Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 577: Does Mindfulness Actually Make You Happier (or Better) at Work? | Prof. Lindsey Cameron

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

People have mixed feelings about the popularization of mindfulness and meditation over the last 10 or 15 years with some referring to it as “McMindfulness.”The critiques can be worthy and the mainstreaming of meditation and mindfulness also have helped millions of people upgrade their lives. One of the many areas where mindfulness and meditation have made inroads of late is the workplace. All sorts of employers are offering their teams access to meditation via apps or in-person training. But does this stuff actually work? Does it really make you happier at work or better at your job? And what techniques produce which benefits?Professor Lindsey Cameron is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Management. Her research focuses on mindfulness as well as the future of work. She has a 20 year practice, having studied and taught primarily in the Vipassana and non-dual traditions. In her prior career, Professor Cameron spent over a decade in the US intelligence and in diplomatic communities serving the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.In this episode we talk about:What companies mean when they talk about mindfulness at workWhat the mindfulness at work research says and how Prof. Cameron parses the resultsThe ways mindfulness helps us counteract our inherent biases and stereotypesWhich specific practices are most beneficial, depending on the situation Prof. Cameron’s tips for integrating small mindfulness moments into our everyday routines Where she stands on the whole “McMindfulness” debateProf. Cameron’s research into the gig economy — and how, paradoxically, an Uber worker can feel a sense of autonomy and freedom even though the work is ultimately being dictated by an algorithmFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/lindsey-cameron-577 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Greetings, my fellow suffering beings. I know some people have mixed feelings about the popularization of mindfulness and meditation over the last 10 or 15 years. You've got your critics who call it mick mindfulness. And I personally think those folks have legitimate critiques, but two things can be true at the same time.

Of course, those critiques can be worthy. And the mainstreaming of meditation and mindfulness can also have helped millions of people upgrade their lives. It's complex. One of the many areas where mindfulness and meditation have made inroads of late is, of course, the workplace. All sorts of employers are offering their team's access to meditation via apps or in-person training.

You name it. But does this stuff actually work? Or is it just mic mindfulness? Does meditation really make you happier at work or better at your job? And which techniques produce which benefits? Professor Lindsey Cameron is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Management. Her research focuses on mindfulness as well as the future of work.

She's done a lot of work on the gig economy. In fact, she went so far as to drive for Uber for several years to get a deeper understanding. But back to meditation, she has a nearly 20 year practice having studied and taught primarily in the Vipassana and Nanduil traditions. In her prior career, Professor Cameron spent over a decade in the US intelligence and diplomatic

communities serving in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. In this conversation, we talked about what companies mean when they talk about mindfulness at work, what the research actually says and how Professor Cameron parses the results of the various studies, including the ones she personally conducted. The ways mindfulness helps us counteract our inherent biases and stereotypes, which specific practices are most beneficial depending on the situation, her tips for integrating small moments of mindfulness

into your everyday routine, and where she stands on the whole McMindfulness Debate. Toward the end, we switch gears and talk about Professor Cameron's research into the gig economy. One thing she mentions is how paradoxically an Uber driver can feel a sense of autonomy and freedom even though the work is ultimately being dictated by an algorithm. In other words, there are upsides to the robot apocalypse. Just to say before we dive in here, this is the final installment

of our work-life series. If you missed the prior episodes, go check them out. We talked about work conflict, whether to bring your whole self to the office and in postures syndrome. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelli McGonicle

and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from, MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast.

Professor Lindsey Cameron, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's a delight to be here today. That's a life for me too. Although let's see, let's see how you do before I declare you a delight. I'll wait with bacon breakfast. Yes, that's right. Now I'm just trying to make you nervous right at the beginning.

All right, so let me start with how you got into mindfulness and meditation because apparently there's something of a yarn here. There is, you know, it's so funny. I've looked at pictures of myself at 15 and boarding school and I had the word meditate written on my whiteboard, but it actually spelled mediate. So that shows what I actually knew what I actually practiced around mindfulness, but before I was an academic, I spent about a dozen years in the US intelligence community and I served in Iraq and several other war zones. And I mean, there's just tons of magazines loading around these bases and I happened to pick

up a yoga journal article because she just looks calm and happy on the cover. And I mean, there were bumps falling multiple times a day. And it was really just in sort of reading this article for the general public that had five ways to do mindfulness, you know, very straightforward about sitting and focusing on your breath. That helped me really deal with the complexities of being in the middle of a deployment

with all the sort of chaos that was going on in my external environment. It touched me. And I think when I moved back to America, I knew it was a practice I wanted to go deep in. I've been religious for many years, but I wouldn't have said spiritual. And that was the beginning of a path. Would you still call yourself religious, but not spiritual? Yes, but my religion has changed. but the spiritual practices have stayed the same. So what religion would you call yourself now? I actually practice the form of African spirituality.

I know your listeners can't see me, but I'm a black American. So these are actually the traditions of my people practice before we were brought over here. And it gives me a lot of comfort and rudeness, particularly as being a black person in America and having so much of my history not being known to be deep in a practice. Like this is the tradition that my ancestors practice and sustain them for their hundreds of years here in the States. And even though that is my religion, my meditation practice is every day I'm sitting on the mat. You know, I think that's one of the great things about African indigenous traditions, is they allow for a lot of incorporation of different traditions. So yeah, mindfulness, meditation is part of my everyday life and addition to my religious

practices. So your religious practice is a form of African spirituality, but you supplement it with mindfulness and meditation. It is, you know. I feel like meditation is how you hear God and prayer is how you talk to God. And so those two things are very much intertwined to me. My daily practice, you know, after I wake up, I meditate and then I pray. So I hear first and then I talk. And then I pray. So I hear first and then I talk. And maybe after settling the mind, you can be more clear in your prayer life. Right.

