Podcast: How meditation can benefit your career

We spoke to clinical psychologist Dr. Megan Jones Bell to learn more about how to apply mindfulness to your career. Listen to our podcast to find out all the different ways you can use meditation for job success.

Given the current climate, there has been an increased focus on the importance of looking after our mental health, not only for the obvious benefit of our wellbeing in our personal lives, but also to support career satisfaction and development, both now and in the future.

In this episode of the podcast, we were joined by Dr. Megan Jones Bell, a former Chief Strategy and Science Officer at mindfulness and meditation app; Headspace. She shared her expert insights on how meditation and mindfulness can improve your overall mental health and wellbeing, but also benefit your career.

Podcast key timestamps

Could you tell us a little bit about yourself as well as Headspace and the work that you do there?

(01:21) I am a clinical psychologist by training, and I’ve spent my career designing and researching evidence-based digital health offerings across the mental health continuum. A lot of my work is focused on prevention of mental health problems, as well as ensuring access to effective care.

At Headspace, we have built the world’s most popular mindfulness solution. Our app addresses guided meditation and we also offer an expansive library of different sleep offerings. This includes our signature Sleepcasts designed to help you fall asleep.

We’ve also added a Focus mode as well as mindful movement. So, while it started with meditation only content, we’ve expanded it to help our audience understand how to apply mindfulness to multiple aspects of their lives.

What sparked your passion for supporting mental health and working in that area?

(02:40) Well personally, I grew up with a Mum who experienced very chronic and severe mental health problems. So, I experienced first-hand, the consequences of a culture that doesn’t allow us to talk about what’s really going on with mental health. For me, being unable to get support for the effects that her mental health problems had on me as a teenager, I ended up developing my own.

It was after I got effective care for my own mental health issues when I was 18 to 19 years old that I decided, this really could have been prevented in my case because I responded really quickly to therapy as soon as I got access to it. I was determined to turn this negative experience into something that could be beneficial to others and use that experience towards growth for me personally.

I was really interested in learning, how do I prevent this from happening to other people? How do I make sure that they get the care they need quickly? That has really been the motivation behind my career so far.

Have you seen attitudes change towards mental health in the workplace since the beginning of the pandemic?

(04:20) Well, it’s changed a lot. I think if you look at the workplace approach to mental health, employers over the last five to seven years have been really contemplating what their role is in addressing the mental health of their employees. I think we’ve seen a trend towards more of what I might consider early adopters, more progressive companies electing to offer benefits like Headspace to their employees.

Covid-19 and the multiple associated additional crises have accelerated the change that was already happening. I think that the main point I want to emphasise here is that this change was already in progress, particularly in the UK. We’ve culturally seen much more public conversation about mental health and a lot of efforts to reduce stigma, creating the space for us to empower people to address their mental health.

Employers have certainly been a key part of this change. What we’ve seen in our own data associated with Headspace’s work offering, which we call Headspace for work, is a dramatic acceleration.

So, companies that were thinking about offering Headspace in the next three to six months, were on the phone with us in March and April 2020 saying, “Can we launch this week?” There was a new sense of urgency and conviction among employers that they really did need to make specific tools available to help their employees’ health.

Do you think this is a positive trend that will continue for employees in the future?

(06:24) I really hope it will continue in the future and I believe it will because this change has been building for a while. It’s not just an artefact of Covid-19, this pandemic just shined a light on this need that has always been there, but it did accelerate the pace of change. Now that we are more aware of mental health, employees really do expect and want their employers to look after their mental health.

I don’t think you’re going to put that genie back in the bottle now that we’ve brought that to life. It’s hard to give employees support like mental health resources and then turn around and take them away later. That wouldn’t be a popular move, especially given the research that shows that when employers look after the mental health of their employees, that benefits everyone. It benefits the company, it benefits individuals and I think this will increasingly be the expectation of employees.

According to the 2020 mental health trends report by Headspace, 89% of workers think that their company should be offering mental health benefits to their employees. What have you found that organisations are doing to support their employees to practise good mental health?

(07:53) I think that the most progressive companies are thinking about addressing mental health in a comprehensive way. What I mean by this is that they are trying to create a culture within the organisation that allows people to take the time to address their mental health. This means that they create opportunities within the course of the work day to support healthy routines around taking restorative breaks.

That’s one of the ways we see companies use Headspace as they actually integrate a short meditation into the beginning of a meeting. We’ve also seen organisations create a Slack channel if it’s a digitally focused employee base, to allow people to get support from each other around learning and applying mindfulness.

We’ve seen great success when leaders are personally engaging in routines like Headspace or other things to actually create the permission that this is important. They want you to get restorative sleep, it’s important to take real breaks, contain your working hours and not let this new Zoom culture bleed into your personal time too. Leaders really have a big role to play in ensuring that when they do offer mental health resources, that employees are empowered to use them.

