MINDFULNESS FOR MINDFUL AND HUMANE POLICING
Last six months, I was in a bad state of mind. My work had got me down, and I felt like I was on a roller coaster of emotions, I felt high when I was running, or writing my column or while I was painting but felt outright crappy and down at work. Every day after work, I dumped all the darkness engulfing and drowning me over my poor family who adored me no matter what. I remember being at a point in my life where things were going downhill every way–especially emotionally. I felt as though I was spiralling into a deep depression. While being at that lowest point, I discovered and gobbled a book sitting on my shelf called” The Miracle of Mindfulness” by Thich Nhat Hanh. After two weeks of breathing, and a somewhat quiet mind, I began seeing the most beautiful, vibrant colours of purple, indigo and white—huge blobs of light bouncing, and swaying back and forth. With a simultaneous realisation of the miracle of mindfulness, that had flashed its light banishing the darkness festering inside my mind.
Mindfulness is a practice of purposely bringing one’s attention to experiences occurring in the present moment without judgment. One can develop this through a method of meditation. Mindfulness is based on Zen, Vipassana, and Tibetan meditation techniques. Programs created on mindfulness models have been embraced in schools, prisons, hospitals, law enforcement and army, and other environments, and have also been applied for different outcomes such as for healthy ageing, weight management, athletic performance etc
Mindfulness or meditation slows the mind by bringing a focus on the breath. It brings attention back from distraction and focuses the mind on the present. The practice of meditation comes from an intuitive and primitive need to connect to the universe and oneself. Being physically fit is not enough for a policeman; emotional wellbeing is also crucial. Meditation enables some people to become more self-aware, while it makes others less stressed and anxious. Unlike other practises, mindfulness meditation requires no gear. For instance, I love to run; I need shoes and a road or a ground to run. And running is best done in a hot city like Chennai, either in the mornings or evenings. But meditation requires no equipment, and we can do it at any place at any time even sitting on the chair you are right now in. You need not follow a particular religion, belief or guru. Even guided meditations available on the Internet can be an excellent place to start.
Mindfulness is imperative for police personnel as they face ordeals day in and day out. Recently, I knew a junior colleague of mine who came back from work depressed and fatigued and unable to sleep through the night. He also suffered from acute backache. His body was in a constant state of agitation. Although he continued to work, he was falling apart. Desperate to calm his mind, he combed the Internet and stumbled on mindfulness meditation. As he began practicing mindfulness, he experienced terrific results. He got back his sense of self, the sense of worth and his ability to breathe, and he slept. He felt whole and hopeful again. Mindfulness, in his case, like for several others, turned out to be a powerful tool in his recovery because it equipped him to rediscover his calming sense of control over his experience. Even when surrounded by a chaos of tumultuous emotions, the officer could use mindfulness to become grounded. Through this practice, he could bring himself back to basics; knowing that all he needed to do was to breathe, be present, and be aware of the event.
Hence, police personnel need to practice meditation to ease the stress of policing. Teaching and practising meditation should be a key piece of the police officer development because policing careers have high rates of depression, sudden cardiac death, diabetes and sleeplessness because of stress. The University of Buffalo and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health suggested that stress, trauma, obesity, shift work, and exposure to toxic chemicals might all contribute to the early deaths. One study of almost 2,800 white male police officers in Buffalo, New York, found their average life expectancy to be 22 years shorter than their civilian counterparts. Police personnel are also more prone to suicide than the general population and are more likely to kill themselves than getting shot in the line of duty.
Further, a 2015 clinical study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that about half of military veterans who underwent mindfulness training reported a reduction in PTSD symptoms, compared to only a third who took part in a different form of therapy. A small 2016 study by Hunsinger, Goering, and others of 43 police officers who went through eight weeks of mindfulness training showed improvement in self-reported resilience, stress, emotional intelligence, and sleep, and also reduced feelings of burnout, anger and fatigue. We know mindfulness to cut off stress by bringing one’s attention to the present moment by withdrawing the attention from the past or future, and by enabling one to feel Zen-like by letting one experience life as it exists in the right here and now.
Experimenters conducted randomised control trials to study the effect of meditation on stress levels of police officers of five forces. In the study, over 600 officers practiced mindfulness at Avon and Somerset in the UK. The studies that the” College of Policing oversaw ” revealed improved wellbeing, life satisfaction, resilience and work performance. They divided the police officers into two groups;They trained one group using a commercial meditation app available for download in the App Store called Headspace. The second group got trained on Mindfit Cop, an in-house meditation technique, and the third group did not get any mindfulness training. The researchers found that the first two groups recorded “meaningful improvements” in wellbeing and life satisfaction and resilience, as compared with the control group. As the research produced strong evidence of mindfulness improving wellbeing and resilience and life satisfaction compared to control groups, leaders of the force decided to give meditation lessons to 200000 police officers in England and Wales.