Because you're tuning in to what I want to say, you know, what about the ancestors? I might want to walk with me or guide me in that particular day. Yeah, because it comes from a space of deep listening and a deep reverence. Do I feel am I able to make that reach back connection to my ancestors and to act for what support guidance or knowledge I need to walk with me in that day. So yeah, they are combined for me, the meditation and the prayer. I don't know anything about African spirituality, but Africa is a huge place. I've been there many times.

So I imagine there are lots of forms of spirituality. It's that so many rich traditions on the continent. What form of spirituality have you latched onto? So I think the core in all African traditions is ancestral reverence and ancestral worship for lack of a better word. And most indigenous cultures in Africa or any other countries, there's a lot of reverence in respect to our ancestors. You think of sort of the day in the dead and Latin American countries or the ancestors shrine, you'll see in people's homes,

you know, if they're from the far east. So that's the base of the tradition. And then almost every cultural group has their own tradition. So you can have IFA, which is more from the group of people around what is now known as Nigeria, or the Icon traditions that are more from Ghana. And then when they were brought to the New World, you've got Haitian vo Do, or Kombu Le, or Santorilla in Cuba.

So each of these traditions, I would say, have distinctions between them. But I think the core is what I would say would be like ancestor worship. So we've just been talking about your spiritual and contemplative life. What about your professional life? How did you get into what you're currently studying and how did you decide to connect your spirituality

to your study? First, when I enter graduate school, I started studying mindfulness. One of my first published papers is around mindfulness in the workplace. But you know, a PhD program is over seven years in research interest shift. I unequivocally think mindfulness is good. It has helped my life and so many other people. And so I felt that I wouldn't be a good scholar of mindfulness practices

because I wasn't willing to sort of interrogate it critically. And my research now is focused on the gig economy. So you think about Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Instacart, all gig work. And I came into this subject because my mother lost her job during the Great Recession around 2008. And I really watched her struggle. She was a middle manager at a call center. So I would say a good job with someone with an associate's degree. And couldn't find similarly paid work because age discrimination is real. And I watched her sell examples and grocery stores and purses at trades shows and work at a warehouse. And I became really interested in this idea of how did people stop downward social

mobility? I think so much we focus on upward social mobility, but you know real wages have declined the United States since the 1970s. And when I was looking at how people were trying to stop downward social mobility, a lot of them were doing what we call gig work. They were driving for Uber, they were delivering groceries for our Instacart. And my prior career was in the intelligence community. I was an intelligence analyst. I was a computer hacker. And so in some ways coming back, looking at this intersection of work and technology, circles back to my prior work of being interested

in sort of hacking and tech. I have so many things I want to ask you, but everything you just said. Let me just start with meditation at work. I know that you've moved on from that in many ways, but the world has not moved on. It's still a very live issue. So let's stay there for a second.

And then I do want to talk about the gig economy for sure. So let me just start by asking how many workplaces are offering people mindfulness and meditation? You know, the number of workplaces you would say in the thousands, but it's a question of what does that mean to offer access? Does that mean I'm going to give you a free subscription? Because this means we're going to have a moment before we go into a group meeting,

you know, to catch our breath. So I think there's questions about how deep companies have broken mindfulness into the workplace, but I think the business community is seeing it as a tool to work on emotional regulation to induce self-compassion and self-awareness. And so we're seeing different companies embrace this in different ways. Do we have a sense of whether all of the money that's being spent on mindfulness in the workplace is working or is it a wild west? Oh, that's such a good question, Dan. I'd be curious to hear what your thoughts are since I know you're also deep in this community.

I feel like a lot of studies have talked about, okay, there are these individual levels of benefits. John Kabat Zins work talks about this. You know, he does the seven or eight week NBSR course and at the end, people are reporting, you know, improving a lot of life outcomes. There've been a growing number of studies,

and that includes some of my work around what does this mean embedded in a workplace context? So does this affect productivity or customer satisfaction, people's emotions at work? So I think that's a growing area of research. Time, mindfulness, a higher level organizational outcomes, you know, if I implement an NBSR course am I gonna see increase in productivity across the farm

by 1%, I haven't seen any research that comes out by that yet. But overall, I would say in the past like 10 to 15 years, there's been an increased interest in researchers going into the world of mindfulness because it's taking a practice that has very deep spiritual roots and there's just sort of figuring out different ways that might be able to work in a Western context. When you talk about the deep roots, at least 2600 year old roots of mindfulness and meditation goes a millennia or two beyond that. There has been some controversy. There are some critics who call the incorporation of meditation into a work context specifically

mcminfulness. Yes, I've heard this. Yeah, yeah. That term actually describes more than just corporate meditation, but I think corporate meditation is a particular generator of irritation in some circles. So what's your take on mcminfulness critique that we're perverting an ancient tradition here? You know, I'm laughing because I think I once gave a talk at a school where I met the

person who coined that phrase. But to your big question, I'm shrugging my shoulders and I'm like, eh, like yes, I do agree with them. You know, these are deep practices that have just formed my life in the lives of so many other people. And that's when you have a song around you, people that are holding you accountable as you grow, that you continue to do self-study and study with teachers. So yes, it is from a deep tradition and we are decontextualizing and stripping so much

away that you have people that are not of these cultures. You know, I'm not originally from this culture and we're talking about how do we do this in five minutes or five weeks or five months. But at the end of the day, it does help people. And so, you know, maybe the in between is to not say we're talking about this is how we do meditation in a workplace. This is an emotional regulation strategy. This is a metacognition strategy because I do think when we're talking about it in a workplace, essentially, that is what it's stripped down to.

