. If you use the code "endorphins", you can receive 10% off your coffee order. And I know, well, I've talked a lot about this in my previous episodes, how much I love coffee and my morning routine really helps me to center myself for the rest of the day. So if you love coffee and you love getting a nice, relaxing, energizing start to your morning, I would highly recommend buying a bag of coffee from strive and using my special promo code "endorphins". Without further ado, here is my conversation with Professor Eric Dane. Thank you so much for coming on to the podcast this afternoon. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here, Stella. Happy to talk about this topic. In fact, as you well know, we just finished our term around my elective mindfulness and performance in the workplace. And so material is hopefully still fresh on my mind. Yes, I think this is great timing that we're recording this episode right as the class has wrapped up. I definitely took a lot away from this course. Something that I really loved about taking this class was learning about how mindfulness isn't just solely connected to mindfulness meditation. Yeah, I mean, so this is an important issue. And I don't want to undersell the merits of meditation itself. I mean, a lot of research, and we see a ton of research on mindfulness across the psychological and health sciences, but a lot of the research is using meditation as the treatment condition, if you will, looking at the whole wide range of positive consequences with respect to both performance and well-being. With that said, meditation is a powerful approach or gateway toward being more mindful, but it's not the only way. The fact is, for some people, for whatever reason, meditation doesn't seem to galvanize them. And I'm never sure if they're just not giving it enough of a chance for weather for some folks. It just doesn't stick. And who knows? But I'm happy to talk about all different ways to become more mindful at work and in life that it makes and beyond meditation. Yeah, I think a lot of people, if they associate meditation and mindfulness together, a lot of people are kind of thrown off by that because meditation seems like this scary daunting task to have to sit down for 30 minutes and just focus on your breath. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about what it means to be mindful and how you can foster that in ways that don't necessarily involve meditating. Yeah, so really important material here. But to try to put this into a nutshell, mindfulness is concerned with being present, being present to the here and now in terms of what's happening around us and also what's happening within us, sort of inter-psychoplate. That could be thoughts and emotions and intuitions and so on and so forth. So it's simply centering the mind in present moment time. And if you think about, there's all sorts of ways to meditate. And I know, again, we'll get into going-- the idea of going beyond meditation is a way toward becoming more mindful. But most approaches to meditation would, of course, be similar to what it is described. For example, following the breath or paying attention to one's emotions or one's thoughts. At core, this idea of mindfulness really is concerned with being present moment oriented or centered. Yeah. And in the course that we just finished, we talked a lot about how there are just mindless errors in the brain. There's the availability, heuristic, the confirmation bias. There's all these different psychological mechanisms that are happening that I think were naturally programmed to not be very mindful. So it takes that extra effort to cultivate being in the present moment and adopting a mindful approach in your thinking. Yeah, absolutely. And so one thing we did was we drew a distinction between mindfulness in terms of attention and then mindfulness in terms of styles of thinking. And you're right. We talked about mindless errors, which are essentially the various cognitive biases that get a lot of airtime these days. And when we fall victim to these biases, when we're essentially relying on autopilot modes of cognition, we're not fully here. We're relying on these simplistic cognitive shortcuts. So again, when you get into the realm of mindfulness, it's both being centered and attentive to the present. And if we want to bolster that, it also involves thinking in ways that involve enhanced vividness or creativity ultimately. So you can do that. Mindfulness is both, again, sort of an intentional set of skills and also a cognitive set of skills. Yeah. And you've done a lot of research on mindfulness as being an intentional set of skills. We've coined the term qualities of attention when thinking about where mindfulness may lie on that matrix. And I love for my listeners to learn a little bit more about where mindfulness falls along that cube spectrum of qualities of attention. Sure. Yeah. And so that kind of came about because I was thinking about, is mindfulness the only, ultimately, productive or healthy state to be in in the realm of attention? And it kind of occurred to me, well, there's also this idea of what's called flow or absorption or being totally kind of encroached or engaged in a particular task. And we know that can be quite conducive to high achieving high quality performance as well. So then the question becomes, OK, maybe it's not so much just mindfulness in and of itself. It's what various states of attention are exceptional useful. And then by extension of which states of attention are not so useful. So that leads to this idea of qualities of attention. A good way to think about that would be maybe our conversation right here, maybe podcasts listeners can go through this thought exercise. The first dimension to consider would be stability, which is your mind where you want it to be. So I'm making the assumption here. But if you're intending to be fully attentive to our conversation