The Evolving Leader

The Resilient Mind with David Creswell

• David Creswell • Season 6 • Episode 23

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In this episode of The Evolving Leader, co-hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to resilience expert David Creswell. David is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Carnegie Mellon University and Chief of Science at Equa Health. His research ranges from basic neuroscience to large community based clinical trials of stress management programs and techniques while his Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University leads on the science of mindfulness meditation training. David is also the Chief of Science at Equa Health, where he has used his research to build an interactive and personalised digital mindfulness training app (www.equahealth.io).
 
David’s work is often profiled in places like the NY Times, LA Times, the Washington Post, and the Today Show, and for his scientific contributions he has received early career awards from the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the Social Personality Health Network, and the American Psychosomatic Society.

Referenced during this episode:
Equa


Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
 Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)


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The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

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Jean Gomes:

If we want to face new, uncertain and potentially scary challenges without becoming defensive, blindsided or burnt out, we need to understand how to build an adaptive mindset that recognises how our feelings, thoughts and mental models work together. mindfulness and meditation are routinely cited in research literature, and amongst thinkers across the spectrum from self help to academic pioneers, has been one of the most successful methods for mindset building. From improved health to better decision making under pressure, it can dramatically improve our confidence and performance. But for many who have tried it, they give up quickly, unable to incorporate it into their lifestyle, or they find it irritatingly difficult and unfulfilling. In this show, we talked to one of the world's leading researchers in the field, about a big reframe that might help you to be more successful in gaining from its benefits. And spoiler alert, meditation and mindfulness are not about achieving a blissed out zen like state. Instead, it's about mental training, and the embrace of micro suffering. A practice that makes life's bigger challenges, setbacks and trigger events shrink into a wider context. If you've tried and failed, try it and we're not convinced or yet to start, give us an hour to reconsider and open up the potential to a whole new mindset building future.

Scott Allender:

Hi, friends, and welcome to the evolving leader, the show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender.

Jean Gomes:

And I'm Jean Gomes.

Scott Allender:

How are you feeling today, Jean?

Jean Gomes:

I'm feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the range of exciting things that are on my plate at the moment so positively challenged, so not not not in a negative place. But I'd be lying if I didn't think that was not the case. And I'm out the whole of next week with you in New York. So that I have to clear the schedule right down to be fully present with that. So I'm really looking forward to that and feeling great around what what we're going to be doing there. How are you feeling Scott?

Scott Allender:

Similar to you, I'm feeling very excited to be able to be with you next week, where I will dazzle you with my tales of how I pack for 10 days in a single carry on piece of luggage. And I will try to give you more tips again on that. I'm feeling very, very grateful today as well. I feel so fortunate to be able to talk to some of the world's leading experts on subjects that are quite honestly very, very close to meeting you know all of my needs as a leader. And in this case, today we get to talk to a world leader in wellbeing, stress and resilience and given the feedback that I know you and I have gotten on many occasions from our listeners. This is a pressing topic that we need to spend more time exploring. So today is going to be a really good show. We are joined by Dr. David Cresswell, who runs the health and human performance lab at Carnegie Mellon University. The labs work lies at the intersection of health, social and clinical psychology and health neuroscience. David's research focuses broadly on understanding what makes people resilient under stress. Specifically, he conducts community intervention studies laboratory studies of stress and coping and neuro imaging studies to understand how various stress management strategies alter our coping and stress resilience. He's also the chief of science at ECWA health, which has created an interactive and personalised digital mindfulness training app which I know Jean, you've been using, and his work has been widely published in the New York Times Washington Post and The Today Show as well as extensively in science journals. And a decade ago, the Association for Psychological Science recognised him as a rising star in 2014. He received the American Psychological Association Early Career Award, and in 2017, he received the Herbert wiener Early Career Award from the American psychosomatic society for his scientific contributions. David, welcome to the Evolving Leader.

David Creswell:

Wow, that was quite the introduction. Thanks for having me. Um, I'm coming in from Rainy Pittsburgh right now. It's a we're seeing some signs of spring and I'm happy to talk to you all and explore these topics around stress resilience and what we can do, you know, to reduce the stress in our lives. Maybe it sounds like both of you might benefit from that.

Jean Gomes:

Definitely. Well, these these shows are in part us working through our baggage, no I'm joking. David, welcome to the show. How are you feeling today? Great,

David Creswell:

Great, great. It's, it's really nice to talk to you and talk about these topics that we've been we've been studying now for, you know, about 15 to 20 years in my lab. So I know we've got an ambitious agenda. So looking forward to taking a dive in.

Jean Gomes:

Well, let's start with that that journey, because you've been, as you say, studying resilience for over 20 years and you started as a sports psychologist in US speedskating. Can you briefly start there and give us an interest in understanding of why wellbeing has been such a central focus of your work?