But enough studies, including mine, have shown that it actually does have an effect. And that is ultimately a good thing. I'm so strongly agree with the vast majority of words you just uttered there. I do think that mic-minfulness folks are correct about a lot of things. And I also think that mic-minfulness or whatever watered down form of practice that's making its way to individuals in a modern context, often in a professional context, seems to be helpful. So, okay, both things are true at the same time. It's a paradox.

And I just remind me, I just this morning was listening to a book on tape about the history of the Buddha and Buddhism. Post the Buddha. And how the Buddha specifically refused to assign a successor as the leader of the Sangha, the leader of the community after he died. And that created a situation where we had all these splits and schisms and new schools coming about. And as the Dharma moved from one country to the next, it often changed in pretty radical ways to fit the local culture.

And so I think what's happening in no small measure as it comes to the United States is that enters a modern, capitalistic society, it's morphing. And, you know, I think there are very legitimate critiques of the morphing and also it's helping people. Yeah, the word that I'm just writing down as you're saying is called synchronization. It's something you see often in African traditions where maybe Catholicism or Christianity gets

interspersed with more traditional beliefs. People who are in the creative industry do this all the time. How do you take this mismatch of ideas to create a new product? I think these are all sort of similar things that we're seeing in different contexts of how do you create a new hole out of what's already existing to adapt into a new context. I'm now realizing to some embarrassment that were many minutes into this interview, and I haven't asked you about the results of your study. I probably put the cart in front of the horse here, but tell us about what you found.

Okay, so this practice was actually comparing two different meditation practices. So breath-based practice, and a loving kindness-based practice. It was a two-week experiment, and what we found is both of them increased helpfulness of individuals at work. And particularly, we looked at individuals who were customer-facing workers, so they were answering calls on a phone line

or they were consultants, and we saw that both practices had an impact in helping but a two different mechanisms. So a mechanism is a Y. So it's not just the direct causal of that. This was an experiment, but underneath that, what was each practice doing, our breath-based practices tend to sort of center people more in the present moment. So back to this idea of sort of the meddicognition that we were talking about, they were sort of able to treat people in a way that was in the highest good of both of them.

So loving kindness, the induction we use which came from Sharon Salisberg's work, we found the mechanism for that study is that instead of cognitive perspective taking, it was more like emotional feeling that you could actually feel that you were the other person and that's why you were able to be more helpful towards them. So that's the result of the study I did and that study was done with some great co-authors.

And then we did a follow-on study to look at some of the limitations of mindfulness as well. Oh, I want to hear about the limitations in a second. But just to stay with the first study, the overall headline was meditation made you more helpful at work, and the two different flavors of helpfulness were, if you were doing a breath-based traditional mindfulness practice, you were better able to take the perspective of the other person. And if you were doing loving kindness meditation where you envision a series of beings and systematically send them good wishes in your mind, it's not just an intellectual perspective taking you actually feel like you're in their shoes in some ways. The border between self and other becomes more porous.

Am I restating this with some degree of accuracy? Yes, you're saying it even in a more precise way than I did, so thank you very much Dan. But yes, those were the findings of the study that both of these practices increased helpfulness. And you know, the measures of healthfulness both came from self-report, but also your coworkers, did your coworkers feel like you were more helpful. And we found that both practices were equally effective, but the why was different. The why was different. And that was the cognitive perspective taking versus can you actually put yourself

emotionally in the other person's shoes. Right, so the difference between cognitive empathy and emotional empathy, I would imagine. Exactly, exactly. And we found they both worked differently. One worked on cognitive empathy, the other one worked on more emotional empathy, but the outcome was the same.

I mean, it just tracks with my own experience, so much of my initial practice of meditation was just what I would call straight up mindfulness. I'm feeling my breath coming in and going out. Every time I get distracted, I start again and again and again. And you become more familiar with how wild your mind is because every time you get distracted, you see, you know, like a lunatic you are and over time you just stop taking all of the noise so seriously. And inextraably that leads to sort of understanding that everybody else's mind is the same way. And so you can really, I think get this cognitive empathy later in my meditative career, I started doing a lot more loving kindness. And that, for me, as somebody who can be a little cold and tend toward the intellectual, was very useful because it

just kind of made my inner weather, as I like to say, balmier. And that resulted in warmer feelings about my own messiness. And I've heard this from prior guests, too, that there's been some studies that show that people doing loving kind of meditation like the the selfing area of the brain gets less active to you start to feel less locked in what has been called the skull-sized kingdom. That's a great point that you're talking about. But I think one thing that was really interesting was we said, okay, people are having different psychological experiences with these practices. But interestingly enough, we have similar outcomes, at least in this study, in the workplace.

