You may have noticed an increasing number of mindfulness programs for business professionals in the past couple of years. However, if you’re unfamiliar with basic mindfulness techniques, you’re probably wondering – just what is mindfulness in the first place? And why do companies want their employees to learn about it so much lately?
We’ll take a quick look at that question and provide you with some meaningful answers!
Harnessing Your Mind
In the modern office environment, your mind is your #1 problem-solving tool, regardless of the industry or specific company you’re working for. There’s just one problem: our minds are curious, wandering things.
That’s especially true in the modern age of hyper-produced digital content. It’s a fact: our attention spans are shorter than they’ve ever been in the history of human civilization. We’re constantly bombarded by narratives, intrusive thoughts, and captivating stories – it’s getting increasingly difficult to actually focus on what you need to be doing, especially at work.
A busy mind is productive, but only if it’s busy with the work at hand. If you allow your mind to wander across memories, content, and future plans willy-nilly – there’s a big chance you’ll enter a cycle of procrastination that doesn’t benefit anyone.
Mindfulness is a practice designed to fix precisely that! And once you learn to use it as a part of your daily activities, you’ll have fewer problems rooting yourself in what you should be doing.
So, What Does Mindfulness Do?
Basically, mindfulness is an umbrella term for a series of techniques designed to help your mind focus on the present. Some of these methods involve focusing on specific sensations that remind you of the present moment, many of which are in the form of meditation techniques. On the other hand, some involve routine daily activities, such as walking, cleaning, and cooking.
None of this is designed to make your mind less busy – remember, its nature is to analyze, think, and try to figure stuff out. But you need to learn how to control your mind instead of leaving it to focus on various unproductive thoughts at random.
Without mindfulness, your brain is always searching for the next stimuli, the next exciting distraction to think about, and steers away from productive tasks.
Through the practice of mindfulness, you’ll learn to nudge your mind back to the present moment gently. For example, when you walk your dog, you let it play around and do whatever it wants – but only up to a certain point. You still control the general route of the walk, and you can always pull it back to where you want it to go.
That’s exactly what you can learn to do with your mind – manage its behavior like you would with a pet or a headstrong toddler.
Benefits of Mindfulness
The myriad advantages of mindfulness have been researched for decades – and so far, many benefits have been documented in various studies. Some of them include:
- Better cognitive abilities;
- Lower risk of depression and anxiety;
- A slower pace of brain aging;
- Higher sense of personal well-being;
- Healthier pain management.
- Better quality of life for people with chronic health problems.
Anxiety and Mindfulness
In the modern world, we’re more anxious than ever – a lot of which comes from the fast-paced daily lifestyle that most humans could not have imagined before the onset of the industrial revolution and the birth of the modern economy.
However, we’ve also developed plenty of treatments for anxiety and techniques to alleviate it. And mindfulness practices are a part of many of them. Numerous therapists advise meditation and mindfulness activities to root you in the present and reduce anxiety symptoms.
Journaling is one of the big ones, as is doodling – both are motoric actions that don’t take much energy but help you focus on the content of your writing and drawing. Also, focusing on specific body sensations and breath is known to help.
In the long run, taking enough breaks from screens is vital – especially considering the addictive nature of social media. If you’re a hard worker, taking scheduled breaks is a good habit, as is taking long walks whenever possible.
Of course, these are all techniques people use to decrease their anxiety in the long run. However, what happens when people have acute panic attacks or frequent moments of extremely heightened anxiety? Actually, certain mindfulness techniques can help with that as well – like PMR (progressive muscle relaxation).
At the end of the day, it’s not difficult to see why mindfulness classes have become so popular in business. Many employers have realized that investing in the mindfulness of their workforce means investing in themselves. Any staff member who’s worked on their mindfulness is more likely to be focused and productive. Scale that up to an entire company, and you have a sizable competitive advantage.