Mindfulness training builds resilience and the ability to bounce back from stress. Similarly, it creates” response inhibition” of the impulse to do something harmful and preventable like opening fire on a mob. Police officers need to respond not to react, but police officers almost always react and do not respond. To respond to a situation, a police officer has to be in the now, not get triggered and overtaken by emotion. Mindfulness helps in such situations by bringing the officer into the now by making them resilient.
At the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds, researchers are working with the Madison Police Department to gauge the impact of an eight-week changed version of Mindfulness-Based Resilience Training (MBRT) on physiological measures like heart rate and breathing, along with the ability to inhibit automatic responses in the face of emotional distractions.
Resilient police officers tend to have a better response inhibition as meditation builds more cognitive resources. When the police are facing a situation, personnel with mindfulness training as a matter of routine perform a self-awareness check which would include some deep breathing to get in touch with the way they are feeling and mentally prepare themselves to embrace the fear or the anger at the injustice that is unfolding without letting those emotions cloud their tactical cognitive decision making. Thus, the practice of mindfulness or meditation helps the police officer to see the perspective of another, enhancing his compassion for the person or persons who get agitated and are likely to go berserk in uneasy volatile situations. The trained officers tend to make better decisions than untrained groups, as they have slower maximum heart rates and quicker recoveries. A fast-beating heart is most often the cause for irrational decisions. Therefore, mindfulness has the potential to reduce unnecessary violence.
Further, as we live in an age of distraction a “quiet-room” or “recovery room” is imperative in each police station or police office to allow for short breaks to enable police personnel to recharge by connecting with themselves. Quiet Room can help officers escape during a period of stress to do some calming inner work and build inner resilience.
Research at Harvard Medical School has revealed that practices such as mindfulness switches on disease-fighting genes which protect the practitioners against cardiac diseases, blood pressure, joint pain, back pain and diabetes. Mindfulness meditation exerts its effects on the brain by acting on the components of attention regulation, body awareness and emotional regulation. When testing characteristics such as a sense of obligation, genuineness, compassion, self-acceptance and integrity, studies have shown that mindfulness meditation renders a more coherent and healthy understanding of self and identity. Neuroimaging techniques show that mindfulness exercises such as mindfulness meditation correlate with “changes in the anterior cingulate cortex, temporoparietal junction, front-limbic network insula, and default mode network structures. In addition, mindfulness may prevent the onset of mild cognitive impairment and could influence genetic expression, leading to a reduction in risk inflammation-related diseases.
Studies have shown that mindfulness enhances Grey matter concentrations in the brain in areas that regulate emotion, including memory processes and improvement of the immune system, which could explain the correlation between stress reduction and increased quality of life. These changes partly appear to be due to the thickening of the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, shrinking of the amygdala and the strengthening of the connections between brain cells. Long-term meditators have more folding of the cortex (gyrification) a significant amount of which may allow the brain to process information faster than non-meditators. Meditators associate mindfulness with higher levels of life satisfaction, agreeableness, conscientiousness, vitality, self-esteem, empathy, a sense of autonomy, competence, optimism, and pleasant effect because of such effects on the human brain.
Incorporating mindfulness practices for police personnel needs to gain steam in India. Police officers in India also have the highest levels of stress among all occupations because of violence, pressure and the demands of the job. The US Secret Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation, and police agencies in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, have all incorporated mindfulness and are using the services of Blue Courage, a training company that has components of mindfulness in its training. Likewise, the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission has incorporated 16 hours of Blue Courage training for all basic law-enforcement recruits.
It’s no wonder that mindfulness is today a $4bn industry. There are over 60,000 books for sale on Amazon on mindfulness with titles such as Mindful Parenting, Mindful Eating, Mindful Teaching, Mindful Therapy, Mindful Leadership, Mindful Finance, a Mindful Nation, Mindful Dog Owners, etc. glorifying its benefits to name just a few.
Eventually, a quote from Rumi says ‘Keep knocking, and the joy inside will eventually open a window and look out to see who’s there’. This is appropriate for police personnel or anyone as mindfulness can help them reconnect to the joy that is always there and that still lives within each one of them. All the police organisations need to do is provide the training to help their personnel access this valuable treasure.
Source from: epaper/deccanchronicle/chennai/dt:27.01.2020
Dr.K. Jayanth Murali is an IPS Officer belonging to 1991 batch. He is borne on Tamil Nadu cadre. He lives with his family in Chennai, India. He is currently serving the Government of Tamil Nadu as Additional Director General of Police, Law and Order.
