Well-being

Baroness Burt of Solihull Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, it is an absolute pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I wish his Bill—the Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill—every success. I will talk about something that has transformed my own well-being and that of thousands of others; it has a great contribution to make in practically every field of government.

My life changed about seven or eight years ago, when an email arrived from my colleague Jo Swinson inviting us to come along on a short course on something called “mindfulness”. Jo talked about how it had helped her to cope with the challenges of being an MP and enabled her to feel much happier in herself. In those days, your Lordships would have seen a very different woman before you from the one that you see today. I was depressed and I did not realise it; only when I came out of that depression did I realise what a bad place, emotionally and mentally, I had been in. I was very underconfident and saw life as a difficult challenge every single day, but I was keen to find potential tools to help. The effect that the mindfulness course had on me was transformational, and this is why.

So many of us live in our heads. We tell ourselves stories about how the world is, and that shapes our perceptions, our mood and our abilities. It is a series of messages that play again and again in our minds. They repeat themselves over and over until they become embedded, and they shape our perceptions of the world. For me, the light-bulb moment was on the parliamentary mindfulness course—available to any noble Lord on Tuesdays in the early evening—when we were talking about how we see the world and the negative perceptions which we allow to rule us. “But these are only thoughts—they are not reality”, said the tutor. What? I had been giving myself a hard time for years and years. Mindfulness gives us the tools to remove ourselves from this perceived reality that we have built for ourselves and to watch thoughts processing before us without them taking us over.

The human mind is like a monkey: it is restless, into everything, and it gets drawn in by every small distraction. From mindfulness we learn how to calm our monkey mind. We can watch thoughts from a distance and see them for what they are—just thoughts, which you can watch go by and decide not to engage with. Guess what happened. I found that being able to calm my mind and see things more objectively from a distance had an incredible, transformational effect on me. For the first time in years, I started to experience inexplicable moments of happiness. I became more open, aware and effective in my work life, my social life and my family life—in fact, practically perfect in every sense.

Your Lordships may be sitting there, thinking, “That’s a very nice story, but what does it have to do with well-being economics?” Its applications extend into many areas of social policy. Mindfulness works in the field of mental health without the need for drugs, and it has proved to be as effective for depression as current NHS first-line therapies. In clinical healthcare, there is also good evidence that mindfulness training improves well-being among those living with long-term health issues, particularly pain, multiple sclerosis, cancer and IBS. It also works in the workplace, particularly where individuals operate in stressful situations—and who does not from time to time? When online training was offered to police officers, they showed a marked improvement in their ability to do their jobs. Health service professionals have also benefited hugely. Just imagine what better decisions politicians would make if they had more insight and compassion for those whose lives they were making laws for.

Mindfulness works in schools, particularly helping children to improve their concentration, so it is particularly effective with children who suffer from ADHD and those perceived as disruptive. But imagine if we offered it to all children. What a generation of well-adjusted, compassionate and resilient individuals we would raise. Of course it also works in prisons. I have heard moving testimony on how mindfulness techniques help prisoners to calm themselves in stressful situations and avoid kicking off. It works for older people, who often suffer from isolation and depression, helping them to develop positive approaches to ageing well.

We had the Budget yesterday. As the noble Lord, Lord Layard, said, with billions of pounds invested in physical infrastructure, if a fraction of that was devoted to developing our social infrastructure, through mindfulness and some of the other suggestions made by my noble friends and others made today, it would have a far-reaching effect on the well-being of our nation.