39%: Finding Quiet in the Noise

ELISE HU: I’m your host, Elise Hu. This season we’re focusing on hybrid work. We’ll let you in on some of Microsoft’s most surprising findings to help companies and individuals create a better future of work.

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ELISE HU: Our ability to connect anytime anywhere has enabled a remarkable transformation to hybrid work. It’s also driving us to distraction—and exhaustion.

Today we’re talking with Dr. Clare Purvis, a clinical psychologist by background, whose career has been at the intersection of mental health and technology. She currently serves as senior director of behavioral science for the meditation app Headspace, so we figured she’d have some pretty great insights into how we can work meaningful breaks into our day to give our brains a breather. You’ll also be hearing in this episode from WorkLab correspondent Desmond Dickerson. He’s going to be zeroing in on stress and virtual meetings with Microsoft researcher Michael Bohan.

So let’s get to it. Dr. Purvis, welcome.

CLARE PURVIS: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

ELISE HU: For those who are unfamiliar, tell us what Headspace is.

CLARE PURVIS: Headspace is a global leader in mindfulness meditation. Many people know us through our mobile app, which has made mindfulness meditation accessible to millions of people all around the world. The company was first started about ten years ago, founded by Andy Puddicombe, who had been a Buddhist monk, and his friend Rich Pierson. And it actually started as an events company, where Andy was leading large, guided meditations for audiences.

That was a nonprofit venture. And they developed the app out of a response from all the people who had been coming to Andy’s teaching, saying, I love this, I’m getting so much value out of it, but I wish this was something I could take with me or that was available when I needed it. And so they were early in thinking about how to use digital technologies to bring this ancient practice into people’s lives.

ELISE HU: And for those of you who use the Headspace app, you will recognize Andy as Andy, the one you meditate with.

CLARE PURVIS: Absolutely.

ELISE HU: The Headspace app has meditations for kids too. And it’s obviously very important to control our emotions, even when we’re very, very young. So my eight-year-old daughter meditates with Andy, and she talks about Andy as if he’s an old friend.

CLARE PURVIS: I love that. People do connect with him. We get letters and emails and DMs from people all over the globe who feel that they have a relationship with Andy, that they know him. He’s an important part of our lives.

ELISE HU: He’s certainly in our ears and, therefore, in our heads.

CLARE PURVIS: Absolutely.

ELISE HU: What about you? How did you come to Headspace? And how did you come to doing this work?

CLARE PURVIS: I was training in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford, and my mentor there was one of the early thinkers in how we can use technology to scale access to mental health treatments. And so, when I was first starting out, this was in the days where we were developing computer-based therapies on a desktop computer. We’ve come a long way with mobile apps and wearable devices and all of that.

The thesis behind the work, and the passion behind the work, has stayed the same. I come from a mental health background, but, broadly, when we think about any intervention or health-and-wellness skill, there’s never going to be enough professionals, certainly not enough mental health professionals, for one-to-one care to be a realistic solution to meet people’s needs to help promote health and well-being.

And so technology, as we’ve entered this era of widespread access to digital technologies, is a tool that we can leverage to expand access to these skills and tools and types of supports that are helpful for people. And that was at the heart of our work at Stanford, where we were developing prevention and treatment programs for things like body-image disturbance and eating disorders. But at Headspace, when we pick a thoughtful and meaningful approach to how we package up those tools and teachings, in this case of mindfulness meditation, and you couple that with the huge reach of digital technologies, that’s potentially a radical impact that you can have on global health and well-being.

ELISE HU: Meditation, especially in recent years, has become more and more in vogue, and we hear the term mindfulness a lot. To you, what is it? What is it for?

CLARE PURVIS: Bringing it back to Andy again, I think he describes this in such a helpful way, that mindfulness is a quality of mind. It’s a way of being present, bringing your awareness to the present moment, without judgment or distraction and with a kind and compassionate heart.

ELISE HU: Without distraction!

CLARE PURVIS: Exactly. That’s the kicker.

ELISE HU: How do we do that?

CLARE PURVIS: Well, it’s a process, right? Like anything else, there are many ways to cultivate mindfulness. And of course at Headspace, what we’re grounded in is meditation, which is an ancient practice that helps us cultivate that mindful awareness. But certainly, it takes time, right? And whenever we sit down to meditate, or whenever we practice any activity that can help us cultivate mindfulness, it’s never the case that we sit down, and the mind is silent, and we have no distractions, and we’re just totally in the zone. It’s about how we relate to those different stimuli and thoughts and feelings and sounds that will distract us. And learning, practicing over time, bringing that attention and placing it back where we want it to be, so we have that intention and control over our attention.