here, is that what your mind is? Or is it running away from this conversation? So that stability is my mind where I want it to be. Then there's the idea of attentional vividness, which is essentially a matter of how vivid or fine-grained are my thoughts in the moment. A lot of our life is lived on autopilot to the point where it's actually hard to remember what we've been doing, even that same day. But if you're thinking about life in terms of looking for novelty or thinking about what's interesting here, maybe cross checking the-- in your mind, if what we're saying makes sense to you, or even challenging in your mind, you're enhancing the vividness of your attention in this moment. And then the other dimension that you mentioned would be this idea of breath. And that's a way to look at the difference between mindfulness and that state of flow or absorption, which I just mentioned. Where when we're mindful, we're pretty wide. We're trying to take in what's happening again, both around us and within ourselves. Whereas if you think about when you're getting just fully immersed, it could be in whether it's a paper or a spreadsheet or certainly if you're doing so in your passion about performing your instrument or something, you can be so in a zone that you're actually blocking out much of what's happening in the world around you. So in that case, you would have a more narrow breath of attention. And that can be just fine, too. And so this idea of breath of attention is not necessarily a good or bad thing. It kind of goes back to the nature of the task itself, and whether you want to be taking in as much as you can or screening out as much as much might be useful. Yeah, and I used to play the violin for like 10, maybe 15 years. I've lost count at this point. But I remember when I would practice and really get into whatever piece I was learning or a section of the piece I was practicing, I really did experience that flow-like state where everything else is blocked out. And you're so focused on this one task. It is kind of meditative in a way. And so I'm wondering, is there really this distinction between being in a flow-like state and also being very mindful. Yeah, you know, and the point to add there is that to be in a flow-like state, this is essentially this occurs when the challenge of the task at hand perfectly matches my skills in that task domain. And so I would imagine that you develop the ability to find your flow, right, while playing the violin only after you've had practiced fairly extensively, right? At first it's just frustrating when you're learning a new sport or a new instrument, and you don't feel like you're in any kind of flow state, you know, you kind of throw up your arms, and it's just kind of infuriating sometimes, but as you develop those skills and those skills start to match that challenge of the task, it essentially fully immerses you, right? You're performing right at the edge of your abilities, and it's kind of thrilling to be there. So this is an exciting state of attention to, you know, for people to pursue at work and in life. And again, I'm drawing this distinction and saying that's not precisely what mindfulness is, and that's not to minimize the merits of mindfulness. It's just to look for more subtleties in this realm of attention itself. Yeah, and during one of the first lectures, I remember you describing mindfulness as some sort of irony. Can you talk a little bit about what exactly this irony is, but with mindfulness in our society? Yeah, so, and I like to frame my teaching and even some of my research papers around this. So the irony is on the one hand that mindfulness is very much in vogue. Okay, you see all sorts of popular press, you know, articles and books on this topic, podcasts on the topic. There's certainly a massive surge of, as I said, of academic research here. So, and there's crosstalk, right? The more we see the merits of mindfulness, the research, the more the discussion there is in society and kind of vice versa. So that's all, you know, that's that's all one part of this equation, but the flip side of this, which makes the whole thing kind of an irony, is that we don't seem to be especially mindful as society in part due to how distracted we are, especially due to digital distractions, perhaps, but there's a lot of concern that our attention spans are on the decline and that we're facing with someone called, you know, it's sort of a deterioration of attention in society and a type of attention crisis. And so what do we make of this tension? On the one hand, we keep talking about mindfulness. On the other hand, we don't seem to be especially mindful at all. So I think that sets up this interesting juxtaposition. And so the question that I always pose is, you know, how do we, how can we find ways to be more mindful or, you know, to fill in higher qualities of attention in a world where the challenges to that end are perhaps more formidable than ever. Yeah, and you mentioned technology as well. We spent a whole class section talking about mindfulness and technology and the digital distractions that exist. And with everything being virtual now, all my classes are over Zoom. I find it increasingly challenging to pay attention because when I'm looking at my computer screen, I have my email open and I have my phone right beside me. And there's all these distractions that are pulling me in so many different directions. So it's very hard to stay focused, even when I'm really interested in something that's being discussed in class or I enjoy the class. Yeah, I mean, and I'm not, you know, I don't want to be, I don't want to send to a reactionary. I don't want to throw technology under the bus. I mean, in many ways, it's a godsend that we have advanced technology in the year 2020. I'm not sure how we possibly continue forward with an academic year like this otherwise. And so like with many things, I think there's