Coming up, Professor Cameron talks about the way his mindfulness can help us counteract our implicit biases and stereotypes, which specific practices are most beneficial depending on the situation and her tips for integrating small, quick mindfulness moments into your everyday routine at the office. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brownleur, we will

be your resident not-so-expert-experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking, oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong, what would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app.

I've never quite understood this, but at the deepest level, I've heard my meditation teachers describe love and awareness as the same thing. So yes, you can debate whether the kind of love that you generate through love and kindness meditation or the awareness that you develop through mindfulness meditation, ultimately are at the same thing that as you see the goal in a Buddhist context of having this kind of mindfulness or awareness is to see that everything's changing all the time and therefore nothing is as solid as we think it is, including

ourselves and that once you understand that we're all in this situation where we're walking around building up and defending these cells. Which in the end are in illusion anyway and once you have wisdom or awareness that love is generated anyway i'm rambling but does any of that make any sense. of my teachers. And even though it's not a state that I myself have stabilized, what I often feel when people bring back these big things, like all we need is love, our love is the path. It's almost like they get a sense of underlying reality that's through the noise, that's through the mucky mind,

and they get a taste of it. And they figure out what is the one word to translate that felt experience into a verbal experience, then they share that with us. And it's reminder to a place in us that we can't actually consistently access, but it's to remind us like that is there. So as we're going down the path, we get like these little guide posts that we can touch and go, okay, they're removing there.

And you know, I have of course not stabilized. I mean, who has the people who have lived in these caves in the Himalayas, I guess. But, you know, I've touched it for a very, very brief period of time. And I have felt this dissolution of boundaries between self and other. And this feeling of love being the deep bliss, the joy and aliveness of being. It's there. I'm not stabilized in it, but I can touch it for a minute and then come back. I think that touching of it or us at least striving to touch it gives me at least the motivation to continue to go on. Keep on moving forward. Because ultimately, I see all humanity as evolving into a higher level, we're all have a little piece to play as the evolution continues.

Yeah, I mean, the two things come to mind listening to what you're saying. One is that these touchstones are little sayings, expressions that enlightened people bring back from the mountain top. They can be really helpful. My meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, teaches in a lot of mantras or little expressions that either he invented himself or he stole from other people. Just one that's coming to mind right now is don't side with yourself.

You know, we get stuck in our views of being right or being a good person, but if we can not side with ourselves and take other people's perspective, actually that can release a lot of suffering internally and also reduce the suffering we're creating. Having said that, the other thing I was going to say is that for me as a curmudgeonly skeptical Gen XR raised in the age of irony, when I hear love is all you need or love is the path, It's very easy for me to reject that as an empty bromide.

I'm shaking my head over here. I know you all can't see this, I'm shaking my head. You know, I think color blindness is similar. You know, when people come up to me and they say, like, I don't see race, I'm like, come on now. You're disavowed my experience of being a brown person walking through this world. So, you know, I think you you are right. It makes sense to be skeptical of these, even though it's also a truth. You know, I do think the truth is love is the path,

love is the answer. How do you walk in the highest good of everyone? And at the same times, we're like humans living a very messy existence, which we've talked about with all the interpersonal baggage that we have. There's a saying that when I'm talking to you, Dan, it's not Lindsey talking to Dan. It's like my impression of Lindsey talking to the impression of Dan and we're like going back and forth. So I think the answer is yes, both is true.

And I mean, I think it's compared to most academics. I'm a bit more of an optimist, but I was born in 1984. And I'm so happy to have been born in 1984 as opposed to 1954 or 1884. And this is back to my idea that, yes, I do think positive evolution is happening. That doesn't mean there are also great, destructive forces here as well on the planet, that you and I both know. But I think ultimately there is some goodness

that is shining through. I had a guest well over a year ago, Jessica Nordell, who is a journalist who wrote a book about bias. And many of the things she said have stuck with me. And she talked about how the way stereotypes work. I mean, they make sense in some ways, stereotypes do because

we evolved for all these biases, these cognitive shortcuts, because we didn't want to have to rethink everything all the time. It just helps you navigate the world. Of course, the problem with the biases is that they're wrong sometimes. And so because we're often making judgments based on stereotypes, we're sometimes not talking to a real person, we're talking to a bunch of collected, culturally inherited ideas about the person. And the originating side, given that you don't actually have a findable self

back to our discussion of impermanence and emptiness, it's like persona talking to rejection. Exactly, yeah. And I think that if you use mindfulness the way it's coming down the secular West right now, it's about how do we maybe not counter those biases, but have a little bit of space. You know, I think I am one of those sorts of people that make up my mind quickly when I see a person, I sort of size them up, I get a sense, but I'm also quite flexible in that interpretation and that, oh, yeah, it'll change in 10 minutes.

It'll change again next week. And so there's both a holding and a letting go that I think happens in our interpersonal relationships with one another, because we are like you're saying, we're biased talking to bias, but then can you let those go as you get to know who that person is underneath all those cognitive shortcuts? Yeah, and loving kindness meditation, I learned this from Jess. That's why I was quoting, hopefully, correctly, when I was talking about how loving kindness meditation has been shown to reduce bias, precisely because it reduces the sense of self and other.

