Here is an excerpt from an article written by Ellen Langer for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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I’ve been researching mindfulness since the early 1970s. New findings emerge from our lab and others each year, showing what a powerful factor mindfulness is with respect to our health, happiness, and effectiveness. Everything we do, we do mindfully or mindlessly, which suggests that it can be one of the most important drivers of our well-being. It’s easy to understand why someone might decide to skip the gym, eat a donut, or fail to finish an assignment. But what sense does it make to choose to be mindless?

The problem is that many people misunderstand what mindfulness is and how to achieve it. Some confuse mindfulness with effortful thinking and stress. Thinking is only effortful when we fear we will not arrive at the right answer; stress results not from events but from the views we take of events. When we mindlessly believe that something is about to happen and that it will be awful when it does, we experience stress. If we instead mindfully ask ourselves for novel reasons why the thing might not even happen and how it might actually be advantageous even if it did, stress falls away.

Many people also confuse mindfulness with meditation. Meditation is a tool to achieve mindfulness, but it requires a practice that some people find difficult. Mindfulness, as my colleagues and I study it, does not depend on meditation: it is the very simple process of noticing new things, which puts us in the present and makes us more sensitive to context and perspective. It is the essence of engagement.

This process of noticing comes naturally when we we’re exposed to something we think is new, and it’s energy-begetting, not energy-consuming. Consider taking a trip to Paris for the first time. Everything would feel new and exciting, and so we would actively notice as much as we could of this new place. We’d experience the trip as a vacation — hardly effortful or something to be avoided.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Ellen Langer, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and founder of the Langer Mindfulness Institute. She has been described as the “mother of mindfulness,” and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Distinguished Scientist Awards, the World Congress Award, the NYU Alumni Achievement Award, and the Staats award for Unifying Psychology.