elements of both a blessing and a curse here, right? I mean, even the fact we're doing this through Zoom right now is just, this is a terrific medium through which to work. But as you said, you know, how many things are also maybe simultaneously for some folks popping up on their phone by way of notifications is your outlook open right now as well. What sort of chirps and, you know, blanks and beeps and lights are flashing all around us at all the time. So, you know, the challenge here is it's I mean, I wouldn't suggest that we do away with technology altogether. But the question is how we manage it in ways that still protect our attention ultimately. That's a hard question to answer. And I suspect that many of my peers and my friends are facing very similar issues that I have been recently with doing Zoom class and just being on our phones all the time. I think our generation in particular has grown up with social media in such a increasingly digital age and social media, as we talked about in class, actually, the documentary, the social dilemma talks all about how social media can really affect one's mental health in a very detrimental way. So, I was wondering if there are any sorts of strategies or ways that we can try to be more mindful with the technology we have. Yeah, absolutely. And there are, of course, many strategies. There's a number of books and TED talks on this topic. You know, one thing I would recommend is to kind of make this mindful and exercise in its own right. So, and we talked about the value of curiosity in class. So, becoming much more tuned to or curious about your own uses habits around whether it's social media or any number of apps on the phone. So, really spending more time contemplating or reflecting upon, okay, what am I doing here? Did I just check this? Didn't I just check this? What am I doing back on the same app right now all of a sudden? And then even at a more micro level, trying to notice the sort of emotional burst that can happen. What does it feel like when you get one more text message after one more after one more, right? What does it feel like as I keep scrolling down on Instagram or Facebook, right? I mean, these things are designed to grab us and hold us there, but are we really experiencing, you know, happiness or joy or is there sort of a background homie of anxiety that's being either created or perpetuated in the moment as we engage with these apps? And I think so fine to helping, you know, thinking through how do we fine tune ourselves to this sort of subtle emotional content that's being provoked can be a mindfulness exercise. Yeah, and we talked all about paying attention to emotions in one of our class lectures and ways, I think you showed photos of people's faces on the projector screen. Basically, we were looking to assess whether or not we can accurately describe people's emotions. More often than not, I think we mis-describe people's emotions. We're not as good as reading them as we might think we are. Yeah, that's exactly right. So there's really interesting research here on how expressed emotion doesn't always reveal underlying emotion very well at all. And yet we always assume we can kind of read other people based on whatever emotional expression they're projecting in even in a short amount of time. So we're up against that challenge and then sort of more generally given our point about distraction. I'm not sure how closely we're tuned to facial expressions these days ever. I mean, you know, compared to in the past. So, you know, if you're buried in your phone, right, you're literally not seeing somebody else's face. Or if you have all these racing thoughts, they're again kind of activated by whatever you're seeing in social media. Again, how sort of thoroughly are we attuned to that person right across the table from us at the coffee shop, or whatever? Maybe not as much as we think. Exactly. Because oftentimes, if I'm out to dinner with my family or with my friends and we're all on our phones, we're missing the present moment. And if you're trying to have a conversation with someone and you're looking at your phone texting or scrolling or you have it next to you and you have that immediate instinct to pick it up and look at it, you're missing exactly what's happening in that present moment. Yeah. And it's once you start looking at exactly the describe a restaurant or coffee shops, it's hard to unsee it. In other words, the number of people who are only kind of halfway there because they're constantly phone checking is it's a way of light for so many folks. But if you can find a way to step back and take that in and not to judge it, you know, we made a big deal in class out of avoiding judgment. So it's understandable that folks are on their phones as much as they are. And again, these products are designed to do that to us. It's why we have to be especially careful. But the more you see it, the more I think unsettling it becomes and the more salient it becomes. Exactly. And we also talked about different strategies we can use to limit these digital distractions, one of which being just getting your phone outside of the space in which you're doing work because simply having it next to you is a distraction. Are there any other strategies you might recommend for people my age or really anyone to hone in on their attention and really decrease or minimize these digital distractions? Yeah. And you're right. It's sort of affecting every one of every age these days, isn't it? That's how powerful these apps are in terms of their programming, their design. So you're right. We talked about the value of if you could do this given whatever work circumstances you have of leaving the phone in another room. It's worth experimenting with turning off apps. Some people have found a way to put their phone on grayscale mode. It's when it's not colorful, it's sort of less exciting to engage with. More generally, the hack