We could all do with a laugh right now. So new book Humour, Seriously: Why Humour Is A Superpower At Work And In Life, published this month, comes as welcome light relief. And it is seriously funny – even though, as it points out, unpicking the anatomy of humour is often likened to dissecting a frog: “Few people care and the frog dies”.

In the digital age, there’s a lot to be said for the benefits of putting pen to paper. But more than just the preservation of penmanship, effective journaling can prove to be a life-changing pursuit, affecting everything from how you cope with stresses to your physical health.

According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, 18 million US adults meditated regularly, with estimates placing total worldwide meditation numbers at around 300 million. It’s a number you feel will only grow as people search to combat feelings of stress and anxiety brought on by turbulent times.

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 Harvard Business Review called Emotional Intelligence “a revolutionary, paradigm-shattering idea” as it shares robust science and in depth studies showing that IQ is no longer a definer of our destiny, but emotional intelligence plays a much more significant role in an individual’s success and overall well being.

When it comes to lessons in resilience – how to navigate and endure unbearable circumstances and reach the other side triumphant overall odds – very few stories are as touching as that of the Antarctic explorer, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton (his story also makes for a good read or watch for anyone stuck for things to do during isolation).

The average worker is willing to give up 20 per cent of their pay to avoid schedules set by their employer on short notice, and 8 per cent of their wages to work from home, according to a study published by Stanford Economics. What this tells us more than anything is that people value having control over their own time.

Only 15% of the worldwide workforce feels engaged in their job, according to data from Gallup. Lower personal productivity becomes an obvious consequence and this can severely impact company success. Organisations such as Google, Netflix, and the UN are trying to tackle this by investing in management training programs to teach their next generation of leaders the soft skills that will strengthen company culture in the future.

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.