How to Use Mindfulness to Hack Your Health and Happiness
Technology isn’t bad, but many of our habits around it are. Here’s how to break them and form new ones.
It’s rare that a conference featuring some of the brightest minds in Silicon Valley on stage and in the audience isn’t live tweeted, selfied and streamed from every angle. But at the most recent Leade.rs event, attendees actually… listened. They participated. They were engaged and in the moment, and almost no one had their smartphones in hand. Which maybe had a lot to do with the topic of the evening.
“My name is Jenna and I’m a technology startup burnout.”
“I’m Laurie and I’m addicted to my smartphone.”
Workers in the fields of health and wellness, startup founders and VCs, even CNN Senior Tech Correspondent Laurie Segall, there filming a docu-series on the subject, all joined together for a discussion on mindfulness in the digital age lead by Leade.rs Founder and CEO, Loic Le Meur and Soren Gordhamer, Founder of the Wisdom 2.0 conference.
Mindfulness—a word, by the way, that often has a red squiggle underneath it when typed into your messenger or note-taker of choice, proof of a word’s trendiness—is having a moment. It’s an answer to a problem we all know well: thanks to our many devices and unlimited data, we are digitally connected now more than ever for work and for play, a blessing and a curse.
We have access to all the information in the world, but don’t know what all of that news in our feeds tell us about who we ultimately are.
The solution is both incredibly simple but much easier typed/tweeted/Snapchatted than executed: investing in updates of the human kind, making sure our own heart and mind and awareness evolve along with our technology. Or, mindfulness.
Irene Au, Design Partner at Khosla Ventures wants to help us understand a crucial element of mindfulness: identifying your self. Then, applying your definition with everything you create.
The Googled dictionary definition of “self” is this:
She began her discussion on design and self by asking all of us to think about what we’re making and creating in our work. We know the well-designed products in our lives that make our existence easier and the poorly-designed products (the cable company’s over-crowded remote control and the uncomfortable, torture chamber that is an airplane seat) that make us unhappy.
“We need good design in this world, because good design helps us be closer to our best selves.” — Irene Au
What design can do for mindfulness’s branding could be the difference between it being written off as a Burners-only brunch conversation to being acknowledged as accessible and key for anyone’s success.
To find a beautiful example of a well-designed mindfulness tool, just type calm.com into your browser or app store and you’ll go into an instant state of ohm:
Alex Tew, Co-Founder and CEO of Calm used our ol’ frenemy technology to help people (two million a month, 70% female and mostly in big cities) learn how to meditate and develop a regular practice. The website and app transforms your surroundings through visual and audio cues and guides you in the practice of chilling out.
Real talk: The genius of Calm is that we’re being tricked into using technology to make us do something we wouldn’t do otherwise — take a break.
“We’re constantly using every little break in our life to get something done,” Soren pointed out.
#same #canrelate #amirite?
But maybe that is not entirely our faults. In fact, Parneet Pal, Harvard-trained physicianist and Chief Science Officer at Wisdom Labs will let us blame science just a little. In a way, our bodies and brains have actually been designed over all of these years of evolutions to embrace the hits of dopamine we get from checking our phones. Foraging and finding that food used to provide it, but now our reward centers are going off constantly as we Like, Follow, Swipe—repeat.
Parneet encouraged everyone in the room to look around and into as many eyes as we could of the people who sat around us. She reminded us that three out of four of everyone in the room will suffer from some sort of chronic lifestyle-related disease, from heart disease to depression. If you happened to live in Silicon Valley and be under the age of 40, the risks are even higher.
The great news is that all of that is completely preventable. For our physical health and mental wellbeing, we can take steps to manage our stress. Parneet pointed out that we can also take the time to align the unconscious and conscious parts of our brain and actually hone our attention networks to change our brain’s course. Ahead of those New Year’s resolutions we might be make just to break, dig deep for your true intentions behind them. And maybe a mindfulness practice just might make the list.
Way before the invention of the iAnything, scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote that all of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. As Soren said, and many echoed throughout the night, technology isn’t good or bad. It just is, and what we bring to it and what it means in our lives and in our happiness and well-being is ultimately up to us.
If you’ve never meditated or are looking for an opportunity to check in with yourself right now, let Parneet Pal guide you through a meditation in our live stream here or replace your daily Facebook crawl with a visit to calm.com instead.
Visit Leade.rs for information and to sound off on speakers for our events in 2017. We’re bringing the best of Silicon Valley to Paris April 11 and 12, request your invitation here!