we talked about in class would be out of sight, out of reach, out of mind. And so I think we underestimate the value of just essentially hiding the phone from ice, eyesight even. Yeah, definitely. I do want to transition a little bit into how mindfulness can really help us in the workplace. I'm wondering how can practicing mindful strategies now enable students to be working individuals once they graduate from college? Yeah, and I'm interested in this from a research standpoint in terms of the link between mindfulness and individual level job performance. And so in line with your question, I think about and theorize these things in terms of individuals within organizations more than sort of a top down. perspective from the organization towards its members. So this is the right question for people who are graduating now to engage with is, okay, this mindfulness stuff sounds pretty interesting to me. Maybe I'm already doing some, you know, practice in the space, but what's going to hold? You know, what habits can I develop that will make me more present-minded to what I'm doing at work in ultimately kind of healthier, better off as a result? And it's really got to be whatever resonates with you and that you think you can continue to practice day and day out. And you know, kind of going back to where we started here. Meditation and you know, there's apps, there's plenty of apps around the meditation space. This is great if that works for you in terms of it being part of your daily practice. But if you keep saying yourself, I don't know if I have 10 minutes today to meditate or I really have to meditate. Is this really worth my time? Is this research all it's cracked up to be? You know, then maybe it's not the ideal way to practice mindfulness on a daily basis. So for example, in class, you know, one of the activities we did was out on campus, you know, selecting the strategy to focus on the world around you. So it could be looking at, you know, buildings you've never noticed before, you know, looking for certain types of colors like a scavenger hind. And what we found was that that too kind of centers us in the moment and almost literally opens our eyes to more things in the world around us. Well, if that's the kind of thing you could do as you're walking into your work site, okay, maybe that serves you very well. If there's any number of sort of personal tips, techniques or hacks that could well serve somebody, and I think the key is to cultivate this attitude of curiosity and experimentation to get there. Yeah, this is also a really great segue into your research on the traveler's mindset and adopting curiosity on a day-to-day basis to really feel like you're adopting a more expansive worldview. And I think this is more important now, like more than ever, because we actually can't travel. So I'd love for you to discuss a little bit about your research on what the traveler's mindset is. Yeah, sure. And so think about it this way. Think about the last time you traveled somewhere that was for you new, maybe me, you know, in this day and age, it's sort of painful to think that to that, of course. But you know, maybe it was an international trip that you took within the last few years, say, odds are you could remember and tell us a number of details about that trip, like where you stayed and who you met along the way, what sort of adventures happened for both better and for worse, perhaps, traveled by its very nature, induces the states of both curiosity, you know, confusion, certainly, again, when it's somewhere new, but also curiosity. I mean, the mind is rapidly and deeply making sense of the world around, you know, in order to tell you whether this is, you know, safe or work your time or what's worth, you know, attending to or exploring this new environment. Mindfulness is sort of heightened or amplified under these conditions of involving novel travel. My contrast on a day-to-day basis, if we're just kind of on our routine, it's hard to remember, right? Even at the end of one day, kind of what happened during the course that day. So that would be the opposite of a travel what we call a traveler's mind. So the traveler's mind is this enhanced, like fully mindful, fully present state, and that's to be contrasted with what the way we experience life on a more mundane, you know, every day, of course. So the question becomes, how can we kind of infuse day-to-day life with a bit more of something akin to a traveler's mind at least? And as you said, that kind of goes back to this idea of novelty. Can we find, you know, new things and cultivate curiosity around those things, at least to some degree with each day? Yeah, this reminds me of childlike curiosity, approaching every new opportunity or thing that you see as something full of endless possibility or opportunities. When I was younger, I remember like really wanting to grow up and all the adults I would speak to were like, no, you want to stay a child, like enjoy this time. It goes really fast. And I know I'm still very young, but it's obviously not the same as being like 10 years old, for example. So I think now I'm starting to kind of understand why that childlike curiosity is something we constantly are striving for or we feel nostalgic about and it's so hard to achieve that kind of mindset in especially right now the chaos of what's happening in the world. Yeah, absolutely. Sputtle on this idea of a child's mind or from some some perspectives there's this concept of the beginner's mind and the beginner's mind is open to possibility and the sort of the double edge sort of developing greater knowledge or enhanced expertise in life is that we whether we know it or not, whether we want this to happen or not, once we know what we know, we kind of preclude other possibilities, right? We kind of think we know it's not possible as well. It takes the seemingly more naive person to open our ideas to possibilities that