Academia, like many other sectors, is a complex work environment. Although universities vary in terms of their size and objectives, the average university in Canada and the US must simultaneously serve the interests of undergraduate education, graduate education, professional education, basic research, applied research, public policy research, and basic scholarship. A university receives its operating funds from tuition payments, governments, research funding agencies, and from private donors. Faculty are at the center of this diverse institution, providing the engine of teaching, research, and service. As a result, faculty members may find themselves occasionally struggling to manage these different interests. This article looks at the challenges that faculty members face, paying particular attention to the leadership role that many faculty play. I then explore the possible ways in which mindfulness practice can have a benefit on faculty well-being and productivity.

Both psychedelics and mindfulness are a recently emerging topic of interest in academia and popular culture alike. Personal meditation practices and recreational psychedelic use have consistently increased in the past decade. While clinical work has shown both to improve long-term wellbeing, the data on naturalistic applications of psychedelics and mindfulness is rather lacking. The current study aims to examine the relationship between psychedelic use, mindfulness, and multi-faceted wellbeing as an outcome. Hierarchical regression was used to quantify these associations on a large sample of people (N = 1219), who engage in both meditation practices and psychedelic use. These results show that both mindfulness and mystical experiences each predict substantial increases in wellbeing. Psychedelics were found to be an important moderator of mystical experience to explain improvements in wellbeing. These data are among the first to establish a strong relationship between personal mindfulness practice, recreational psychedelic use, and overall psychological wellbeing in a naturalistic framework.

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