David Creswell:

Yeah, I was really from an early age interested in you know, how to build more resilient people and how to get the performance edge in life and sports a great domain to explore those interests. I played college tennis and had the opportunity I was a Sport and Exercise Science minor in college and I basically put my my resume and to anyone that would listen over at the Olympic Training Centre in Colorado Springs. And fortunately, US speedskating had an open position for us or resident assistant coach that would provide some mental skills training to their athletes. So I had this great opportunity, really, at a young age during my college years to live with the US short track speedskating team, they were a young team at the time. So I still had some age seniority on this on those guys. And there was it was a really unique time in short track speedskating where a lot of the kind of young inline skaters were coming over to short track speed skating because they saw the opportunity to win Olympic medals. So we had these young in liners that were sort of just coming into the scene for for short track. And none of them wanted to listen to me initially about mental skills training, whether that was about creating logbooks to sort of track their goals in their performance. It was also about mental imagery, and I also built in mindfulness meditation strategies. And my breakthrough was with Apollo Ono, actually, he was, you know, he's now one of our most winningest winter Olympians in terms of medals, but he's, he's been okay with me sharing the story. But, you know, he and I started playing badminton. And I started noticing patterns in his performance. And then he started taking me more seriously and started doing meditation with me every night. And then he won the junior world championship, couple months after we started working more closely together, and that brought the rest of the team around. And so they were more willing to start to do these mental training exercises. And so it's, it's really great couple years where I had an opportunity to, you know, test out some of these ideas on ways to make more resilient people under really high performance demands. And I always sort of say that Apollo was my first meditation student, you know, in this work. And, you know, now for the last 20 years, we've been studying mindfulness meditation strategies for a broad range of, of people. And it really started in those early days working with the US short track speed skating team. So you know, one of the things that Jean and I have talked about, and we've written about separately in our books, even is that stress itself is not the enemy, and that it can be a factor in actually getting stronger. And it's when it becomes too pervasive to continuous and overwhelming that it's really when it becomes a problem.

Scott Allender:

I'd like to have you shed some light on a piece you wrote for Scientific American last year, called learning to accept discomfort could help you thrive. Can you can you talk to us about that a

Unknown:

bit? Yeah, well, first of all, you're right, that the stress response we have is a really evolved response to help give us the energy we need to respond to the demands that are placed on us. And so it's a beautiful system that can be really helpful. And, you know, of course, in the early days, it helped us sort of flee from predators or sort of fight and defend our territory, you know, so that we have this sort of classic fight or flight stress response. That's, that's really helpful in the moment. The problem is that as humans, we have this prefrontal cortex that can sort of take stressors that may or may not happen in the next six months and sort of make those a sort of continuous stressor for long periods of time. You know, you we've all had The experience of being up late at night ruminating about something that happened or something that may or may not happen, and not being able to turn it off very well. And so we, we have to develop strategies for how we can better manage the beautiful machinery that we have around both are sort of our brains response to, you know, potential stressors in the future. And, and also, you know, be able to turn on the stress response, when we need it be be able to turn it off as well. And, you know, so we've been doing a lot with stress management interventions, a lot of the work we do is looking at mindfulness meditation, techniques for giving people these skills to be able to turn on and off their stress responses. But that's taken us in some surprising and interesting directions. In the last I don't know, I'd say eight or so years, where we've been starting to look at what mindfulness meditation is. And in fact, what it is, is it's asking people to sit down and pay attention to their experience in a particular way, in a sort of non judgmental or nonreactive way. And meditation is actually a really interesting situation where we're asking you to sit with a bunch of what I might call benign discomforts, right? You get that itch on your nose, or that sort of discomfort in your legs. Or maybe you're feeling that kind of emotional agitation in your body, because you like want to be doing something else. But it's a beautiful thing, in that you create the situation where these are these benign discomforts. And we're asking you to continually bring this capacity to be nonreactive, non judgmental, and sort of open to your experience. So in effect, what we're doing is we're asking you to sort of sit with discomfort. Some people may not, who are listening to this, do meditation, but they go in, they exercise, and they say, actually, what I'm doing with my exercise routine is sort of creating some discomfort in my body. And I'm, I'm like having to figure out how to work with that. And in fact, if you look at our evolutionary past, you know, much of human existence was dealing with lots of discomfort in life, right, you're dealing with not having air conditioning, and, you know, dealing with with heat, or dealing with cold or other types of discomforts. And so, you know, over time, we, as humans have had to learn how to sit with discomfort, I'd say, you know, in our sort of modern era, we have much fewer discomforts. And so meditation, I think, plays a beautiful role, or it's a beautiful tool for helping people start to work with sitting with discomfort, and, you know, what we're finding with these types of mindfulness meditation programmes that helps people better manage their distress, you know, reduces their suffering. And so you can learn these skills, and practice these skills with meditation and so that when you're then going out into the world, and you're dealing with significant stressors that are hitting you, or what people report to us again, and again, in our mindfulness meditation programmes is that, that the experience doesn't doesn't bother them as much. Like they're still experiencing the discomfort and the challenges, but it's not hitting them in the same way that they did. They're not reacting in the same way, or they're not continuing to react in the same way. And so I really see mindfulness meditation as an opportunity, it's sort of a training ground for working with distress and building up this capacity to not react in the same way. And so, you know, one of my big take home points I hope to leave you all with is that a lot of times people think about mindfulness meditation is some mellow out relaxation activity, like I should go and meditate, and just relax and just kind of hit this sort of blissful, transcendent state. And that can happen. But I like to think of mindfulness meditation is like, you're sort of you're you're sort of training for your brain, right? It's like you're training for building up these, these capacities to change how you're reacting to experience. So in fact, meditation by design is not meant to be comfortable, it's meant to be challenging, and that if you bring that attitude in, I think you can really transform how you train with with mindfulness meditation, and also how you sort of change your expectations on results. And, you know, some of the best mindfulness meditation training sessions, really maybe the ones where you're sort of having to deal with discomfort the most and really continue to keep bringing up these sorts of capacities of non reactivity, non judgement and open curiosity, the experience.

