How Mindfulness Meditation Can Help You Make Fewer Mistakes and Errors
A great deal has been researched and published regarding the physical and psychological benefits of meditation.
In my book, Eye of the Storm: How Mindful Leaders Can Transform Chaotic Workplaces, I also describe in detail how mindful leaders can make a positive impact on organizations and their workers.
Recent research has also shown that meditation can aid us in reducing mistakes and errors that are made.
A new study by YanLi Lin and colleagues from Michigan State University published in the journal Brain Sciences found in studying brain functioning, that meditation could help you to become less error prone.
The research tested how what is termed “ open monitoring meditation” or meditation that focuses awareness on feelings, thoughts or sensations as they unfold in one’s mind and body — altered brain activity in a way that reduces mistakes and errors.
“People’s interest in meditation and mindfulness is outpacing what science can prove in terms of effects and benefits,” said Lin “But it’s amazing to me that we were able to see how one session of a guided meditation can produce changes to brain activity in non-meditators.”
The findings suggest that different forms of meditation can have different neurocognitive effects. “Some forms of meditation have you focus on a single object, commonly your breath, but open monitoring meditation is a bit different,” Lin said. “It has you tune inward and pay attention to everything going on in your mind and body. The goal is to sit quietly and pay close attention to where the mind travels without getting too caught up in the scenery.”
Lin and his co-authors — William Eckerle, Ling Peng and Jason Moser — recruited more than 200 participants to test how open monitoring meditation affected how people detect and respond to errors.
The participants, who had never meditated before, were taken through a 20-minute open monitoring meditation exercise while the researchers measured brain activity through an EEG. Then, they completed a computerized distraction test.
“The EEG can measure brain activity at the millisecond level, so we got precise measures of neural activity right after mistakes compared to correct responses,” Lin said. “A certain neural signal occurs about half a second after an error called the error positivity, which is linked to conscious error recognition. We found that the strength of this signal is increased in the meditators relative to controls.”
“These findings are a strong demonstration of what just 20 minutes of meditation can do to enhance the brain’s ability to detect and pay attention to mistakes,” Moser said. “It makes us feel more confident in what mindfulness meditation might really be capable of for performance and daily functioning right there in the moment.”
Looking ahead, Lin said that the next phase of research will be to include a broader group of participants, test different forms of meditation and determine whether changes in brain activity can translate to behavioral changes with more long-term practice.
“It’s great to see the public’s enthusiasm for mindfulness, but there’s still plenty of work from a scientific perspective to be done to understand the benefits it can have, and equally importantly, how it actually works,” Lin said. “It’s time we start looking at it through a more rigorous lens.”
Lin’s research adds more credence to the positive benefits of mindfulness mediation as a way of not only enhancing well-being, but improving productivity.
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