The Women's Place grant helps spread mindfulness
"Live in the moment" is advice many of us have gotten to remind us to practice mindfulness, focusing one's attention on emotions, thoughts and sensations occurring in the present moment. As researchers explore this practice, they're finding a number of therapeutic applications from decreasing stress to reducing implicit bias.
One such researcher, Dr. Maryanna Klatt, associate clinical professor in Family Medicine at the Wexner Medical Center and an expert in integrative medicine, has focused on stress and mindfulness. She has spent more than a decade studying perceived stress, sleep cortisol and salivary alpha amylase levels — an indicator of the fight-or-flight response we experience in stressful situations. In addition, she developed Mindfulness in Motion (MIM), an eight-week program that combines weekly group meetings on awareness and relaxation techniques with a 20-minute individual, daily practice. She used the program in a study with surgical intensive care unit nurses at Ohio State. Her study results determined that the MIM program contributed to a 40 percent drop in the fight-or-flight indicator of the nurses in the intervention group.
The Women's Place (TWP) helped Klatt further her mindfulness work by awarding her a President and Provost's Leadership Institute Faculty Associates grant to publish this recent mindfulness research and offer two mindfulness classes to TWP's current leadership program members and alumni. TWP's Faculty Associates program is a pilot endeavor for President and Provost’s Leadership Institute graduates or current cohort members to receive funding for a project that will contribute to catalyzing institutional change at Ohio State and expanding opportunities for women's professional growth.
With The Women’s Place funding, Klatt created a video article on her MIM research to publish in The Journal of Visualized Experiments, a PubMed indexed video methods journal. She also used the grant to create and teach two mind/body classes open to TWP's current leadership program members and alumni. The classes utilized yoga and meditation principles and experiences to augment the leadership skills introduced in the programs. Class participants experienced body/mind dialogue, pushing the boundary of those who usually operate from a cognitive perspective into the realm of transformational leadership located within our whole selves.
The Women's Place is interested in spreading mindfulness training for a number of reasons, including stress reduction and enhancing leadership skills, but particularly because recent research shows it can reduce implicit bias. Results of a newly published study by researchers Adam Lueke and Brian Gibson of Central Michigan University show that a mindfulness intervention decreased students’ automatic biases. In this case, mindfulness may be interrupting the link between past experience and impulsive responding.
As The Women's Place works to create an equitable environment in which all can thrive at Ohio State, we feel that all these applications of mindfulness could help create positive culture change at the university.