The world's strongest software: your mind

Fast-paced working environments, ever-changing trends, and high demands from customers, partners, and colleagues, are the most dominating phrases of our current realities. Between such dynamics, our lives have become a series of never-ending to-do lists. Finish everything until the next vacation which is always postponed. To survive and maintain our mental health, we need to stop and breathe, and most importantly, we need to learn new behaviors and so-called health hacks. 

Mindfulness has entered the business world slowly but surely. Fact-driven individuals can’t help but notice all the thousands of research papers on this rather calming and clarity-bringing practice. In short, it’s the practice of purposefully bringing one’s attention to the present moment without evaluation. Underlining without evaluation. 

For as simple as it seems, guidance brings about more stability to the game. Thus, we invited Adriana Spătaru to share her insights as an International Mindfulness Teacher & Trainer. 

Yesterday’s mindfulness workshop at Linnify has pinpointed how practicing mindfulness has a lot to do with how individuals perceive the mind and its products. Starting off, Adriana suggested we take a moment to get in touch with our senses and check where we feel our mind is. Whereas Eastern civilizations identify the mind in the chest, Central-Eastern and Western civilizations identify it in the brain. Within the process of balancing the mind, it’s useful to know where you’re addressing the focus towards. 

Short exercise: Take a moment to see where you feel your mind is. 

The fact that your neuronal systems are probably the greatest software of all time is familiar to us all. This is also why they deserve our attention and understanding. Funny enough, we still know so little about it and about its glitches.

The yin to the yang: stress and mindfulness

Research shows that 80% of the time the mind is working on problem-solving. That shouldn’t come as a big surprise given the overthinking practice we are so familiar with, yet what is surprising is that 46% of the time the mind is actually accessing random information even if there’s a single task in priority. That is similar to Random Access Memory slowing down the process of focus. Matthew Killingsworth has dedicated an entire study to that. 

The interest in these matters surpasses the intellectual value due to the mind’s power over the overall health of the human body. While the mind is the most popular responsible for stress, hormones are actually the workers. 

Cortisol, the stress hormone, has the ability to lower the levels of estrogen, respectively testosterone. What’s utterly scandalous about its ways is actually the fact that it reduces intellectual capacity by up to 50%. In short, stress is not only your mood killer, but it’s also your good decision-making killer.

How often are we really aware of our stressful times? Compared to the usual Savannah situations, daily stress doesn’t come in life-threatening forms. Thus, the balance depends on your ability to set personal boundaries regarding burnout. Stress is not only smart enough to hide between the lines (or tasks), but it has also the chemical potency to create cortisol dependence for you to miss identifying it. 

Stress is smart, but we are smarter

Regulating these rising levels of hormones and moments of control loss is a practice. For as much time we dedicate to demanding situations, it's only logical that we should dedicate some time to counteract. As for anything new we want to implement in behavior, the secret remains to be strategic and patient about it. 

To better understand ‘the why’ behind mindfulness, here are some facts about its biological effects on the human body: 

• Mindfulness leads to an increase in gray matter concentration in the parts of the brain that affect learning.
• Mindfulness increases the number of white cells.
• Mindfulness increases the length of telomeres.
• It induces a homeostasis state in the body creating autonomy and self-healing.
• It creates DHEA hormones that combat cortisol.
• Strengthens the immune system.

All resulting in a better and longer life. 

‘Psychology changes biology.’

It’s all a matter of perspective: you can’t eliminate all stimuli

For this practice to start rooting in our daily lives, one thing must be clear for all of us:

It doesn’t depend on the stimuli, it depends on the perspective you have on the stimulus. 

Becoming mindful is a paradigm shift. It’s a change in our patterns of thought. Given the fact that we all have terabytes of implicit memory that run in the background, it’s not a one-time practice that will twitch the entire way we comprehend life and stress. 

You definitely can’t eliminate all stressful stimuli and thus maybe you won't be calm in every single situation, but don’t let that bring you down. Changing the way we perceive our power and responsibility regarding stress it’s a great place to start. 

Make your first steps in practicing mindfulness

Researching on Chade-Meng Tan’s method tangled in his book ‘Search Inside Yourself’ also used at Google, Adriana proposed we would give three stages a chance to build perspective in our minds:

• Attention training: practicing a couple of minutes a day consistently will bring intuitive clarity of what’s happening in your body, mind, and heart. Boundaries become clearer, wishes become more authentic and the steps toward them become more doable. 

• Self-knowledge and self-mastery: when you can observe what is happening exactly when it comes to you. Body: If you don’t react with your mind, I’ll react for sure.

• Creating useful mental habits: start with the small controllable aspects and let yourselves build from there. 

It's about reframing what we’ve been taught to frame in a stressful yet inefficient way. The good news is: there are only two fears we can’t consciously control: the fear of high-pitched sounds, and the fear of falling. Any other stress-inducing fears, such as the fear of not being good enough, are self-taught. And we can unlearn them.

The journey is not against stress, it’s towards your authentic self. When you build authenticity, things gain sense and perspective. And where there’s a perspective, there’s scalability. 

75% of leaders globally operate from a reactive, non-scalable mindset. As leaders of tomorrow, you’re invited to change this paradigm. 

About our guest trainer, Adriana Spătaru:

‘I was an entrepreneur for over 14 years, I have over 50,000 minutes of personal meditation practice and now I have over 3,000 participants in my courses from all over the world.

Now I'm an International Mindfulness Teacher and Psychologist and I help people feel like they're more than a To-Do list.

My clients come to me with chronic fatigue, with stress accumulated over many years, lots of self-judgment, and even feeling that everything falls apart - and then gain balance, peace, and confidence. They discover a source of inner joy accessible at any time.’

Connect with Adriana on LinkedIn if you want to learn more.

Further reading: 

Scaling Leadership: Building Organizational Capability and Capacity to Create Outcomes that Matter Most

Book by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams

Search Inside Yourself

Book by Chade-Meng Tan