Scott Allender:

Are you finding that as well? As our lives get more comfortable, is this a correlated factor to what I presume is is people struggling more and more to cope with stress in difficult situations, we almost have come to expect that life will be and feel comfortable. And so therefore, if I'm hearing you correctly, when stressors happen, we're less able to cope.

David Creswell:

Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a general capacity for our brains to sort of, you know, seek out pleasure and avoid pain. And I think a lot of the technology and modern comforts that we built have sort of moved out a lot of the sort of standing discomforts that people had to deal with on a daily basis. Even you know, think about what existence was like, you know, 150 years ago, you know, no air conditioning,

Unknown:

you know, the heat was coming from wood burning coal burning fires, you know, these are not exactly comfortable lives that people lead. And so, you know, you had to build these skills. But as we've sort of changed with these mark just comforts, we've lost a lot of those training opportunities, I would say, now, have there been really great scientific studies on this not to my knowledge, you know, but what you're seeing is, you know, there's different books that are coming out on these topics these days, you know, coddling of the American mind, you know, among others, that that are sort of starting to explore these topics and say, like, there's actually some value to practices or contexts that allow us to sit with discomfort. And what I'm trying to do is really say, actually, contemplative practices, like mindfulness meditation are really great places for sitting with discomfort and practising building these skills. Now, one of the ways that we've been talking about this is that these mindfulness meditation practices help build equanimity skills. Equanimity is sort of a funny word that's been thrown around in some places, or maybe folks haven't heard it before. But it's this idea that we can be at peace with the push and pull of our experience. And that mindfulness meditation practices allow us to really build these equanimity skills, where we can meet discomfort, we can meet stressors in our life, or challenges in our life, with more equanimity. And so we've been working really hard to kind of, I think, put equanimity on the scientific map, and sort of say, Hey, this is really one of the active ingredients for why mindfulness meditation programmes work so well is that they build these equanimity skills. So sitting with the discomfort really is a means for building these equanimity skills, which I think can be so transformative for people in terms of changing how they're dealing with stress and suffering in real life.

Jean Gomes:

So I think is a really important point that we need to just completely underline here, because for many people, they either give up on mindfulness and meditation because they associate it with being something pleasurable and relaxing and so on. Or they don't even try in the first place. Because that's not for me, that's not who I am. So we're kind of thinking about this idea of it being a training ground for building resilience and the ability to confront discomfort, and manage it differently, which I think is really important thing to help understand. And this intentional equanimity that you were talking about here helps us to face the kind of overwhelming situations that are often finding ourselves in Can we get a little bit into the research that you did, because you request you recruited stressed adults, and you gave them mindfulness meditation training programmes, with our training in equanimity. And with what happened? What was the difference for people? Yeah,

Unknown:

so we did that. We've done a couple of large, randomised controlled trials. So these are big clinical trials. We've recruited stressed community adults, so people say they've over the past month, they have really high stress stress levels. And we've put them into different programmes. One programme is sort of standard mindfulness meditation training, where you're learning how to use your attention to pay attention to your present moment experience, but that we're really teaching these equanimity skills to so we're teaching people how to be nonreactive, non judgmental, and more open and curious to their experience. So, you know, we're giving people strategies for how to welcome experience, even if that experience is unpleasant. So you can imagine if you're having some discomfort or craving response, we ask you to really sort of pay attention to like, what that experience feels like you actually get really curious about it. It isn't about sort of ignoring it, or pushing it away, but to sort of move your attention fully into that experience. In fact, one of the specific activities that we do with our mindfulness meditation training as we have P We'll just notice body experience. So they're just monitoring body experience. So each time they notice a body experience, maybe it's a discomfort in your knee, or maybe it's some pleasant warm feeling in your chest, we just have them label it with the label feel. So each time to yourself quietly, you can just say feel as you notice these experiences. These are great ways to get people to be mindfully attentive to their body experience. But then for the equanimity skills, we actually change it a little bit, we say, each time you notice a body sensation, good or bad. just label it. Yes. And that yes, is your reminder to sort of move your attention in to that experience. If it's really uncomfortable, and you need to distract yourself, that's fine. You know, bring yourself back to doing this practice. Again, starting again, sorry, again. And each time using that label, yes, as a way to move into that body experience. And in which, by doing these types of practices, we can really get people to start to change their relationship to their experience, like, just uncomfortable experiences are okay, like, they're just going to be there. And I'm just going to watch them, you know, gently acknowledge them and sort of acknowledge the quality and nature of that experience. People can build these skills over time. So we delivered these programmes in this clinical trial, it was a 14 day, we've done in different ways. But the study I want to tell you about right now is we did it as a 14 day mindfulness meditation app. So you were doing this 20 minutes a day of these types of guidances. As I mentioned, in this one group, they did all of this sort of attention monitoring, and equanimity skills training. So they got all these sort of prompts to sort of pay attention to their experience, practice doing that, and to do it in a particular way with sort of non reactivity, non judgement. So building these equanimity skills. In another group, we, we actually gave them a mindfulness meditation programme that was similar, but we stripped out all that equanimity language. So you're still learning how to pay attention to your experience and label experience. But we didn't add on all these things about being non judgmental, and nonreactive. And curious. So it's like, every time your attention wanders, just bring it back, you know, and so you're really monitoring your experience. So this is a really tightly controlled study where we're only taking away the equanimity skills training. So we call this in our clinical science, clinical science field, we call these dismantling trials, we're sort of dismantling the equanimity skills training component for mindfulness interventions. So we have these two groups, we then had a third group where they were doing active coping effectiveness training. So they're learning coping skills, but it didn't have a mindfulness training component. So we wanted a third control, or comparison group. So we have this this group of stress community adults, essentially, they're randomly assigned to one of these 314 day training programmes, 20 minutes a day on their smartphone. And we did a number of assessments on them to sort of look at what are the impacts of this type of training, one of the assessments that we did was at the end of that 14 day training run, we had them come into the laboratory, and we had them all do a very stressful task, we had them give a five minute speech and do five minutes of really difficult mental arithmetic. And they're doing it in front of this panel of experts who are wearing white lab coats, and we train that panel to look really unimpressed with their performance. So you can imagine you're getting up there, you're talking about why you'd be a really good person for the job, all these things. And you have this group, this panel of people in white lab coats, they're shaking their heads, looking really unimpressed with your performance. That's for five minutes really hard. And then we say, by the way, we now want you to do this mental arithmetic task, you need to count backwards from 2083 by seven teens go. It's so people are doing that. And every time they mess up, they say that is incorrect. Please start over again at 2083. Why do we do these terrible things to people? Well, it reliably increases their stress response. So you get increases in heart rate increases in blood pressure. And importantly, we also get increases in stress hormones like cortisol levels, so we can actually measure your cortisol and saliva. And this task is called the tree or social stress task is a really good at stress task for increasing all of these sorts of stress response signals. And so the question we had was, well, when we offer these different mindfulness training programmes, is that going to change how people are reacting in the stress tax? And what we find is that, first of all, if you just look at our two mindfulness training programmes, they do turn down people's stress responding relative to coping effectiveness training, so teaching people general coping skills, giving them an opportunity to think about the stresses doesn't really do much in terms of actually helping people in the moment in terms of their their stress reactions. But the most interesting thing was we found that really learning these equanimity skills was a key driver. are reducing people's stress biology or their stress reactivity to this task. We saw the most dramatic stress reduction benefits when they learn these equanimity skills. So it's really learning how to be more open and curious to your experience is really changing how you're reacting when we really stick it to you with these very difficult stress tasks. And now, we saw this beautiful 54% reduction in their cortisol levels, when they learn these equanimity skills relative to the control group. So I think it's really led us to some provisional conclusions that learning these equanimity skills is going to change your your stress biology over time, particularly when you're provoked. And we saw these beautiful other benefits in terms of learning these equanimity skills on your well being. So we did experience sampling where we actually add people respond on their smartphones, we sent them periodically during their waking hours, these little queries, like, you know, how are you doing right now, we could ask about their social relationships, we could ask about their, their mood, and so on. And we saw that learning these equanimity skills really boosted people's positive emotions and well being in daily life. And it also improved their social functioning, reduce their loneliness, and improved the number of quality social interaction. So, you know, I think that learning is equanimity skills are really opening people up to sort of savour and capture the more positive moments in people's lives, improving their well being. And also, by learning these skills about how to be more economists with your own experience. It's making people interestingly, more open to connecting with others, right, and lowering your loneliness and having more quality social interaction. So, you know, I always say the side effect profile of mindfulness meditation training looks pretty good, you know, you get wellbeing benefits, you get social relationship benefits. And, you know, we've got this data to really suggest that it's going to change how you're reacting to, you know, stressors, in terms of your stress, or allergy. So that's just one example of sort of how we've been thinking about studying these equanimity skills is to do it in the context of mindfulness, intervention trials, where we compare mindfulness interventions with equanimity skills to mindfulness interventions without those equanimity skills to sort of show that the equanimity skills may be a potentially important player in you know, the outcomes that we care about.