were right there in front of us, which just, you know, have become we've been conditioned ourselves to ignore essentially. Yeah, and you would also discuss how there's strategies we can adopt when we're actually traveling to adopt more of a traveler's mindset and also there are ways we can try to adopt a traveler's mindset in our day-to-day life. Can you describe some of the ways for hopefully when we can begin to travel again to have a more a greater sense of curiosity when we're traveling? Yeah, well, to begin, you've got to want to do it. I mean, some people are reluctant travelers. I mean, basically, I'll just literally have to twist their arm to go in some sort of new trip. And again, there's no judgment there. Some people are just less, less open to experience than others. But if you do this reluctantly, it's probably not going to cultivate the full blown travelers mind that we're talking about. But we also talked about techniques like going off the beaten path. So, you know, just because a guidebook tells you to do something, okay, that's fine, but it's often these explorations that we do when we kind of break from whatever either guidebooks or people have advices to do. Again, assuming we keep, you know, good judgment as we do so in the process, that we have some of our memorable experiences along the way. So sort of going native as it were is supposed to sticking with the tourist group and meeting people who are true locals in a different city or country can be quite useful. So that's on the travel front. And then there's the question, how do we cultivate a traveler's mind on a everyday basis, you know, at work? And it could be something as simple as changing your commute that day. So driving a different route or taking a different mode of, you know, transportation, it could be something as simple as spending time on a different floor of your office building or meeting people in a different department that you just wouldn't normally take the time to meet. And these things turn out to be more memorable and oftentimes more informative to our performance even than we anticipate. Yeah, this is really helpful because as students, we're not in the working world yet. So we really don't know what that experience is going to be like until we graduate and we have our first job. So I think this is really valuable advice and things to learn right now is we're finishing up our studies and transitioning into our first job and just being able to already have ideas of what strategies could help us feel more empowered in our in our work lives. Yeah, I mean that's that's the hope and the dream here, right, is that this material is going to prove useful and perhaps even inspiring certainly to people entering the workforce. But but again, you know, in line with this conversation might might even you know, produce some insights for those who feel kind of stuck in a rut at work for that matter. Yeah, and this this reminds me when we're talking about the definition of mindfulness or the concept of what mindful thinking is life is challenging. We all face struggles on a day-to-day basis and some small anxieties or larger anxieties and we can often adopt very ruminating thought patterns. You brought up the really interesting idea of what a second arrow is and how that relates to mindfulness and being attuned to our own thoughts and emotions. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what these second arrows are. Sure and this the idea of the second era really struck is pierced through me no pun intended earlier this year when I took my own course on mindfully. I took a mindfulness-based stress reduction course and so I want to give credit where credits do I learn about that concept there and then I integrated it into the course and so second arrows are the thoughts that perpetuate suffering and so if you think about it by means of an example, you know, one that we used in class let's say that you're in a meeting at work and somebody says something that insults you okay and it makes you angry and that's totally understandable and you wouldn't be human not to be angry in that moment but as many of us know what often happens which is counterproductive is that you spend essentially the rest of that day ruminating and thinking about oh why didn't I have the snappy come back or why is that person so mean or you get even wider you know what I can't trust that it went in life what kind of what kind of organization is this what a terrible culture why did I sign up for this and once you start spinning in these you know mental into these spirals this ends up being a greater source of suffering than whatever was inflicted you know the first arrow that was shot through you which was what produced the anger in the first place and so look it's easier said than done to pluck out second arrows from our lives but this is what a lot of I'd say both mindfulness training ultimately therapeutic avenues toward human flourishing kind of help people cultivate is minimizing the impact of these second areas that we kind of inadvertently inflict ourselves with Yeah, and in college, I think some examples of these second arrows may be, "Oh, I failed this exam." I am not smart enough feeling having imposter syndrome or feeling FOMO, which I do want to get back to because I love the idea of JOMO that we talked about in class. But there's all these negative thoughts that we can think on a daily basis. At a school like WAPSU, where the average student is incredibly high-achieving and does so many different things, it can feel very easy to be in that comparison game. And so these second arrows are constantly cycling in our mind. So I'm curious to know, how mindfulness, maybe not meditation, but just mindfulness in general, can help take away these second arrows and intervene in those habit loops and reverse those thought patterns. Yeah, I mean, the broad thing rough against here is how quickly we