Those are creating the conditions for a mental health offering to really be meaningfully used. You want to address mental health in an upstream way, meaning offering health promotion and resources to help reduce stigma. They empower employees to improve their resilience and psychological wellbeing wherever they are across the mental health continuum.

They also offer interventions that are preventative in nature. This means that if somebody is at risk for an anxiety disorder or depression for example, they’re able to intervene and get support for reducing that risk or reducing possible symptoms. Ideally that would prevent the onset and progression to a diagnosable condition. So, there are multiple levels within prevention, but overall, it’s really about reduction in risk.

That’s where Headspace plays in the health promotion and prevention side. Employers also want to connect those resources to other specialised resources. So, that’s making sure that employees who do need therapy are able to access that in a timely manner.

Could you give us a quick introduction as to what you mean by meditating and recommend how someone completely new to meditation could get started?

(11:09) Absolutely, I think we’re talking a lot about meditation and mindfulness in our culture today. Our specific version of mindfulness that we offer at Headspace is mindfulness meditation, which is really about this combination of attention and training. That means learning how to be fully present in the moment, accepting where you are right now in a non-judgmental way and practising compassion for yourself and others.

What meditation in a mindfulness meditation capacity helps you learn to do is, use your breath or another attentional anchor. What I mean by that is you might be guided to focus on a beam of light or visualise a place that you’ve been, or simply focus on your breath. Your breath is one of the most powerful tools that you have to change your physiology in the moment.

When we are focused on our breath and we breathe in a more regular pattern, we activate our body’s natural relaxation response. That’s an added benefit, the in-the-moment benefit.

In this practice of focusing on your breath, maybe doing a body scan to relax your body, you’re learning how to observe when your mind is wandering and bring it back to the present moment. That muscle that you’re building over time helps you enhance your ability to focus and be present, to have equanimity, meaning you’re not as reactive to negative emotions.

What changes in your brain over time when you practice mindfulness meditation, is that when a stressor happens, of course stress will continue to happen, it’s really your reaction to that stress that is changing. It can seem like a very simple practice sitting quietly with your feet on the ground, focusing on your breath, scanning your body. But actually you’re building the ability to face the challenges and demands of life with a greater sense of ease and calm.

I think one of the misconceptions about this is we’re asking you to accept where you are right now. That acceptance is really liberating because it’s not in conflict with change.

Let’s say you’re meditating because you’re so stressed that you’re having trouble sleeping at night. We want you to still work on improving your sleep quality, but the way to do that is to drop the rope and drop some of those reactions. That’s why we’re learning how to be more present in your mind.

Accepting where you are non-judgmentally is really a paradigm shift for a lot of people that gives them a new perspective on the things that are happening in their lives.

You mentioned some of the benefits just now, but are there other examples of the benefits of meditation at work and in our personal lives?

(14:25) There are a lot of positive influences and what we’ve seen in our research on Headspace. It is very consistent with research on meditation and mindfulness interventions in general. As few as 10 days of practising meditation can reduce stress by 12%, 30 days is close to 33% reduction in stress, as well as improving your resilience to stress in the future.

We see improvements in psychological wellbeing, happiness, and positivity overall. We also see improvements in focus as well as increases in compassionate behaviour.

We’ve done a study showing that people who meditate with Headspace are more likely to help someone else in need. Those people have also been found to be less reactive to negative emotions, both in terms of being less irritable, as well as less aggressive to provocation. People who were provoked reacted less to that provocation after they had meditated for three weeks with Headspace.

We’ve also seen workplace impacts like reduced presenteeism, improvements in self-reported productivity at work, and the list goes on. It can start to seem like it’s a panacea because it has such cross-cutting benefits. Actually what’s happening is meditation’s core mechanism of action is really changing your relationship to stress, enhancing your ability to focus and get that mental clarity. Those changes have a dramatic impact on your mental health, as well as on your physical health.

Do you think meditation could help people to be more successful in the new era of work where creativity, adaptability and problem-solving are set to become more important as we have to deal with more changes?

(16:35) I certainly think so, because if you think about what meditation enhances, it is creating the right conditions for you to be more psychologically flexible. There is a form of psychological intervention called acceptance and commitment therapy. That’s really designed to enhance psychological flexibility, meaning, you might’ve had a ‘plan A’, but you need to quickly switch to ‘plan B’. What helps us learn how to do this acceptance and commitment therapy, is a mindfulness-based intervention.

A lot of these benefits that I’m describing around less reactivity and better present moment awareness help you take a step back. You can learn how to take your ego out of those decisions and pivot in a way where you’re not reacting to something. Instead, you’re more intentionally choosing the way that you want to respond to a situation.

