When tech company IBM introduced internal email in the Eighties, it first quantified the amount of intra-organisation analogue communication: voicemails, memos, handwritten notes left in the recipient’s cubicle. Within days, the shiny, new, amply provisioned and extremely expensive email server crashed under five to six times the projected volume of traffic. Employees were not only sending way more messages than before but also copying in multiple recipients, where they’d previously corresponded person-to-person.

Jillian Lavender has been teaching Vedic Meditation since 2003. As co-founder of the London Meditation Centre and New York Meditation Center, she has helped thousands of people across the globe to transform their lives. This piece is an edited excerpt from Jillian’s new book Why Meditate? Because It Works which was released in July 2021.

What were you thinking about just a moment ago? Or this morning, as you made a cup of coffee and anticipated the day ahead? Perhaps you were reminding yourself to send an important email. It’s possible that your mind was already engaged in an upcoming work task. Or maybe you were thinking, rather hopelessly, that the day ahead is destined to overwhelm you before it’s even happened?

The author of this article is Jenny Dearborn, Chief Learning Officer and Senior Vice President at SAP, author, artist, entrepreneur, athlete and mother of four. SAP is a Tech German company pioneering Mindfulness Leadership programs to improve employees wellbeing and critical thinking.

Kristin Neff, Ph.D. is widely recognised as one of the world’s leading experts on self-compassion, being the first one to operationally define and measure the construct over a decade ago. Self-compassion involves acting the same way towards yourself when you are having a difficult time, fail, or notice something you don’t like about yourself.

Martin Seligman founded the field of positive psychology in 2000, and has devoted his career since then to furthering the study of positive emotion, positive character traits, and positive institutions. It's a fascinating field of study that had few empirical, scientific measures -- traditional clinical psychology focusing more on the repair of unhappy states than the propagation and nurturing of happy ones. In his pioneering work, Seligman directs the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, developing clinical tools and training the next generation of positive psychologists.