Can this daily habit make you smarter and accelerate success?
Just 15 minutes a day of mindfulness practice can help you be smarter and make better decisions in only two weeks. That’s the finding of a study by researchers at the University of Warwick in the U.K. Earlier studies had already shown that mindfulness meditation and other similar practices can lead to reduced stress and greater happiness.
Now researchers wanted to know if a brief daily mindfulness practice could also help people make better decisions.
Specifically, they wanted to learn whether mindfulness could help with a phenomenon called information avoidance — the common human tendency to avoid learning information that might upset or worry us.
If you’ve ever put off a routine medical screening because you weren’t sure you wanted to know the results, or chosen not to ask someone’s opinion of something you did because you feared they would have valid criticisms, then you’ve experienced information avoidance, as most of us have.
For a business leader, and especially for an entrepreneur, information avoidance can be a dangerous thing because it could stop you from gaining the knowledge you need to make the best decisions for your employees and your company.
And, of course, when it comes to things like skipping medical tests, information avoidance can be downright deadly. Could a mindfulness practice help people stop avoiding information that might be unpleasant but could ultimately help them?
Mindfulness or music?
The researchers’ experiment results strongly suggest that it can.
They randomly assigned 261 participants to either a mindfulness session or a music session once a day. In the mindfulness session, participants completed a 15-minute recorded guided mindfulness session in which the instructor invited them to bring their attention to the present moment; then focus on their breathing, allowing their thoughts to come and go without judgment; then do a scan, bringing attention to each part of their bodies; and finally to sit with whatever awareness they had gained for a few moments before the session’s end.
In the music session recording, the same instructor invited participants to listen to 15 minutes of calming music.
After 14 days of daily practice, the researchers tested both groups to measure their stress levels and mindfulness, and also tested them on the Information Preference Scale, a 13-point test that measures a person’s willingness to receive information that might upset them.
What they found is that both those who did mindfulness meditation and those who listened to calming music exhibited lowered stress levels.
But the group doing the mindfulness practice also tested as more willing to receive information about themselves or the world that might upset them. (They also tested as more mindful in general — proof that even a brief daily practice can improve your mindfulness all day.)
Why is a mindfulness practice so effective for helping people face up to unpleasant truths? The researchers think they might know the answer.
“Supplementary evidence suggests that it may be mindfulness’ effects on emotion regulation (specifically, nonreaction to emotions) that acts as a potential mechanism through which this greater tolerance for information operates,” they write in their report on the experiment in the journal Economics Letters.
In plain English, because a mindfulness practice can make you more resilient and better able to process negative emotions, it can better help you handle bad news.