It can feel like instead of being on this hamster wheel or caught up in the chaos of a complicated situation, you’re able to step alongside it.

Andy Puddicombe, our resident monk at Headspace and Co-founder likes to talk about a traffic metaphor. It can feel like instead of being in your car, stressed about the traffic, that meditation actually helps you step onto the sidewalk and observe what’s going on rather than getting caught up in that moment.

We move towards a work life where we’re knowledge workers, we need to adapt. We may have trained for ‘job A’ but after 10 years of doing it, we may find that it doesn't exist anymore and we need to retrain. That ability to constantly learn, innovate and be creative, certainly can be enhanced with a mindfulness practice.

So, it certainly seems that being mindful can help professionals be more successful in their career?

(18:47) I certainly think we’re seeing great evidence of the benefits meditation and mindfulness can have on people’s careers. We know that many very accomplished leaders integrate mindfulness into their routines. We see that in our works, we’ve done studies with thousands of employees across a range of different types of companies and consistently see positive impacts.

How would you recommend people go about finding the time to fit meditation into their busy day-to-day lives and their work routines?

(19:24) Well, as a behavioural scientist, I think it’s hard for us when we think about fitting in something new to a schedule that already feels quite packed. My recommendation is to add the quality of mindfulness onto something that you already have an existing routine around to scaffold your way towards learning a new practice or skill.

It might be that if you like to take an evening walk, you could listen to Headspace which has walking meditations. Alternatively, when you’re lying in bed, preparing for sleep at night, you could practise one of our wind down meditations. So, rather than trying to find additional time in the day, you layer on mindfulness and meditation to something that you’re already doing.

What we hope people build up to is creating at least a ten minute routine, ideally daily, but as many times as you can per week, of guided meditation. That’s really where you get the most benefits associated with this practice. It doesn’t need to be ten minutes when you start, but you do want to build up to at least that duration of practice over time.

Headspace, as well as other leading mindfulness researchers have shown that a ten-minute period of practice is quite powerful when you add that up over time. It might be that just simply starting with a two- or three-minute meditation is all that you can manage, and our app allows you to choose the duration of practice. But from a habit formation point of view, you could try to do this with someone else so you get that supportive accountability around your new routine.

Layer it on, start small, but set yourself up for success because we’re most motivated to change our behaviour when we feel like we’re succeeding at doing so. It’s really important that whatever behaviour you’re trying to establish or change, you set achievable goals in the beginning, but they should get harder and build you up over time.

Earlier on, you mentioned some companies that are promoting meditation programs, do you have any examples of organisations that have effectively implemented those programs to help support their employees? And what impact has this had on their workforce?

(22:28) We did a really cutting edge study with the college of policing in the UK. A group of researchers and the college took over a thousand employees, both of the police force, as well as office workers and support staff and randomised them. This was a large randomised controlled study, so we have high-quality data about the effects of Headspace in that population.

What we found was that Headspace and this meditation practice improved mental wellbeing, life satisfaction, resilience, and work performance at both ten weeks. As well as this, it was maintained at twenty-four weeks follow up. We also saw that there was a reduction in presenteeism that was seen at twenty-four weeks, improved core mindfulness skills and that this was a beneficial practice to people who had a low job control.

The research on stress levels shows that people who have a low locus of control are much more vulnerable to the negative consequences of stress. A low locus of control means that they feel like they can’t change the factors that are causing them to experience the stress. So, being able to help a group like that feel more resilient to stress is really an incredible outcome.

We did an implementation and research study at Google and Roche with their employees and we saw dramatic changes in anxiety and depression. We saw about a 46% decrease in depressive symptoms and 31% reduction in anxiety symptoms.

We’ve done multiple case studies with a number of different companies, as well as some very large randomised controlled trials, and really see these consistent benefits associated with reduction in risk factors for mental health conditions, as well as benefits around helping people find resilience, even when the conditions of their employment aren’t amenable to that.

If some people feel like meditation isn’t right for them, even after they’ve tried it, what can they do to become more mindful?

(25:06) Well, I think if meditation itself feels unapproachable for someone, there are a lot of other ways that you can learn this quality of being present in the moment without meditating. That’s the motivation behind why we’ve expanded into other types of experiences that support our Headspace members, such as mindful movement. If you are taking a walk or a run or want to do a stretching exercise, you can be guided to learn how to be where you are right now.

We also have focus music and sleep music. Music is increasingly shown to have great mental health benefits. That’s another way that people can start this practice as well as simply focusing on your breath, that’s something that we can all do.

Breathing is a great tool, you can do it in the middle of a meeting, in traffic or while you’re waiting for a bus. It’s always with you and learning how to tune into your mind and body, really can create an immediate sense of calm that is powerful for all of us to learn how to do.