For all employers' high-cost wellness efforts to help employees take charge of their health, author and meditation expert Diana Lang says that introducing employees to meditation is an effective, convenient and free way to boost ROI on wellness dollars and other investments in medical and mental health benefits.
Lang, 50, has been meditating since age 15 and teaching the practice since 1980. She asserts that "wellness programs, onsite fitness and yoga classes, personal days - all those things are great, but [their effectiveness] would be accelerated if they were paired with a program that taught workers to meditate. Even just once a week can bring life changes. It would increase productivity, and people would find more joy in what they're doing. It's like every day is the weekend."
Why it works
Lang's confidence in the power of mediation to improve health boils down to a well-known mantra: mind over matter.
"Meditation strengthens your relationship with your body, your control of your health and your ability to deal with and prevent disease," she says. "Just quiet your mind, calm down and you'll have a powerful tool to keeping your mind and body healthy.
"To me, health and mental health is a matter of staying current," Lang continues. "Things like overeating, overworking, drinking and drugs keep us from being connected to ourselves, and we end up with a mental backlog. When we meditate, the backlog clears up."
Indeed, research has shown the positive effects of meditation.
In a study published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, people who practiced meditation for eight weeks produced more antibodies to a flu vaccine and showed increased signs of brain activity in areas related to positive feelings than people who didn't meditate.
The study is the first one that links meditation to positive changes in brain activity and immune function. "Our findings indicate that a short training program in mindful meditation has demonstrable effects on brain and immune function," says researcher Richard Davidson.
Other research has found that meditation training results in greater EEG (brain activity) coherence, increased efficiency of information transfer in the brain, lower baseline levels of heart and respiration rates, increased stability of the autonomic nervous system, faster recovery from stress, faster reactions and faster reflex responses.
'Not like learning French'
Not only is meditation inexpensive and effective, it's also simple, Lang affirms.
"There are thousands of books out there that make meditation sound complicated and mysterious. But it's not like learning French."
She adds that all the tools needed to meditate are already within us - and in fact, have been since childhood. "It's connecting to something that's already there - the ability to just be still. When we were young, we didn't fight it. Children can sit and just watch ants for long stretches of time. As we get older, we're trained away from taking time to [be still] because it won't get us an 'A' or a promotion."
According to Lang, a practice of just five minutes a day is enough to yield positive results. "It's not about time, it's about quality. Just taking uninterrupted time to check in with yourself consistently can help you to prevent long-term illness. I teach a lot of beginners who think you have to spend an hour a day, and you don't."
She calls her latest book, "Opening to Meditation: A Gentle, Guided Approach," "training wheels" for novice practitioners. She is working with insurance companies to use meditation CDs to complement their current, traditional wellness efforts.
"It's great that businesses are starting to consider keeping employees healthier, even if it is for the company's sake, because employees are benefiting," she says, adding that meditation can help kick those efforts into a higher gear.
"It's not just exercising or taking vitamins. It's deeper than that. Keeping a connection to ourselves is an active part of good health."
