Does Mindfulness Help Creativity?

The workplace has never demanded more. And not in a good way. I’m worried how this affects creativity. Being stressed and having great ideas are clearly not bedfellows. But, equally we’re building high performance teams where stress is a critical ingredient. 

A bit like quinoa, mindfulness has emerged as a path to betterment. Few are clear exactly where it came from or what precisely was wrong before. But its application seems to be appearing in ever random circumstances. You can now practice mindful wine tasting, use a mindful colouring-in book or even have mindful sex.Not unsurprising then, one of the places we are hearing about mindfulness the most is in agencies...

So, I decided to put it to the test. I’m generally in violent disagreement that we should have calm, centered employees. Energy, play, anger and chaos are all part of it. So my question was ‘does mindfulness actually help creativity?’. Because if it doesn’t, it’s just a piece of feel-good padding, at a time when we’re desperate to engineer systems that can bring some real originality of thinking and difference. 

So what is mindfulness?

Mindfulness’ spiritual image comes from its history being adapted from the teachings of Buddhism. The act of regular meditation - pausing to step out of the wandering mind and ‘just be’ has profound effects on our internal happiness. The science is that in exercising our muscles of concentration we increase our Working Memory Capacity or mental RAM.As we are often accused of being awkwardly hip and voguish, just over a year ago, we decided to see what mindfulness had to offer our agency.

The intention was far from hipster, we simply wanted to know whether the practice of mindfulness could go beyond personal wellbeing and increase creative capability. We teamed up with mindfulness industry leaders Michael Chaskalson and Dr. Peter Malinowski in conjunction with Liverpool Moore’s University to implement a full-blown training system based on mindfulness for the entire company with the red blooded objective to make ourselves more effective. 

The starting hypothesis was that there would be correlations between increases in Working Memory Capacity, creativity and productivity. In other words, participants would find it easier to think of new ideas, to have more of them and to feel an increase in happiness in doing so. Name me a Fortune 500 company's CEO who wouldn’t sell his pinky to get that?

Thirty employees were divided into two groups. Both underwent a series of pre- and post-training cognitive tests and were subjected to random positivity checks via email prompts. The groups were tested in sequence not in parallel, meaning that one group initially acted as a control.

Training lasted eight weeks, meeting for half-day sessions bi-weekly, which took priority over all work commitments.It is logical to expect an increase in productivity of some kind in the abstract. But in the real world, would our people be open enough to the training to benefit? Would they be able to assimilate the practices properly enough to make a difference? Not all made it through the training. Two collapsed out. But otherwise, the results were loud and clear. 

We found very significant increases in context sensitive Working Memory Capacity of both the initial mindfulness group and in the control group after they had the training. Done properly, mindfulness practice works.The other key stand out was the experience sampling, which showed that the mindfulness training increased people’s overall positivity. The results clearly showed that negative states decreased and positive states increased within both groups during and after the mindfulness training. 

It seems that the respondents became better able to manage their own minds and mental states, and that led to increased overall positivity. This makes a better working atmosphere, for sure, but more than that, a happy mind is a creative mind – and that matters most in our business.

What's fascinating about mindfulness is what it has to offer people working in imperfect industries in an imperfect world. Those who practice it suffer from less stress, can focus for longer and (when not working) sleep better. Let’s be honest, clients are going to make ever more unreasonable demands and you’re going to need the people in your company to be tooled up to cope.