identify with our thoughts. Right, so if I have these ruminations around, that provoke this anger or suffering of any number of forms, and my mind starts shurning through all these possibilities, I kind of forget that, look, these are just thoughts. I can take a step back here and recognize that they're not who I am. Right, at the end of the day, thoughts arise and recede in the same way that sounds or sensations or conversations or any number of other stimuli simply arise and recede. And for whatever reason as humans, we tend to identify with or put so much stock into whatever happens to, whatever thought happens to populate consciousness at any given point in time. And so I think what mindfulness training does for us is simply to help us recognize, look, the thought is just a thought and nothing more. And a story that we're telling ourselves is just a story and nothing more. And it helps us kind of unwind these ruminations spirals and therefore kind of cuts them short in a healthy way. And so I think even having this terminology, hopefully even conversations like this kind of open our eyes to the fact that we're getting caught up in our own thoughts so much at the time in ways that can be a bit maladaptive. Yeah, definitely. I mean, even if you're in conversation with someone, it's very hard to even be present what they're saying because you're thinking in your mind, how am I going to respond to this or you're thinking about something completely different and you're not actually focusing on the present moment. So yeah, we're thinking about what are they thinking about me? So I'm having a conversation with you, but my mind is nonetheless, you know, hopefully not too much right now. And I'm actually trying to focus on the content of the conversation. But so often in life, it could be a job interview, for example. It would be totally natural for this to happen, but you're not just answering the question, you're thinking, how am I doing with this? I think, you know, how are they evaluating me right now? Am I the only candidate? You know, somebody with somebody answer this question better than I. These are all just thoughts which produce all this noise, which make us uncomfortable, ultimately. Definitely. And yeah, and I think a lot of college students suffer with mental health issues because of these ruminating thoughts that occur. And not necessarily everyone has the ability to, like, you know, utilize a toolkit like this so that they can identify when these thought patterns occur and intervene quickly enough so that they they can reverse that pattern in their mind. And I think, you know, going back to this concept of meditation, we know that meditation is a great practice to help us stay more in the present and acknowledge the thoughts that pass by without any judgment and let them go kind of like a wave crashing at the shore and then coming back. But I really love how we can talk about mindfulness in a way that's separate from meditation, because you don't necessarily need to sit down and count your breaths to find ways to intervene when that second arrow hits. Yeah, I think that's very well said. So again, you know, people need to find what works well for them. And I think these concepts are the right ones to talk about, but the specific practices have to be cultivated a bit idiosyncratically. Yeah. And in our last class session, you left us with a few main takeaways towards the very end of the lecture. And one, I'd love to talk a little bit about it's the idea of Jomo. So not FOMO, fear of missing out, but Jomo, what is Jomo? Yeah, and again, I don't want to take credit. I've seen that term out there in the ether as well, although it's not as popular yet as FOMO. So of course, FOMO being fear of missing out, Jomo being the joy of missing out. And I talked about that in the context of FOMO being such a popular thing to both discuss and lament. And one point I like to make is that look, we can only be one place at a time. And in a way, we're therefore missing out when everything else is happening on planet Earth right now. Okay, that's just the nature of life. Right, and there's nothing we can do about that. So we might as well celebrate that. In other words, try to be fully present where we are. Like I'm having, you know, this is a nice conversation right here. And so I'm just going to be grateful that we're having this. And I'm not going to become preoccupied with whatever exciting, you know, developments there are, whether it's around St. Louis or the World War generally right now. I mean, once we start doing that to ourselves, you can't win that game. And again, it just creates more consternation in ourselves. Yeah, definitely. And I'm the type of person to want to be in like 50 different places at once. But I really like this idea of the joy of missing out because the nature of living is that you're, you can only do one thing at one time. You can only be in one situation at one time. So naturally you're going to miss out on every other possibility. Thinking about that by definition makes it a bit easier to be okay with missing out on other things that are happening. And I, on college campuses usually, I mean, this year, this can't happen because of COVID. But there's parties that are happening or social gatherings. And it can feel very stressful. This also ties back into our discussion with technology to see on Instagram or Snapchat or all these other platforms what people are up to 24/7. And that can really, you know, hurt our mental health in a really bad way. