BerkeleyX: Mindfulness and Resilience to Stress at Work

Stress, anxiety, and burnout are rampant across workplaces today: 80 percent of workers feel stress on the job, and nearly half say they need help learning how to manage it. While many organizations may assume that intense stress is unavoidable, even admirable, research suggests that too much stress is toxic to our health and performance, leading to burnout and harming the culture of organizations as a whole.

This course offers research-based strategies for building resilience to stress and fortifying our well-being in the face of challenges. It explains the biological and psychological impact of stress, helps you distinguish between harmful and helpful forms of stress at work, and provides strategies for handling stress in healthy and productive ways.

The course zeroes in on the practice of mindfulness, the moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations that comes without judging those thoughts and feelings as good or bad. In recent years, there has been a surge in scientific research on mindfulness, with many studies documenting the value and advantages of fostering mindfulness in workplace settings. This course covers the landscape of mindfulness science, explains why it’s relevant to modern workplaces, and describes how it can be effectively folded into your workplace, drawing on case studies from several major companies that have implemented their own mindfulness programs.

The course instructors are expert faculty from UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, Dacher Keltner, Ph.D., and Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Ph.D., whose earlier edX course, The Science of Happiness, has been a global phenomenon, introducing a half million students worldwide to research-based practices of mindfulness and related skills of stress reduction. In this course, they tailor their scientific insights to the needs of the modern workplace, highlighting stories of success from trailblazing organizations while also identifying challenges that workplaces may face as they try to foster mindfulness and resilience.