But now that we're talking about loving kindness and meditation practice, you mentioned that you've done a follow-on study to your initial study, which looked at some of the limitations of the benefits of meditation in the workplace. What did you find there? So they were looking to see when you make a mistake at work, something that we've all done, is it breath-based practice or is a loving kindness-based practice, which one was more likely to have a tone. And surprisingly, they found that it was only the loving kind as practice because they were able to have this emotional empathy and really feeling themselves in the other person's shoes. Yeah, the idea of the breath-based practice is really it kind of centers you in yourself and it's really only cognition, it's activated, and so you're less likely to atone for your wrongs. It's interesting because this may be about how people metabolize the practice at a beginner level

because at least in the Buddhist tradition, breath-based meditation is said to be able to take you all the way to enlightenment, in which case you should be able to be pretty loving. Mm-hmm. You know, as you said that I kind of like raised my hand and I'm like, perhaps I think often as I thought these practices came down at a given time for a given group of people that worked well for them at that moment of history. And as someone you know, who practices an African tradition, but I'm African American, a descendant of George Washington, even on my black side, you know, like those those practices in some ways have to be modified or adjusted living in the world that we're in right now. So I wouldn't on my black side, you know, like those, those practices in some ways have to be modified

or adjusted living in the world that we're in right now. So I wouldn't take that away from the Buddha and saying that, yes, breath-based practices all you need, yeah, it's probably all you need at that time. And for people who are really going to take the monk's path and that's so many of us are doing these practices and in different cultural context of different types of communities around us, that maybe we need something a little bit more. Fair point. So where do you land after all of this about

who should do what practices and when? Oh, that is such an interesting and big question. You know, one of the ways that we were able to induce mindfulness in this study was through what we called on the spot mindfulness. So imagine that you're working at a call center and you take three breaths before you answer the phone or you project loving kindness to the person before you answer the phone or the same if you're a doctor or a nurse or a nurse is aid and right before you come into

the patient's room as you're putting a hand on the door knob, you're taking that moment to sort of bring in that practice. So to get to your question at one way about how to integrate this into your work day is to find something as like a repetitive interaction, particularly when you're interacting with other people, because this is really much more about mindfulness and you sort of improving relationship with others. So find that repetitive thing that's part of your everyday and try to bring more intention around that. That's more at the individual level,

thinking about these studies. We really see the results having the most impact for people that have customer facing work because there's so much about interact with a customer, you know, how do you get on the same page with a client or a patient or if you're a sales clerk in a store? You know, the example I have is of Kobe Bryant. He's a legendary basketball player and well-known for having a deep mindfulness practice. He talks about meditating at the beginning of the day,

not right before a game, because the daily practice was more to ground him for the day, but right before a game, there's like just more energizing routine that he had. So I think based on the type of work you do and the type of energy that you need to bring into that interaction can have impacts on what practice you might want to do. And the last thing that I want to say is that there is some other research that's out there about people who are in job, so there's a high amount of emotional labor. And by emotional labor, that means when the way that you're presenting to another person doesn't actually match your interior state. So you think about the flight attendant who has to say for like the 12th time of day, please put on your seatbelt or somebody that's working at

Disneyland and they have to, you know, have a pleasant face on while they're dealing with all the guests. There's research that shows it actually doing mindfulness and those types of jobs can actually be counterproductive because it shows there's a disconnect between someone's interior self and the exterior self they have to show to the world. So maybe those people should be doing loving kindness meditation? So the research actually doesn't go that far, but I would say yeah, for those people probably more loving kindness meditation. You talked about how in your study you had people at a call center take a few deep breaths. Those seemed like micro bursts of practice, where you also having your study participants do what we might call formal practice. your study participants do what we might call formal practice? So, yes, there were a group of people who did have a more formal practice.

I think there was like a 10 minute meditation they did every day. And then there was another group of workers that once they had built up this muscle of hiring this 10 minute day practice for two weeks, they didn't do these sort of like micro practices. And we found basically a strengthening of that effect. What do you recommend for people who and I hear this all the time? I'm sure you hear it all the time who say, look yeah, okay, the science is very compelling. It's pretty obvious the meditation would be good for me, but I don't have the time. So I think it goes back to this idea of what is

this repetitive thing that happens in your workday and that could be Driving to work. It could be making your morning coffee Mindfulness the way that we're talking about it in the research is just about Cultivating a greater amount of attention to the present moment and there are many things that you can do that are not sitting on a cushion that Heidens your awareness to the present moment in other words, you don't have to get hung up on having some formal practice every day in a regimented way.

You can weave it into your every day. Exactly, that's it, that's it. Just think about what is something I typically do every day. If it's walking the dog, it's making coffee, it's driving to work, you know, the step side take between the front of the building at my school and when I go up into the classroom and take whatever that routine every day moment is and just infuse it with breath. I'm going to ground myself or loving kindness, putting myself in my student shoes.

It could even be, this is the intention. I want to get out of this interaction with this client or with my students. And even just saying that intention and rooting it can guide your behaviors when you're in that interaction. And I make that statement based on a lot of research, it's on creativity that says when you're trying to tackle a really hard problem, you read a little bit about the problem, you think, okay, this is what I'm trying to solve, and then you go for a run,

or then you go look at art, and that while you're doing something else in the background, your cognitive processes is working to solve that hard problem, and that's when your burst of creative insight comes in, and I think the same can be happening when you infuse a little mindful routine each day and setting what your intention is, it's going to have the ability to sort of

shape it, influence the activity that comes after that. How do you find your meditation practice helps you in a work context? I think it comes up most strongly when I interact with students. You know, I teach in the core MBA class, which is really a privilege because I see basically half of all the awarding MBAs because it's a required class. And you know, I think about how can I welcome every student? How can I make sure all of the voices are heard? And these are the questions I'm thinking about

as I'm walking, you know, from the edge of campus, up the stairs and going into the classroom and having these same repetitive actions where I set the intention for the day. And I'm really focusing on my breath just to bring me to be fully present in that classroom. It shows up every time I have to have difficult conversations with coworkers or with co-authors.

