Before Dr. David Klemanski studied whether five to 10 minutes of mindfulness could shift stress, anxiety, and emotional regulation, he thought mindfulness sounded “kind of weird.” 

Klemanski, chief of the Division of Psychology and director of postdoctoral training at Harvard Psychiatry’s Cambridge Health Alliance and a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, told Daniel Williams, senior editor and host of the MGMA Insights Podcast, that his early interest came from clinical work with patients who couldn't stop overthinking, worrying, and replaying what they couldn't control.

Williams then gave Klemanski a scene every overextended practice leader knows well: A line at the post office. Eleven unclaimed minutes. No patient waiting, no inbox flashing, no payer on hold. And yet, almost automatically, the smartphone comes out. Email, social media, a little scrolling — just one more chance for the brain to stay lit up when the body has nowhere to go.

Klemanski heard something larger in that moment, and it sounded less like personal weakness than a clinical operations problem: Medical professionals just can't find time to slow down.

When stress becomes the operating system

That problem is showing up in MGMA’s data, as well: An April 28, 2026, MGMA Stat poll found that 33% of medical groups reported a physician retiring or leaving in the past year due to burnout, while 49% said physician burnout was getting worse in their organizations. 

Klemanski described the same shift from the clinical side. “Stress is becoming chronic and it’s no longer episodic,” he said. A difficult week, a tough patient panel, or a late night of charting used to feel like discrete events. For many workers, he said, stress now stretches across work, family, finances, emails, side obligations, and the blurred borders between all of them.

He was careful not to label every demand as pathological: Raising kids, practicing medicine, leading a group, staying connected, and caring about work can all generate meaningful stress. The problem comes when the nervous system never gets a clean signal that the stress has passed. 

“We are on autopilot almost all the time,” Klemanski said. “We are trained to do that.”

Mindfulness without the fog machine

Klemanski defines mindfulness in plain clinical language: “helping people learn to pay attention in the present moment, on purpose and without judgment.” That may sound simple — until it's a real-life clinic day, where attention is rarely focused and purpose gets hijacked by urgency.

“We are often judging our emotions,” he said. “We’re often judging our circumstances, maybe judging other people.” In a medical practice, that can show up as a physician blaming themselves for late documentation, an administrator resenting yet another payer demand, or a manager silently rehearsing what might break next.

Klemanski's interest began with patients who had anxiety, but the pattern he saw maps closely to practice leaders endlessly replaying the past or rehearsing the future. “When we teach people how to be mindful about their work, it really helps them to see clearly — like, gee, 'I was stuck in this worry loop,'” Klemanski said. “'I was stuck ruminating about something I have no control over.'”

Why the intervention had to be small

Klemanski’s work with Caravan Wellness started with a practical research question: Could the wellness activities inside an app be validated in a structured way? Caravan describes itself as an expert content platform for health, wellness, workplace, financial care, and education, with content used by more than 1,000 organizations in 50 countries.

The company's name caught Klemanski’s attention before the study did. Caravan’s founders described a caravan as a group of travelers moving together on a mission to explore, discover, and arrive safely. “I thought that was such a cool concept from a wellness-based perspective,” he said, “that we’re in it together, we’re going to provide access to lots of people, and we’re going to do some really great things with this journey.”

Klemanski's study was intentionally simple: Participants completed nearly an hour of baseline assessments covering emotional state, prior use of mindfulness, sleep, physical activity, stress, and wellness. Then they were assigned to one of three groups: a mindfulness group, a physical movement group, or a wait-list group that did not receive an assigned activity but continued to answer surveys.

The active groups used the Caravan app for short practices, often around 10 minutes a day, over two weeks. Klemanski called it “a very, very simple study,” but the design was aimed at a question that matters inside medical practices: Does a small intervention survive real life?

The answer was promising. Participants who used the brief mindfulness or movement activities often completed them around 12 times over two weeks, and many wanted to keep doing them afterward. Klemanski said the study showed changes in quality of life, stress, anxiety, emotional regulation, and motivation, with the most important signal being continuation. “We saw motivation increases,” he said. “And that’s the key.”

The habit has to come before the storm

Medical practice leaders often encounter wellness tools at the wrong moment: after a physician has already announced a departure, after an administrator is already exhausted, after a team has already normalized running short-staffed. Klemanski argued that mindfulness works better when it is practiced before a person urgently needs it.

“If I’m in the middle of an emotional sort of like storm and I’m having a really tough day, that’s not the day to learn mindfulness,” he said. “The day to learn mindfulness is another day when your mindset is a better space so that you can employ it when you need to.”

A practice leader could test the idea without launching a formal wellness program. A leadership team might begin one standing meeting with two minutes of breathing. A clinic team might create a five-minute reset after lunch or after a difficult patient escalation. A physician might use a 10-minute guided practice before opening the EHR inbox at the end of clinic.

The point is to attach a small reset to an existing moment when the nervous system is already shifting gears.

Movement might be an easier ask than "mindfulness"

Williams then gave voice to the listener who has tried sitting down, only to find their mind moving faster: Not every worker wants to sit still and meditate. In response, Klemanski didn't treat movement as a lesser substitute.

“Anything that the person might benefit from,” he said. “Any movement, any sort of exercise, light, moderate, intense, it’s going to be good for you.” The Caravan study included a physical activity condition for that reason. Mindfulness and movement can be separate interventions, but they also overlap when a person pays attention to what the body is doing in the moment.

“I would bet any athlete, anyone that goes to the gym, they’re doing that stuff mindfully,” Klemanski said. “They’re not checking out. They’re doing this stuff in a way that’s helpful.” 

He suggested that for teams that resist the word "mindfulness," movement may be the easier ask.

The puppy brain

Klemanski’s own relationship with mindfulness remains practical, not perfect. He said some days still get away from him, but he tries to practice proactively, especially near the beginning of the day. That gives him a trained response to draw on when his emotions are “out of whack,” when he is tired, or when he might otherwise snap at a partner, friend, or child.

“I think of mindfulness like a puppy, right?” he said. “Or I think of our brain like a puppy.” A new puppy on a walk is chaotic, distracted by everything, and mostly uninterested in the route. With training, the dog learns the walk.
“When you first learn mindfulness, your brain is going to be a lot like a puppy,” Klemanski said. “It’s going to want to think about anything and everything else —  but the more you train it, the better it gets at that.”

MGMA’s December 2025 stress Stat poll found that 78% of medical practice leaders reported increased stress that year, with respondents citing staffing shortages, turnover, financial pressure, payer denials, rising overhead, regulatory demands, and cultural strain. MGMA advised leaders to start with a “small, daily off switch,” such as five minutes of quiet, walking, reading, or a brief mindfulness exercise.

Klemanski’s study gives that advice a bit of a sharper edge: The reset session doesn't have to be long to be effective — it just has to be practiced before the next storm comes crashing in.

Resources

• Connect with Dr. David Klemanski on LinkedIn
• Learn more about Caravan Wellness
• Learn more about Harvard Medical School
• Physician burnout and early retirement: The pressure medical groups can’t afford to ignore (MGMA Stat article)
• Stress check at year’s end for a better, more manageable 2026 (MGMA Stat article)
• "Staying vigilant against physician burnout: Is progress being made?" (MGMA Stat article)
• "Can focusing on burnout cause more burnout?" (MGMA Insight article)
• "Addressing clinician burnout with a focus on their calling to medicine" (MGMA Stat article)
• MGMA Insights Podcast Network

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