How Observing Thoughts Works | Employee Wellbeing Program

This recording explains how Observing Thoughts works, an exercise from the Innerleaps employee wellbeing program. The explanation belongs to week 4 of the 6-week Innerleaps program, stress management training that employers use to increase employee retention. Week 1 pointed attention at one thing and week 2 moved it through the body. Here attention widens to everything that passes, without being drawn into it. The image used in the exercise is a station platform: thoughts are a train going by, carriage after carriage, a thought about work, a memory from yesterday, a plan for tomorrow. The participant does not board and lets the train leave. The breath serves as home base, and anyone who notices they climbed aboard anyway brings attention back to the breath for a moment and then carries on watching. Briefly naming what went past helps, for example "that is planning" or "that is worrying". The naming is not the point in itself but a way of stepping back onto the platform. What this trains is the difference between having a thought and being pulled inside it. Vanhove and colleagues pooled workplace studies in 2016 and calculated that this type of training leads to up to 15% less absence, because sustained stress escalates less often. Mao and colleagues found in 2023 that rumination decreases significantly after this type of training, and Cropley and colleagues linked less work-related brooding to better recovery outside working hours in 2016. At a Dutch client organisation, 36% of participants reported less rumination. Outside the exercise the pattern shows up in a conversation where the nodding continues but nothing can be repeated afterwards, or in a night where thoughts about tomorrow keep turning and the next day starts short of sleep. The thoughts are still there, but being stuck inside them is not. This exercise is done sitting up, with the back straight.