There, it's a bit more of a loving kindness intervention that I do with myself and thinking about how does other person feeling. How can I approach this conversation in a way that's uplifting us all? So all of that to say, Dan, is that the fact that I've done these studies on mindfulness and you know, I've had a steady practice now for 20 years, it really infuses my life every day. One last question about meditation at work. Somebody organizations are thinking about or already have introduced meditation and mindfulness to their teams.

Do you have a sense of what the best practices are for successfully introducing meditation into these kinds of environments? I've seen corporations do it in so many different ways. And it's very hard to get a metric of what success is. Yeah. I think the companies where I felt like I've really resonated with what they've done is you can really do this in a small or medium company. I think that's particularly when the CEO or founder is there, they can infuse

the culture. It's taking a mindful moment before meetings. And it's being very intentional on how to address conflicts in a way that's pointing at the problem and not the person. So the mindfulness is sort of less about, I'm going to listen to this app and I'm going to have this regular practice. It's more about seeing mindfulness engage, almost of this reflective, mindful engagement, interspersed or intertwined and how all the company does business on a day to day level.

So it's more of a cultural shift as opposed to individual practice. I have not done any systematic studying of this, but I get invited into all sorts of corporate contexts to talk about what's worked for me with meditation. What I've seen is that it can be very helpful when there's buy-in from the highest level of an organization. It has to be voluntary, for sure. You can't force anybody to do it, but if you're seeing your boss or your boss's boss's boss modeling this behavior, that can really be a powerful example. You can't force anybody to do it, but if you're seeing your boss or your boss's boss's boss

Modeling this behavior that can really be powerful example Coming up we switch gears and talk about professor Cameron's research into the gig economy which is fascinating how paradoxically an uber driver can feel a sense of autonomy and freedom even though the work is ultimately being dictated by an algorithm and of autonomy and freedom even though the work is ultimately being dictated by an algorithm and her advice for gig workers looking to establish a sense of spaciousness and growth in their lives. So gig economy, I understand you actually drove for Uber for a few years to really get the learnings into your marrow. Oh my goodness, you're right. I did. You know, talk about having an embodied experience of life. Yes, I worked on it off as a driver. Overall, my research is looking at the interplay between autonomy and control and these types of work environments, and where workers able to have freedom

when they're being managed by an algorithm, and in some ways, which ways or algorithms taking away a autonomy that workers can have, even though I focus more on sort of lower paid work like this. I mean, as well as implications for how do we think about remote work, or contract workers, there's a lot of higher skilled, higher paid work, it's more contract, and so I just think it's a way of higher skilled, higher paid work that's more contract.

And so I just think it's a way that we're seeing the US economy shift. And so I'm trying to gain a broader understanding of these trends and what does it mean for individual workers? One of the things you've found, I believe, is that even though gig workers, in many cases, are working for an algorithm, a robot over Lord, they feel free.

Hi, yes, I'm laughing. I think that is one of the paradoxes of my research. And really, the tension there I'm trying to address is if you're saying academic, you know, someone who's very much on this high throne of what we call social science theory, he'll be like, these workers can't possibly be free. You know, the algorithm is telling them what to do and dictating how much money they make and where they're supposed to drive or how many rides or assignments are supposed to take.

And I think just sitting on that sort of pedestal of high theory discounts workers' experiences. And I really trust workers when they say, hey, I do have a sense of freedom in this job. This is why many of my drivers stop working at Walmart, stop working at McDonald's, left union jobs, good paying union jobs to do this sort of work. And so I really try to interrogate

what is the reason for this and what is the freedom that they have. And it I really try to interrogate what is the reason for this and what is the freedom that they have. And you know, it's not just schedule flexibility. I think a lot of the companies want you to think it's just schedule flexibility or it's just the ability to earn money on demand. It's that, but I also think there's a way that the algorithms can sort of splice work up into very small segments that you can feel like you're having more choices. Because you decide, where am I going to start?

What speed am I going to drive? Am I going to talk to the passenger? Am I going to rate them? All these very small but real choices that you have, I think also let workers, like they have a sense of autonomy and agency in their everyday work. Even though structurally, this is a very hard job to do. Given that it's a hard job, I wonder based on what you've learned, what advice you would have for people who are doing gig work either full-time or as a side hustle? Oh wow. Now that's a really interesting question. And I also feel like the

answers are split. It depending if you're doing more higher paid work or lower paid work. I'm thinking of some research which talks about for higher paid workers, it's how do you create a holding environment for yourself? So you go to work every day, but you don't have an organization that's the boss of you are telling you what to do. So it's how do you create routines and connections to people and places that give you a sense of grounding. It's the morning cup of coffee. These are the professional friends I talk to. These are

the message boards. I go to get ideas. So I think in sort of creating this strong holding environment and thinking about who is that community of support. So I touched my Risto Franco. I know she spoke on a podcast of yours about friendships and how important it is to make friends as an adult. I think that's really important for workers who are higher paid, but also workers who are lower paid too. What is the structures that you can build around these jobs to make them better for you? What also not losing side of the fact that it's very precarious to try to make a career out of what we think of as gig work. So also be thinking about what can you do to grow and expand that hopefully in five to ten years you aren't still doing this lower paid work that doesn't even have to pay minimum wage.