Scott Allender:

This is super interesting to me. And this is probably a good place to ask you about your app. Aqua, I'm assuming does that stand for? Is that short for equanimity? Yeah,

Unknown:

it's EQ UA, that's right. ECWA is short for equanimity. You know, we're we're not only trying to put equanimity on the scientific map as something that people should be studying and paying attention to, in our clinical trials. But we've been trying to figure out ways to take a lot of our laboratory research where we've been building ways to build these equanimity skills, and to translate that into, you know, a commercial app that's going to be available for folks to download and use. And so, you know, ECWA is really an extension of these, these clinical trials. It's our second generation mindfulness training app, it's available on the, you know, the Apple Store and the Google Google Play Store. So you can go there and and download it and try it out. I think the things that I'm most excited about with the app, right now is that we've tried to make it interactive, so that you sort of feel like you have a coach in your pocket. We're really, you know, pushing hard on sort of branding it as a an app, that it's a mental training app, this is not an app for you to come and just mellow out, you know, it's about building the skills. And we get really clear about the skills that we're building, including these equanimity skills. So it's going to be interactive, it's going to feel like you're going to get prompts from the teacher that says, you know, did you experience this or this and then we can sort of customise, you know, your guidance based on the feedback we're getting. And what I'm really excited about who's got this new respiration science work that we're doing we're we're finding that people's breathing patterns tell us a whole lot about who's going deep with their mindfulness meditation training. And we're finding this sort of slow rhythmic breathing pattern that's really distinct when people are going deep with their mindfulness training. And some of our new machine learning work in the lab is showing that we can with about 83 to 85% accuracy predict whether the session is going to be improving your mindfulness skills or not just based on what your breathing patterns are. And so in some of our kind of scientific betas right now, i i We're just about to release this commercially so you can kind of see it and play around with it with our respiration beta. People can put the phone on their chest with a chest strap, you know, or a belt. You can imagine taking your either belt, hoisting it up on the middle of your chest, maybe for the video audience, I can, I can show you a little bit. And the phone sort of sits right here on your sternum. And the accelerometer actually moves with your breathing. And we actually get these really great measures that people's breathing patterns without a whole lot of expensive technology.

David Creswell:

And so we've got this respiration beta that's Yeah. I think I mean, we could talk about this at the level of, coming in, that will be available for folks to test. And we're definitely in the early stages, we just got a large are just about to get a large grant from National Institutes of Health to do a large three year development projects technology development project on our respiration tracking. But the really cool thing about the respiration tracking is that we're finding an experimental studies in the lab that people like it, and they're more willing to do mindfulness meditation training, if they can get this feedback about how they're doing. And mindfulness apps really are part of a broader category of well being apps that people use, but they of the brain, we can talk about the level of psychology and behaviour. don't use all that regularly. In you know, you mentioned at the at the front of the hour that you know, a lot of the people you talk to struggle with doing meditation or exercise and sort of sticking with it. And so a lot of what we're trying to solve right now at Echo is how do we how do we really address the engagement problem? How do we make these things sticky. And I think if you can see your progress, with your bio signals like your respiration, that's going to be a really sticky element that's going to allow people to see whether they're improving their skills and help them stick around build that mastery.

Unknown:

I think that generally, lots of people have a general mindset of discomfort or pain, or suffering is bad. Yeah. And so there's an immediate knee jerk reaction to trying to suppress or otherwise avoid these experiences. And I think what we're doing with mindfulness training, mindfulness meditation training, is we're sort of retraining that reaction. And that, in that space, we're opening up opportunities for insight and discovery into, you know, I hadn't seen it in this way. It actually doesn't bother me as bad as I thought. And there's some real lessons, historically, from the mindfulness meditation, science literature, you know, some of the earliest scientific work, rigorous scientific work that came out was done by Jon Kabat Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre, and so that he did his work in the late 70s. And throughout the 80s, really, where he built a new pain clinic, a mindfulness based pain clinic, and they treated these chronic pain patients that weren't responding to any of the other treatments. So essentially, he became his clinic kind of became a dumping ground for all the docs sending him there, there were non responsive pain patients. And so he taught them mindfulness meditation. You know, he did it through eight or 10 week courses, they learn these skills, they practice them 30 to 45 minutes a day. And if you look at the data from these pain patients, it's really interesting. And they've done more recent studies of this as well. But the pain patients said, like, I still have the pain, but it doesn't bother me as much anymore. And so you really saw a change in the nature of that their relationship to pain, they reduced the amount of pain relief medication they were taking. So this translated into changes in their their real behaviour. And more recent work that's been doing neuroimaging in this space finds that actually, you're not only changing people's brain response, in terms of the unpleasantness response, like it's not just that people are saying, like, the pain doesn't feel as unpleasant anymore, doesn't bother me as much anymore. But you're also changing the sort of somatosensory representation of the pain. So mindfulness training seems to sort of quiet down these sorts of pain reflex circuits, as well. And I find that to be really interesting. So I think there's a whole lot that's going on, as we start to build these equanimity skills to really flex this capacity to be like, I want to be curious about this pain instead of just sort of suppressing or distracting myself from it. And as you start to move into that pain experience and look at it, start to break that experience down. There's, I think, a tremendous transformation of brain, psychology and biology in that space.

