Studies show that mindfulness enables people to increase their capacity to pay attention and to develop different qualities of attention for different situations and any task at hand.
Present-moment attention can be considered a self-regulatory skill of attention-regulation. It decreases rumination, worry, anxiety, and unbalanced orientation towards the past or future. (Dale Zhou)
Studies note that we have an over-reliance on thinking which does us harm and that mindfulness provides a quite different mode of consciousness. (Norman Farb)
Meditation has also been shown to reduce grey matter in the amygdala, which is a part of the brain commonly associated with stress, anxiety, and emotional processing. (Lazar)
If leaders want to direct the attention of their employees, they must first learn to focus their own.
Daniel Goleman
References
Dale Zhou et al, Mindful attention promotes control of brain network dynamics for self-regulation and discontinues the past from the present, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2201074119
Farb NA, Segal ZV, Mayberg H, Bean J, McKeon D, Fatima Z, Anderson AK. Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2007 Dec;2(4):313-22. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsm030
Lazar et al, Stress reduction correlates with structural changes in amygdala. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsp034