How do you grow and expand from gig work, especially if you don't have a boss? You're right. That is a really good question that I've been thinking about in researching. So one thing that we see, let's say IT professionals doing, which I think you could also see people in upwork or task rapid doing, is under bidding for jobs in which there are skills that they want to develop. So say, our programmer, I want to learn how to program Ruby on Rails. I'll spend a little bit enough time that I can convince the person who's going to hire me. I'm not going to charge as much for this project. And then I'm going to build up my skillset on this. So now I'm able to sort of

advertise myself as a Ruby on Rails programmer. And I see people doing this on task rabbit. I mean, the task or not as higher paid, but it's pushing yourself to develop adjacent skills to be able to build up that portfolio. As I think one example about how you can start trying to grow while doing this more lower paid work. After all these years of looking at the gig economy, what learnings have you arrived at that might scale up to the rest of the economy, especially in an era where flexibility and freedom is really important and people are looking to either stay remote or have some sort of hybrid situation?

You know, I think for the lower paid gig workers I'm looking at, having a sense of routines is really important. There's research about people who are integrators and people who are as segmenters. And as segmenters, someone has a very strict boundary between work and home, and they even might have their keys on two separate key rings because they're so segmented.

And integrated people tend to be like, oh, I'm working from home. Let me work in my kitchen or let me be out with my friends and maybe finish up a project or respond to a client. People who are doing this type of gig work are forced to really to be integrators, you know, because their boss is their phone and they might get an alert saying, hey, there's a surge right now, there's higher demand, you jump on Instacart. And I think that even if you are an integrator, you have to have routines that transition you into your work day. So you know when work is starting,

and then you also get a sense of when work is ending and you can wind down. And I think as we move into hybrid or remote work, where we're gonna be forced to become more integrators and segmenters, having again this mindfulness, this mindful engagement, and conducting many experiments on yourself. Okay, I tried this routine. My morning commute is like walking around my house three times

and making coffee before I log in, creating these many experiments and creating these boundaries. Even while you're integrating, I think it's something that workers sort of on all different levels can really try and experiment with. That's a really good point. So, for me, for example, I'm in an incredibly lucky position. High paid work, a lot of flexibility, but I work from home, and it's very easy for me to be integrative to the point of the work blotting out the sun, and, or quite literally, the SO and my son. And therefore, if I'm hearing you correctly, might wanna get better at having clear segmentation

or boundaries between the work part of the day and the not work part of the day. Yeah, that's exactly it. Is there anything you see yourself automatically doing already? Well, we're pretty disciplined around here at having family dinner every night around the same time and nobody's got their phones at the table. And that usually signals the end of my work day.

Sometimes I'll go back a little bit to work or take a phone call, or especially if it's personal, you know, if I'm helping somebody, you know, like a mentor situation, I'll do that a little bit after dinner. But dinner has been a nice dividing line between work and personal. No, that's important. I remember Calon Newport talking in his book Deep Work, is he would put a post-it note on top of his laptop and it would be like all finished for the day and maybe have one or two things that we're going to be as high priority for the next day to tell

his brain it's time to shut down. Yes, I do that too. I'll just leave myself a note with here's where you were when you stopped. This is what you should start doing in the morning. There's a lot of energy right now behind shorter work weeks. This is something we've experimented a little bit with at 10% happier. Where do you fall on this? Huh, I'm curious. Has it worked for 10% happier? Well, I haven't been super involved in the implementation of these policies. So I'm embarrassed and mad.

I don't really know. I don't do a short work week. I do a long work week, but my days are not as intense. So I don't go into an office and I start work when I want. I take lots of breaks or exercise and meditation, playing with cats, playing with my son, and tend to knock off a little bit early. But I'll work six or seven days just at my own pace. So I sometimes feel guilty about that either because I'm not quite convinced. It's the best way to operate or because I'm not quite convinced it's the best way to operate or because I'm not sure

it's the right signal to be sending to my teams, but that is how I'm currently working. Yeah, no, it's interesting. I have the freedom that's afforded by both types of work. I have something in the bottom of my signature block. It says, please don't expect my working hours to be your working hours. You know, respond

whenever you like to. You know, thinking about the four day work week, I mean, the six day work week was just implemented like a hundred years ago. Thank you, unions, or from moving us from the six day work week to the five day work week. And so I think it's an interesting conversation we're having in terms of social norms, do we want to go to the four day work week? And I mean, most of the companies we see that are trying these sort of experiments are going really well. Basically, they're saying people are more satisfied at work. Productivity is rising at the same time, but I mean, there's also self-selection bias. You're often getting companies that want to try this as an experiment.