ELISE HU: Is there a trick that we can use to get into flow when we’re feeling distracted?

CLARE PURVIS: If we come from a meditation or mindfulness perspective, our breath is always there. And something that Andy teaches in a lot of his sessions, especially in our Basics course, when you’re just starting out with meditation, is to get a little stone or a little sticker or a little item that you can place in your line of sight, on your desk, and when your eyes drift to that, when you notice it, it becomes your cue and your reminder to bring your attention to your breath, to drop in and just follow the next breath, all the way in and all the way out.

ELISE HU: I love that, especially now. It’s such an important time to be talking with you because more than half of the respondents in Microsoft’s 2021 Work Trend Index said they felt overworked while working remotely. And nearly four in ten—it was 39 percent, to be exact—described themselves as outright exhausted. That’s a lot. So what does that say to you? How do you interpret this data?

CLARE PURVIS: I resonate with it. I think we see this all around us, right, the change and the transition that we’ve all collectively gone through over the last year is immense. It’s phenomenal, and I think we have to look at that with open eyes. What this says to me is that it’s really time. This is a moment that is an opportunity for us to take a fresh look at how we work, broadly stated, to start to create some new norms and some new best practices, assuming that, even though hopefully things will improve from here, we are living in this digitally enabled, potentially remote environment for the foreseeable future.

ELISE HU: In the big picture, what do you attribute as the causes of our work stress in the first place?

CLARE PURVIS: I think we can zoom out and think a little bit about what is stress, what is this experience all about? Stress is, essentially, it’s a natural and normal human response that we have when things change, when we experience change. That’s the highest, most-zoomed-out level. What happens is we tend to perceive many, many things throughout our lives as different than how we want them to be, and that tends to lead us to feel stressed. Imagine, for one thing, how much work has become so central in many of our lives. The stat that I’ve seen many times is that over the course of our lives, we’ll spend 90,000 hours at work.

That’s a significant amount of time, and so it’s an environment that’s central to us, and being human beings, we’re going to be reacting a lot to all the different people that we interact with, all the different tasks on our plate, and certainly, all of the beliefs and stories and thoughts we have about how we should be, how things should be going, versus how they are. And that stew comes together, and work has become the top thing people always name as the main stressor in their lives.

ELISE HU: But it does strike me as solvable or potentially solvable. That workplaces could be more responsive to the mental health needs of employees. But one of the big barriers is a stigma around talking about our mental health at work.

Like if you come into work with a broken arm, people can ask you about it, and they know that you were going through some sort of pain. But if you’ve lost a pet, or you’re going through a breakup, or something like that, you might be going through a similar kind of emotional pain, but you don’t wear a cast on your arm.

CLARE PURVIS: It’s such a great point. Mental health is, for many, a silent experience. If we think about even that term, mental health , we all have mental health, just as we all have physical health.

You know, this distinction that we make between it being okay to talk about physical health versus mental health. We’re starting to see more and more public stories about people’s mental health experiences, and we’re slowly creating a bit more normalization around, hey, mental health is actually something that everyone has as a baseline. The majority of us, over the courses of our lives, will experience a mental health disorder or disturbance.

And simply by sharing that information and raising awareness, and then through tools like Headspace, we’re showing that there’s skills that everyone can practice that help manage that emotional health before things exacerbate to the point of being a mental health disorder or a clinical concern.

And so we’re starting to see a shift, again, slowly but surely, to the idea that just as we eat vegetables and go for walks and do things to care for our physical health, we can engage in different skills that help us take care of our emotional health. And this is all creating a conversation that centers on this theme that mental health is real. It’s something we all experience, and it’s something that we have some agency to manage.

ELISE HU: On the topic of this wider conversation, there’s a little news on the business front in that Headspace is merging with Ginger, and the combined entity will be called Headspace Health. Now, the Headspace app won’t be changing for consumers, but what does this coming together of the two companies mean for you?

CLARE PURVIS: First of all, it’s just been hugely exciting throughout both of our companies. And for those who aren’t familiar, Ginger is a virtual mental health company that provides coaching therapy and psychiatry primarily to employees, but also through other channels, not just healthcare.

And so, by bringing these two companies together, Headspace having a strong appeal and approach in mental and emotional well-being, in prevention, and Ginger providing that higher level of care, providing more clinical levels of interventions.

When we bring that together, what you’re signaling to the employer is, this is a single solution that can cover that full spectrum of mental and emotional health needs in your population.