Scott Allender:

Can we talk a bit about sleep as well, because you've done some interesting research here. And it's much like mindfulness, mindfulness meditation, it feels like something people are willing to sacrifice to readily.

Unknown:

The first part of this podcast is about waking up. And now we want to transition to falling. Want to cover it cover the full space of consciousness? Full Spectrum? Very good. Yeah. And, yeah, so you know, we've done some work looking at different sleep signals. And they're the value they tell us in terms of academic academic achievement, actually. So we've done some work, looking at young adults, these are first and second year college students, and looking at their sleep patterns, and then looking at how that might matter in terms of their performance and academic achievement. So in this wellness space that my lab works, and we do think about waking up and falling asleep, I think they're, they're equally important. And so it's been fun to kind of build out that that kind of that space. But essentially, what we did was we we worked with a number of universities, we equipped, first and second year college students. And the data I'm going to speak to we focus primarily on first year college students. But we equip them with Fitbits. So these were Fitbits, that were tracking their sleep and activity patterns. We did a whole lot of other things as well, but I'll hold that aside for now. And what we did is in each case, we were able to get their consent to get their university records, so we can actually track their their GPA and actually look at their their college performance. And one question that we had going into this was, we know that first year college students have pretty disrupted sleep patterns, you know, and you can imagine being a young adult coming into college, you got all the hustle and bustle and an activity of the dorm, at least for residential college students, and you're trying to figure out for the first time in your life, how to sort of set your own sort of sleep schedules. In our college students samples, and this was these were studies that were done at here at Carnegie Mellon University, also at the University of Washington, and at Notre Dame. So we had a kind of a broad range of different types of university settings. In each case, these were first year college students that were being tracked for an entire, you know, spring term, academic term, with their Fitbits to look at their sleep patterns. And there's a really a couple of really interesting findings from this. The first is that, yes, these college students weren't sleeping that much average nightly sleep duration was about six and a half hours, six hours and 37 minutes to be precise. You know, as you might imagine, with 18 year old kids, the general sleep medicine guidelines that are they they should be having eight to 10 hours of sleep per night. So you know, on average, these students were accumulating pretty significant sleep debts. And we knew this because when we looked at the spring break period, we saw these huge sleep rebound effects, like these college students are basically sleeping through their their spring breaks. So they work certainly building up sleep sleep debt. Another thing that we found was that the average bed time was

2:

30am. average wait time was around, you know, 9am. So I was quickly humbled by the fact that the college students that I'm teaching are living in very different time zones than me as someone who goes to bed at 1030. But when we looked at the different sleep signals, what we found was that it was total nightly sleep duration, that was the most critical variable for predicting people's academic success. That's the total amount of sleep that they got at night. And by the way, these effects hold if we look at daytime napping, so it's not about like, getting a small nightly sleep window and then do taking a big nap during the day. It's really about the length of that nightly sleep window that was important. And it really scaled up so that it was sort of a linear effect more nightly sleep was associated with higher end of term GPA. These effects hold even if we control for their previous term GPA, or if we control for like the total amount of like course units they were taking. So wasn't like, you know, this was due to their academic load, for example. So we found in some sensitivity analyses that the A big problem was in the six hours or less per night sleepers. These were the folks where we saw a real drops in their GPA from their fall term GPA to their spring term GPA. If you were sleeping less than six hours a night, that was a real signal for problems, terms of your academic performance. So a really, I think, important study to sort of say that sleep matters for our academic performance. And I suspect, although we haven't looked at this, you know, if we're looking at other, you know, midlife adults, for example, or other types of performance contexts, that nightly sleep duration is going to be a real important signal. You know, we did look at other sleep features, like maybe it was like, when they went to bed, for example, or like, maybe it was variability like some nights you go to bed early other nights you go to late and like that variability is going to create problems for your academic performance, none of those hold up, it really is about that total nightly sleep duration that really matters.