And they tend to be more like smaller and middle companies, like we talked about before, that you can do more of a wholesale shift in culture. I think it's something that for many jobs, it is a possibility, less for lower paid jobs or lower skill jobs. When you think about manufacturing line, you can't just cut it down like that. Or like in the United States,

instead of seeing people working four days at eight hours, we tend to see people working 40 hours and four days. And we all know that creates a lot of cognitive pressure on people so they can't take all the breaks you and I are able to take. And I think that sort of ties us into a larger conversation that we're having before. There's almost two different worlds of work that have emerged, you know, one for higher paid higher skill work and one for lower paid lower skill work. You think about who could go remote during the pandemic and who couldn't, who's going to get to be able to do a four day work week and bunch their leisure time together and who won't.

That's sort of like my complex. It depends answer to your question, Dan. Complex, it depends answers are welcome here. You may have the same spirit in your answer to this question, which is where do you stand on the idea of in your answer to this question, which is, where do you stand on the idea of bringing your whole self to work, which has become popular these days? I know. Isn't it popular?

And it's a question of who actually feels like it's safe to bring their whole self to work and who doesn't feel like they're safe depending on, you know, what identities they have in playing where they're working at. The way I think I personally think about it is being someone who has a lot of different identities. It's just to sort of hold this belief that there's a whole lots of different parts of me, and it's not zero sum. So I can show up one way like I'm a Texan because I did spend my high school in Texas, but then I can show up like I'm from the Southside Chicago, which is actually where my parents are from and where I live from 12. You know, I can show up in all these different educational or racial or income, different

configurations that I live in. By doing one, I'm not negating the other. And so when I'm thinking about what it takes for me to present myself authentically, am I able to express it in a thoughtful matter? Because you know, you can't show people all 150 sides of you in their very first meeting. They're going to be overwhelmed. So it's back to this idea about being diatic and this mindful relating that we were talking about earlier. And can I show up in my full self, this part of myself that's showing up when I'm interacting with that person.

We've had guests who've argued you shouldn't bring your full self to the office. The office is a professional environment. This is not therapy. This is not your friends, even though it's good to have friends at the office, and that there's a certain amount of boundary setting that is actually healthy for you and everybody around you. Hey, exactly Dan. And I think there's a lot of truckiness.

You know, there's a great book I love. It's like, how work has become the new religion? And it basically talks about how the feelings used to have it like religion gave us a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. We've now have given that to work. And because of that, we expect our manager to sort of counsel us

and give us personal advice. And we should get at this leave time and enjoy work. I mean, all these things that are very different from, you know, the purpose of work, where it used to be a more of a job orientation to sort of make money and maybe build a career. And I think it's very dangerous to expect that much from work or your employer,

because it's basically doomed to fail. Your job and your manager cannot become your parents. And so to that idea, it's basically doomed to fail. Your job and your manager cannot become your parents. And so to that idea, it's like you should feel safe to express different parts of yourself and work, but your whole self all the time, like who I am on Friday night with my friends or who you are with your son. I also don't think as the person that shows up at work from the 9 a.m. meeting on Monday. The great. Last question I wanted to ask you is about, and it kind of relates to this work as a religion idea. There's been a kind of glorification of stress, a hustle culture that we see a lot in our media, social or otherwise. Curious as somebody who looks at our work

lives for a living, what you think of this and whether this glorification of stress is ascendant or dissendant. So I think I'm very much part of this culture. Like I work a lot, I love my job, I get a lot of sense of meaning on it. But I see the angst that my students often express. Like I'm supposed to have my calling.

Nothing came to me when I was 12 years old, no? Cause we had this idea, doctors and musicians, they get that calling at a young age. And you know, the advice I often give them is many people build their calling, you know, it's an intersection about what you love and what you're good at and what pays the bills. And you've got to find the Venn diagram, we're all three of those overlap, to step into life and to live your calling. And I see my students thinking about it. So I do see the pendulum sort of swinging from maybe this over amplification of stress and working all the time to something, having mindful self-awareness can help you draw the line between the unhelpful stress and the helpful stress in my experience.

No, I agree with you in my experience too. And I think one lesson that I've been learning right now is I feel like a lot of mindfulness least the way it's talked in the research, it's like a day thing. Okay, so I meditate before I'm giving a big presentation or I'm taking an exam and there's these immediate benefits that happen. But one thing I've been living into right now is mindfulness. Okay, I'm about to go through three months of a really intense time where I teaching and I am giving talks and I had papers or a do and can I just recognize that this creative

my life work is going to have a priority. And then I'm going to have three months after that or two months, where it's going to be slower and it's going to be more recovery. So having this mindfulness almost like a different stages or seasons of a year in someone's life. And to realize it's just not going to always be like this. Like I think their times when you turn up the heat for work-related things and to have mindfulness

of when you're going through these stages to prepare the routines that allow you for sort of like a helpful ramp in and ramp down those different times of life. This has been such a great conversation, a delight, for people who want to learn more about you, do you have resources that you would recommend people access? I think you know if you go to my website Lindsay Cameron.com it has you know everything that's up to date about what I'm

working on. Thank you so much Lindsay great to talk to you. You're welcome. Thank you again to Professor Lindsay Cameron. Thank you for listening. If you feel so inclined go give us a rating or a review. Those actually really help. And finally, thank you so much to everybody who works so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Justine Davy and Lauren Smith.

Our supervising producer is Marissa Schneiderman and Kimi Regler is our managing producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet audio, Nick Thorburn of the Great Indy Rock Band Islands, wrote our theme. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey

at Wondery.com slash Survey.