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that point up. Stress and anxiety just around seeing what others are doing via social media is definitely a big part of film-o. Right? So people have film-o in part because they're, they're being bombarded by these images of people, you know, their friends and family, you know, smiling away somewhere exciting. And of course, as we know that may or may not even encapsulate what that hike up the mountain was really like for them. And then the other side of all this is if you're so captivated by social media, you're on it a lot. There's film-o just being away from it, right? You feel like you're missing the latest headlines, you know, as it were. But you have to ask yourself, is it really that important to be following all these people all the time? Exactly. And I think now because we're basically stuck at home all the time, I feel like a hermit all the time. It's a bit easier to not feel like I'm missing out on anything because nothing is really occurring. But I think over time now in college, I've gotten to a point where I feel less swayed by what other people are up to. And that's a very liberating feeling. And I wish I had felt that way, maybe my freshman or sophomore year. Yeah. Yeah. Now that's, that's well said. And you know, we obviously were unfortunate circumstances compared to many of these days. But I think, I think this is just it. I mean, in most people's lives, these days are any days. You know, there's high points and then there's low points. And then there's just any number of sort of just days that are, you know, not necessarily here nor there. And that's why I don't think it's always healthy to go through life, just chasing all these great highs. It's kind of hard to make your way through life with that being your philosophy, right? It's more about cultivating as much as we can. And the, you know, otherwise, what we consider otherwise, sort of mundane moments. Exactly. And finding something very beautiful and special in the simple things that occur in our day to day. I've found that writing down what I'm grateful for every day or just journaling about or having like a brain dump in the morning has helped me to kind of clear my headspace and focus my attention more on the very simple joys, which is obviously easier said than done and happens more successfully on some days than others. But as you said, it's, I think it's about finding that strategy that works for you of mindfulness and committing to it, which will help produce long-term beneficial effects. Yeah. No, that's, that's what I said. And those are great practices. And it kind of reminds me of something else I emphasize in class, which is that incremental improvement is the way to think about this. In other words, like you said, some days are better than others, right? Or you're able to stick to these, these awesome practices more effectively in some days. And that's again, the nature of life. And we don't need to beat ourselves up because we missed the meditation session or because we just feel kind of blah today. That's fine. You want to look at improvement over a much longer time window than just ending one hour of one's life, right? So there's no need to cast any kind of second arrows around such things. Exactly. Well, you've done such incredible research in this field and especially applying mindful practices and mindfulness research into the context of the workplace and the work environment. I am curious if you have any last pieces of advice or key takeaway for my listeners who are either at the beginning of college or just about to graduate and enter the workforce about mindfulness and how to cultivate a more mindful approach to their day-to-day life. Just to kind of reiterate this idea of a traveler's mind, I think is a good one. I mean, if you, whatever it takes so that at the end of the day, you can think back and, you know, maybe there weren't highlights per se, but there were memorable moments that you were able to achieve as a result of your own mindfulness practice. And again, finding what works for you, and so it could be meditation or it could be any number of other things, but like I said in class, I mean, attention is the bedrock skill. It's the bedrock phenomenon around which cognition, decision-making, problem solving, and in some ways leadership, all hivots. Right? If we're not leveraging our attention effectively, we're just not going to perform as well as we're capable of, and we're actually just not going to be as well off from a well-being standpoint, as all of us would like to be. So think about attention as sort of the cardinal skill to start with to develop. Yeah, thank you for that. That's very helpful. And after taking this class, I feel like I've learned so much over the course of the past six or seven weeks, and I'm excited to try to apply these different strategies in my routine instead of just meditating, also trying to find small moments throughout the day where I can adopt more of a traveler's mindset. Here is one last question I'd like to ask you, and it's something I ask every single guest I bring on to the podcast. It relates to happiness and well-being and endorphins, which is the name of this podcast. What is something that brings you a bit of endorphins every day? Yeah, well, I'm in Forest Park pretty much every day. So this one's pretty easy for me, running or walking and thinking about this very type of material. So that's my happy place and that's why I love living right by the park. Yeah, definitely. That's funny you mentioned that because the other day I went for the six mile walk around the perimeter of the park. I did that before my 10 am class and I was very early in the morning and I was like, "I don't want to have to get up to go." But when I got out there, it was so beautiful to watch the sunrise and be by myself and just walk for a long extended period of time and get outside in the fresh air. So I think there really is something to be said about having solitude and being in nature and using those spaces to really help focus you in the present moment. Absolutely. I mean, go for a mindful walk and see how that works for you. Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you so much, Eric. I appreciate you coming on to the podcast. It was a pleasure. Thanks so much. [Music]