SMU Professor of Organisational Behaviour & Human Resources Jochen Reb is the founding director of the Mindfulness Initiative @ SMU, which was started in 2013 to support research in educational and outreach projects on mindfulness, with programmes that are open to the public and corporate organisations. He said, “Gratitude is a well-researched emotion and it’s clear that experiencing it brings both mental and general health benefits, including positive affect and lower stress.” Ms Chang Ching Chen, a mindfulness-based stress reduction teacher with the Mindfulness Initiative @ SMU, explained how the brain is “wired in a way that makes people tend to go into auto-pilot mode to achieve maximum efficiency”. SMU Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidate in organisational behaviour and human resources Eva K Peters, whose dissertation centres around mindfulness, said she started developing the “skill” of being grateful regularly in 2019 after becoming a certified yoga teacher. She commented that practising gratitude has helped her to better navigate failures and disappointments.