ELISE HU: It seems like it would make business sense, too, because you mentioned that 40 percent of workers in the U.S. have said they leave jobs because of stress, and so how could it help employers who want to retain their talent?

CLARE PURVIS: Retention is a huge motivator for employers to invest in mental health and well-being solutions. With a combined service like this, what we hear from employers is that this is addressing a need they have. But it’s difficult to find a solution you can offer to your employee population that is integrated, that’s seamless, and that meets them where they are.

ELISE HU: And we should also mention that Microsoft partnered with Headspace to help employees prioritize breaks throughout their workdays. Clare, could you talk us through some of the science and the strategy behind this kind of tool, or these kinds of interventions, essentially using technology to help folks focus more, versus seeing technology as a driver of distraction?

CLARE PURVIS: You know, on the one hand, I always think it is important to acknowledge that, for a lot of people, technology is driving some of that stress and distraction, right, but—

ELISE HU: Guilty.

CLARE PURVIS: Likewise, me too. But it is important to remember that technology is a tool that we use throughout our day-to-day lives to do all kinds of different things, but it’s very rarely technology itself that’s truly the stressor. It’s our relationship to that technology.

It’s a nice way to flip our default setting upside down by saying, okay, we’re going to use this same technology as a tool that will help me remember to take a break or remember to reduce my distractions or to focus or to be engaged in this moment.

As far as the science, speaking about Headspace specifically, we find that even a short, single session of one of our mindfulness meditations does have measurable significant effect on reducing mind wandering.

It’s a reminder that taking that time for yourself, taking that break, even something that seems small, like 10 minutes, can have a significant effect on not only how you feel but how you’re performing afterwards.

ELISE HU: Microsoft has looked into why our brains crave those breaks and how just a few minutes could make a difference. Let’s listen in as researcher Michael Bohan speaks about those findings with correspondent Desmond Dickerson.

DESMOND DICKERSON: I’m talking today with Michael Bohan. He’s the senior director of the Human Factors Center of Excellence at Microsoft. That group is focused on understanding the interactions between people and technology.

MICHAEL BOHAN: Thanks, Desmond. Nice to meet you. Thanks for having me here.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Thanks for joining us, Michael. So, your team has studied people’s brain waves and how they react to meetings. You found that breaks are really essential between video calls because they help your brain reset and relax. And when you don’t take those breaks, the back-to-backs cause stress and limit your ability to focus in a meeting. I know I’ve definitely felt that. As have others. But why are we feeling that way?

MICHAEL BOHAN: What we found out was our brains have to do a lot of overhead work when we’re participating in meetings on a screen, particularly meetings where we’re looking at people in grids.

Because, you know, in the natural world, when we interact with people, it’s in a 3D environment. And here, we’re asking people to talk with people that are compressed to the size of a postage stamp, you know, digitized, compressed, flattened. And it’s more challenging.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Got it. So based on your studies, what should people be doing to prevent meeting fatigue?

MICHAEL BOHAN: If you’re in a job where you have a lot of back-to-back meetings, it’s important to start taking small breaks early and often, because if you wait too long, then you have to take longer and longer breaks potentially for it to have an effect.

DESMOND DICKERSON: That makes sense. So then, what should I be doing during those breaks?

MICHAEL BOHAN: Ideally, what you would do is not fill that five minutes with other stressful work. Rather, take that five minutes and meditate. Close your eyes, relax, or do something that’s enjoyable to you, or do some kind of exercise. Do something that focuses your brain on something else that’s not stressful.

DESMOND DICKERSON: We’ll get a little personal here. What’s your favorite break activity?

MICHAEL BOHAN: Go outside, get fresh air, be around nature. For me, that’s a reset.

DESMOND DICKERSON: Microsoft learned from your research and built settings into Outlook so that people and companies can create natural breaks between meetings. So looking at the big picture, what else do you think organizations should do to encourage folks to take breaks or to recharge?

MICHAEL BOHAN: Desmond, it’s a great question. And I think if we had the answer right now, we’d be solving a lot of the world’s problems. I think it’s a cultural mindset shift. And I don’t think it’s going to happen overnight, but I think you used the right word, which is encouraging.

The leaders of these companies need, themselves, to absorb the idea that giving people breaks will actually make them more productive. And you’re going to get a better product at the end of the day.

DESMOND DICKERSON: That sounds like great advice, and hopefully it illuminates a path forward for a lot of leaders out there. Thank you so much for joining us today, Michael.

