How Google employees cope with stress and stay creative

Google brings together innovators with a passion for what they do. Hard work or failure does not scare them, but push them to new heights. Such people immerse themselves in work with their heads. To keep its employees from burning out, the company has developed its own recipe for getting rid of stress.

Google, as always, approached this case creatively: to get rid of stress, employees use ancient Eastern practices.

Search within yourself

Google Engineer Chade-Meng Tan, author of Search Inside You, was at the very beginning of the company. Once he noticed that it was difficult for him and his colleagues to “turn off the working mode”. It was almost impossible to break away from work in the evening or on weekends, take a break and simply refresh thoughts. Google developed at lightning speed, but Tan realized in time that stress and lack of rest would not help in any way at work.

Tan practiced mindfulness meditation, during which the meditator focuses exclusively on breathing. In 2007, he wrote Search Within Yourself, a seven-week course in mindfulness meditation for Google employees. At first, colleagues were skeptical about his idea, but then they noted that they became calmer, more focused, and by the end of the day, the head remained clear.

Even company executives have noticed that their employees are healthier, happier, and more productive. Appreciating Tang's work, they offered him the position of Head of Personal Growth to teach meditation to all Google employees.

Subsequently, Chad-Meng Tan created the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI) educational project. As part of this project, Tan and 14 other like-minded people teach mindfulness to employees of different organizations.

Get some rest to develop creativity

This is the advice Google employees follow. It turns out that meditation and relaxation not only help relieve stress, but also increase creativity.

In 2001, Marcus Raichle, professor of neurology at the University of Washington in St. Louis, performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain. He observed activity in certain parts of the brain if the subject was scattered or hovered in the clouds. He called it the Passive Brain Mode Network (SPRMN).

Reichl's experiment inspired many scientists to study the resting brain. They concluded that the SPRMM is often responsible for our creativity. This means that a brilliant idea will come to our minds rather during a walk than in painful attempts to come up with something.

A good idea doesn't come when you're loaded. A good idea will appear at the moment of rest. She will come when you take a shower. She will come when you are drawing or playing cars with your son. When your mind is on the other side of thoughts.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is an American composer, creator of the famous Broadway musical Hamilton.

Let's chart the majority of creative discoveries. First, we immerse ourselves in the work, delving into the essence of the matter and thinking about solving the problem. Then comes a dead end when we cannot get off the ground, no matter how hard we try. At this point, you just need to stop. If we give the brain a break from exhausting thoughts, it will magically give us the solution we need.

Don't confuse relaxation with laziness and inaction. This is an active process during which a person grows both physically and psychologically.

Rational thinking will certainly help in many situations. But sometimes you need to give free rein to your subconscious. It gives us information from those parts of the brain that are inaccessible when we think about something consciously. Neurologists have found that our subconscious mind is constantly working. However, as Markus Reichl found out, it will only show true strength in a state of rest.