Jean Gomes:

from a performance perspective, you've conducted studies and decision making and learning related to well being Can you talk to us a little bit about what you've done and what you've learned in those areas? Yeah,

Unknown:

so one of the you know, big take home messages from about 150 years of stress research, or research on stress is that stress can impact decision making. And, and sort of change how people are making decisions. And so, in that space, we've been looking at stress management strategies and interventions that can sort of facilitate decision making under stress. And so we've done a little bit of work, looking at ways that people in the moment as they're entering difficult or stressful situations, can employ strategies that can help them manage the stress more effectively and make better decisions. And so we've done some laboratory studies where we have people think about important personal values. So it's, in the in the psychology literature, this is called self affirmation or value affirmation, thinking about an important personal value. And we've shown over a number of studies now that just the act of thinking about something that is really important to you can have these really beautiful stress buffering effects that can change your stress biology reactions, to acute stressors we do in the lab, or even like daily stressors that are occurring. So we've looked at this in the context of like, taking a really stressful exam, for example, these types of value affirmation or self affirmation activities can be really helpful in terms of turning down your stress biology reactions. And then some of our, our work has moved into the decision making space like are you able to do creative problem solving tasks more effectively under stress, if you've done a self affirmation activity, and that's what we've shown is that thinking about an important personal value, and then having you do a sort of under time pressure problem solving tasks, we can improve your problem solving performance, with that simple activity.

Sara Deschamps:

If the conversations we've been having on the evolving leader have helped you in any way, please share this episode with your network, friends and family. Thank you for listening. Now, let's get back to the conversation.

Scott Allender:

We talked to leaders all the time, who are experiencing, you know, constant shifting and pressures and added pressures and the world is evolving faster than it sort of ever has, and things are changing. And if you were to kind of step back and kind of put on a leadership lens. What do you think? What do you consider that are the some of the biggest factors that are undermining people's well being? And what are the things that leaders can kind of look out for when they think about the people in their care and their own self care? I mean, we've talked about sleep, we've talked about mindfulness meditation, as important solutions to combat some of this stuff. But what what do you see as an overarching sort of theme that's undermining people's well being and what can our listeners kind of think about as they as they lead in their day to day?

Unknown:

Yeah, I mean, I would say that the, you know, if you look at the best leaders, and these are leaders who last are ones that prioritise self care and building and nurturing relationships in their life, you know, these are these are people that really invest in this space. And when I say invest, I mean that they make it part of their daily routine. And I think that that the data really bears this out that people who prioritise these types of, you know, resilience building, training exercises, whether that be exercise If meditation or other types of self care, you know, decent sleep, would I put I put into that category. And that really invest in in building and nurturing the relationships and the communities that they work in. These are the folks that, you know, seem to be happiest and most effective in their jobs. And there's always cases of people, you can find readers that, that do not fall into these categories. So, but generally, looking at effective leadership, these are people that are investing in these practices, and saying that they're critically important for their success. So, you know, I think we have lots of good examples of this that are already out there. I think the big question is, well, in my extremely overscheduled, you know, calendar, like, how do I get the maximum bang for my buck, you know, in terms of protecting my time for these things, but also knowing that I've got a whole lot going on. And, you know, that's where I think we've been trying to work on building more effective digital mindfulness training exercises. So, you know, at ECWA, for example, we're building two to 10 minute guided meditation sessions, we're going to try to lean into more six minute training sessions, so that, you know, on your subway right in, or, if you're at physical therapy, and they want to do some Eisen stem, you can just plug in, right and do these, do these types of training exercises just as part of your regular routine, and that they don't feel too onerous. I don't have great news on the sleep front, because, you know, it's total nightly sleep duration in our work. So, you know, some real sleep medicine leader say, hey, you know, protect an eight hour nightly sleep window. I always say that, and, you know, at some leadership meetings, everyone gasped with like, How dare you, you know, tell me I have to sleep eight hours, I think there's a lot of variability in that in terms of what's going to be optimal. But, you know, our research really shows that, you know, you're gonna get, you're gonna live longer, you're, you're gonna perform better, everything's gonna get better if you're sort of looking at ways to protect that night least sleep window. And, you know, I, I think a lot of times when people ask me as sort of a resilience expert, you know, what's the, what's the, what's the biggest number one, I think, for me, it's about building, sustaining and nurturing relationships, there's so much beautiful research on social support and, and social connection, that's sort of the, you know, the key for, you know, a good life. And, you know, I've been surprised and working in this space for so many years, how few interventions we have, or programmes that we have for fostering, like, better humans in terms of more relational humans. And I've been impressed with some of the new programmes on social emotional learning, that give people practices and skills to actually practice like, how do we manage conflict? You know, how do we build relationships, and, you know, I live in a space in academia, where scientists are not trained in social skills, you know, so I get to see this on a daily basis. But that, that we actually have to practice these skills. And that, you know, I think we need better programmes. So I encourage people to check out social emotional learning programmes is one sort of tool for, for building those skills. But, you know, overall, to the degree that leaders can be building these skills, and committing to building these skills, and speaking in their community agreements, to the people that they work with about the importance of these skills, we have the opportunity, I think, to take the science that we're doing, and translate it into, you know, happier, healthier, more productive workplaces. And, you know, if there's one, one message I've seen is that, you know, a lot of people talk about vacations or leisure time, but the data really suggests that people who spend time on vacations or leisure, leisure time, do a better job in terms of work efficiency, work productivity over time. So if you're interested in playing the long game with your organisation, to the degree that you can be promoting opportunities to do this self care to take the vacations, you actually, you know, surprisingly going to get a better, more effective product or workplace environment in terms of your efficiencies and work. So, you know, I think it's, I think it's worth the effort to spend the energy and time on these elements. If you care about the bottom line.

