 Well the growing interest in mindfulness has been prompted, I believe, because of a variety of factors. First of all, our increasingly frantic pace of life. It's not okay anymore to do one thing at a time. We have to do 15 things at a time. And not only that, but the way that we're using technology. We check our phones on average 150 times a day. And there's a number of reasons that we're enticed by our technology. Often it's out of habit or the need to keep up with what's going on. But also, the reward centre of our brain releases a small amount of dopamine, which is a feel-good hormone, every single time something new or novel pops up on our screen. And that's actually addictive. So the pace of life and the way we're using technology, I believe, is pushing us to operate in a state of what we call continuous partial attention. And that gives us that feeling of franticness, distraction, and a fragmented sense to our lives. But I also feel like we're operating on this flawed notion that busyness means happy and successful. And yet if you think about it, we're all racing around busy, but I don't see us all rolling around deliriously happy. In fact, the health consequences are staggering. Depression is now the most widespread illness globally. A quarter of us will suffer from some form of anxiety in our lifetime. Stress-related illness is the number one reason that people visit the doctor today. But it's not just about the health consequences, but mindfulness has been proven to be effective in all of those three areas. It's also about what we're missing out on, that ability to really connect with each other, that ability to do meaningful real work. So I think the pace of life and the technology and the way that we're running our lives are having a real impact on our success and happiness. Well, we've got this kind of frantic pace of life that we're living, and yet we've still got this primitive part of our brain, which is operating, and it's very similar in fact to the fight-or-flight response that you might see in a zebra, for example. So let's imagine you've got a zebra just relaxing on the plains of Africa. In next minute, a lion leaps out of the bush, and the zebra is running for its life, activating its fight-or-flight response, dumping cortisol and adrenaline into its bloodstream, shutting down its digestion, and its immune functionality. Now, let's say the zebra survives to live another day, and it's able to activate its relaxation response, and that is a form of natural resilience. And I think we've lost our ability to be able to activate our own natural resilience, because our fight-or-flight or panic button is being pressed constantly all day, just from little things like the flood of email coming into our inbox when we come to work in the morning, right through to that horrible feeling that you're never going to get to the bottom of your to-do list. So we're having this almost constant reactivity to stress that's happening throughout the day, and I think that is contributing to our health conditions as well. So we've got this sort of frantic pace of life, this primitive part of the brain activating our threat response constantly throughout the day. So we've got a more, the executive functioning part of our brain, which is kind of coming in and offering to help us out. And that gives us the ability to operate on autopilot or to think about what we're not doing. So you probably have had an experience of that, you've driven home from work, you've pulled into the driveway, and then you've realised you've not seen a thing on the journey home, because you've almost been operating like in a trance. But the problem is we're spending so much time, because our lives are busy, thinking about what's just happened, or planning or worrying for what's about to happen, that this kind of direct experience that we're having in any given moment is getting squished in the middle. And research has proven that we actually only spend 47% of our time in our direct experience. And the more time we spend thinking about what we're not doing, the more unhappy we are. So right now is really the only moment we have to experience things like happiness and success. So for example, a participant on a recent course that I ran said for her it was the little things. Like for example, recently at work in a public setting, she was commended for a project that she did. And she just took a moment for that praise to really sink in. Or when she arrived home from work and was greeted by her young daughter, hugging her, having a moment to just feel the warmth of that hug. So mindfulness training has a load of benefits. But it's really important to look at the evidence-based research around the benefits. There's been a lot of hype around mindfulness lately. So it's important to remember that there is 35 years of clinical research to support the benefits of mindfulness in things like anxiety, depression, illness and a chronic pain. We also know through research that has been conducted in the area of neuroscience that mindfulness actually makes physical changes to our brain. So it actually increases the gray matter of our hippocampus. And that is the part of our brain that's responsible for emotional regulation. It also decreases the gray matter in our amygdala. Now that is our bodies, it houses our threat response. So that's that trigger button. So we're able to react less to moments of stress because of that. So we've got some great clinical research. We've got some great neuroscience data. There is some really promising research on mindfulness in organizations. The research is still in its infancy. But a review of all of the evidence-based research conducted recently concluded that mindfulness can have an impact on areas of well-being, of performance and of relationships. So mindfulness can have a real impact on our work experience and effectiveness. And I sort of see it happening over three different levels. If you build a mindfulness practice up over time, it'll have an impact on your attention, on your awareness and on the way that you act. So on your attention, increasing your concentration span so you can manage distraction. In terms of your awareness, much more aware of what's happening internally in terms of your tendency to be thinking about the past or worrying about the future. But you're also able to take in the full context of what's happening around you and see things as they really are. And the last area is your actions. So being able to manage how you respond to pressure and stress and conflict and not react but rather respond more skillfully. So increasingly, organisations are turning to mindfulness-based programs to support things like emotional intelligence, leadership and resilience. But if it is something that you wanted to explore further, then my advice would be first off, look for something that has scientific evidence-based behind it to support its benefits. And also, look for something that is going to give you support over a period of weeks because mindfulness training is like training at the gym for your muscles. It's not a quick fix. So you actually need something to strengthen your mindfulness muscle over a period of weeks.