MICHAEL BOHAN: Thank you.

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ELISE HU: So we’ve just heard there from researcher Michael Bohan about how important it is to provide those mental breaks. So how do managers give employees the space to do this, not physical space necessarily, but encouraging them that this is a priority and they won’t be judged for it?

CLARE PURVIS: One thing we’ve done at Headspace, and this is just an example, but organization-wide, we have instituted mental health days every other Friday. And that’s not going to work for every company, but what it signals is, as an organization, we want to normalize this idea of taking time away from work, of taking time explicitly to care for yourself, maybe care for your family, or be a human outside of work, and that in the long run, we trust that that will support our productivity.

It is important for leadership and for managers to make explicit, to signal it for themselves, when appropriate and relevant to say, here is what I’m doing to care for myself, or here’s what I’m doing to manage my stress, or here’s the vacation that I’m planning to take.

So it does start with the leaders themselves and leadership as a group to be intentional and explicit about the ways to open up that door for employees to feel more comfortable asking for what they need or sharing how they’re doing.

ELISE HU: And I’m curious, did Headspace shift its programming or your services during the pandemic, presumably because people are experiencing such uncertainty and anxiety?

CLARE PURVIS: We did. I think probably the most important thing to highlight there is that, during the pandemic, healthcare professionals were having a tremendously stressful and emotionally overwhelming experience.

ELISE HU: Right, it’s ongoing.

CLARE PURVIS: Absolutely, it’s ongoing, and Headspace did make subscriptions free for all healthcare professionals during that time. Which is just one small gesture, but a way that we wanted to signal that we understand that this population is in need of additional support and help in managing the stress.

ELISE HU: So, Clare, I’m curious, because Headspace partners with so many employers, so many companies, what kind of feedback have you gotten from employers about this moment and how they’re trying to adapt to an uncertain business climate but also stressed-out workers?

CLARE PURVIS: Well, we’ve actually done quite a bit of qualitative research with our members themselves, and what we’re seeing echoes what we were also seeing across all of our surveys of employers and employees. When we ask our members directly, what’s bringing them to Headspace, they’re coming to Headspace wanting support and guidance to help them feel better in the moment, and certainly then to sustain that over time. In the past, we might have assumed a larger proportion of people might come to Headspace with perhaps more of a curiosity around mindfulness or meditation, or looking for maybe a range of different benefits, but that real focus on stress and anxiety in the moment has come to the forefront in our direct research, loud and clear.

ELISE HU: You’re so good at seeing the landscape, and you have the data to back it, so what advice do you have for us? How do we individually find quiet in the noise and nurture our emotional well-being?

CLARE PURVIS: It is an individual journey. Something I often would tell my clients and still talk to my teams about at Headspace is that it’s helpful to take the scientist mindset, or the experimenter mindset.

I find myself doing this even within Headspace as I try to find the right set of conditions that will help me meditate consistently. A spoiler is that, even after two years of working at Headspace, this is still something that I constantly work on, too, to find those conditions to meditate consistently.

In transitioning to working from home, I found that I was just feeling so crummy at the end of a workday, after being on all these meetings and staring at my computer for a while, and I had to remind myself, like, hey, Clare, maybe it would be a good idea to get up and go for a walk at some point during the day.

ELISE HU: Clare, so many people judge themselves or are hard on themselves about meditating correctly or doing it right. What do you say to folks who feel that way?

CLARE PURVIS: Well, you’re right that a lot of people do feel that way, but with meditation, it’s a practice, and each time we sit to meditate, it’s going to be different because our mind is different. And so the practice is about meeting whatever is present in that moment with awareness, without judgment, and with kindness and compassion. There is no perfect way to meditate. There’s no perfect meditation session. There’s not even a better or worse meditation session. There’s just whatever session we had in this moment, today.

ELISE HU: I love that. Dr. Clare Purvis, who is Headspace’s senior director of behavioral science, Dr. Purvis, thanks so much.

CLARE PURVIS: Absolutely, my pleasure.

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ELISE HU: You’ve been listening to the WorkLab podcast, from Microsoft. There’s a WorkLab digital publication too. Check out microsoft.com/worklab for more insights about the future of work, and please rate, review, and follow us wherever you listen to podcasts.

WorkLab is produced by Microsoft with Godfrey Dadich Partners and Reasonable Volume. I’m your host, Elise Hu. Our correspondents are Mary Melton and Desmond Dickerson. Sharon Kallander produces the podcast. Jessica Voelker is the WorkLab editor. Thanks for listening.