Jean Gomes:

David, to kind of bring us to the end of our conversation, which has been amazing and really inspiring. I love the app, I think it's fantastic. And I'd really encourage your listeners to download it and start playing with it. For anybody who's not tried mindfulness and meditation techniques, or how they struggle with it, and they've really, you know, it's not worked for them. What would you encourage is like the way to get them over the hump? You know, the when should they do it in the day? What's the what are the things to think about to make a good start?

Unknown:

Yeah, well, the first is to set expectations. And that if you're going to come in to this with the expectation that you should feel relaxed and blissed out right away, you're setting the wrong expectation. So let's set the right expectation, this is you protecting some time to do some mental training to get some mental exercise for your brain. And that the purpose, one purpose of these types of training programmes is to make you feel a little bit uncomfortable, and to see how you can sit and work with that discomfort. So each time you're noticing discomfort to remind yourself, this is my brain working, building these skills and changing like this is, this is the secret sauce. So I think that's, that's one key element is to think about this as an opportunity for mental training. You know, I totally recognise the challenges for starting any new self care routine, whether that's sleeping, you know, more consistently with a protected sleep window, starting exercise, quitting smoking, or starting a new meditation programme. And, you know, I think there's different ways that that work really well for people. One is to commit to a very small amount, think of the minimum amount that you would say, Hey, listen, like that's, that's something I can do. Maybe, for you on your exercise, it's like committing to five minutes a day of walking, you know, walking around the block once a day, for meditation, and maybe committing to it two minutes a day, just dropping in, and trying these practices. So that can be a really nice tool for just starting to build the habit of doing these practices. And, you know, another thing to do is to sort of structure it into parts of your day where there's windows where it's, it's regular. So, you know, for some people, it's, it's in the morning, when they wake up, you know, it's going to be part of everyone's figured out, most people have figured out how to brush their teeth every morning, you know, after the breakfast, or after they get up. Likewise, you can build some of these very short self care routines and as sort of part of that daily routine. And another thing you can do is you can say, I'm going to find others that I want to do this with, we're going to commit to starting these programmes together. In fact, we're going to download one of the, you know, 1000s of different mindfulness meditation apps. And we're going to commit to doing this together for five minutes a day, at lunch, you know, maybe this is a co worker, for example. And that type of kind of social contracting, can be really helpful for sort of supporting and sustaining building these new habits, I think you might be surprised whether it's with exercise, or meditation, that as you start to get into it, you're gonna make insights and discoveries and start to feel better. And so some of those things, as long as you stick with it can really create their own momentum itself. And so give these practices enough of a chance couple of weeks to really start to work, the magic that began to once people start feeling better, they can see the value and that can be really helpful for wanting to go deeper and build these practices. And, you know, I've got a new op ed coming out in Scientific American on the benefits of exercise. And one of the big things I say in that is that, you know, to the degree we can start to make our exercise routines fun and joyful. So many of us sort of feel like we have to do exercise, and it's just gonna, like, I'm just gonna go grin and bear it. This is not the strategy for a long term, exercise routine, that's actually going to be helpful. In fact, if you force animals to exercise, they actually found that that's counterproductive for our brain. So we have to figure out ways to make exercise fun and, you know, so go go find a pickleball league or, you know, go go find a social sport that, you know, captivates your interest and find some joy in it. And those are going to be key ways to I think, make make the self care routine stick.

Scott Allender:

Well, folks, before you do anything else, download the ECWA app. All right now, fact we'll wait. Go ahead do it right now. David, this has been really brilliant. I wish we had more time to talk with you because I'm just soaking it all in. It's it's super inspiring. I thank you for the work you're doing. And thank you for talking with us about it today. It's it's been a real honour.

Unknown:

Thanks, you guys. It's been a lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for listening. Yeah,

Jean Gomes:

it's been brilliant. All right,

Scott Allender:

friends. Thanks for joining us today. And remember, until next time, the world is evolving. Are you

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Jean Gomes

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