Meditating Helps You to Become More Productive
You’ve certainly heard or read at one point that meditation provides many health benefits, both physical and emotional. However, you might not have heard that meditating helps you be more productive, perform better, and achieve your goals.
The rhythm of modern life is contaminated by haste, stress, and noise (especially the latter). And in the middle of this chaotic panorama, you’re obligated to deliver good results and perform well. The problem is that your mind is saturated as a result of circumstance. You have a thousand and one pending tasks in both your work and personal life. How can you find that key point in order to balance everything that happens to you? The answer is meditation. Let’s delve deeper into this.
Meditation to calm the mind
Meditation, especially mindfulness, is a practice inspired by Buddhism which tries to focus the mind in the present, in the here and now, and in what you’re doing at this very moment. The goal is to avoid chaining yourself to expectations, worries, and guilt in order to savor each moment. By doing so, you avoid losing time between the past and future.
These days, many accept this practice due to its instrumental benefits, especially in the business world. For example, large business such as Apple, Google, and Nike have rooms which offer brief meditation sessions for their employees during the workday. According to their data, work leave has reduced by 78%.
High executives throughout the world publicly extol its benefits, which is hardly surprising. Studies linking work satisfaction, rational thinking, and the capacity for emotional recuperation support the practical benefit of mindfulness. Furthermore, meditation encourages a calm state, allowing you to observe what’s happening to you at work or in your personal life from a different perspective.
“Whatever forms of meditation you practice, the most important point is to apply mindfulness continuously, and make a sustained effort. It’s unrealistic to expect results from meditation within a short period of time. What’s required is continuous sustained effort.”
-Dalai Lama-
Meditating helps you be more productive
Meditating helps you be more productive because it frees you from stress, as well as decreases the intensity of negative thoughts. This way, your mind has fewer burdens, pressures, and attachments to deal with, meaning it can work in a calmer, more effective, and more concentrated way.
Conversely, the right hemisphere of your brain, which is responsible for creating new ideas, will work more actively if you meditate regularly. As a result, your work performance will improve. In other words, you’ll become more focused on work because your mind won’t go blank or get lost in other thoughts. Furthermore, it’ll also help you feel fresher and lighter, which will allow you to work with greater agility. Meditation helps you to be more creative when it comes to solving problems and coming up with ideas for improvement.
Perhaps it seems strange to you that closing your eyes, sitting in silence, and focusing your attention on your breathing can improve your productivity levels. Nevertheless, it’s true. You just have to try it for yourself. In fact, what’s most surprising is that, somehow, it also positively influences your mood throughout the day.
“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”
-Oscar Wilde-
The benefits of meditating
Practicing meditation has profound calming, relaxing, and freeing effects on stress. Thus, it may boost your productivity. Some of its most important benefits are:
- Meditating provides a large recharge capacity.
- Also, it provides strong energy doses all day.
- It increases blood circulation in the brain.
- It slows down aging.
- Meditating provides a better planning capacity.
- It improves focus and memory.
- It boosts creativity.
According to a study conducted by Gonzalo Hervás, Ausiàs Cebolla, and Joaquim Soler, mindfulness was confirmed to provide numerous benefits, such as improved attention control and better emotional regulation or self-awareness, among others.
Despite its positive consequences, a large number of people reject this kind of practice or are skeptical about it. One of the reasons why this happens is that many of them give up practicing meditation without even trying because it seems difficult to them. And it certainly is. Shakti Gawain rightfully says that anyone who’s practiced meditation knows how difficult it is to silence your “mental conversation” and connect yourself with your deepest, wisest, and most intuitive mind.
The good news is that nothing will happen if you fail. Meditating gets easier little by little. And as your willpower increases in your effort to meditate, so will the benefits in other aspects of your life.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Capdet, P. P. A. (1998). La utilidad de la meditación como modalidad terapéutica. Rev Cubana Med Gen Integr, 14(3), 250-255.
- Gutiérrez, G. S. (2011). Meditación, mindfulness y sus efectos biopsicosociales. Revisión de literatura. Revista electrónica de psicología Iztacala, 14(2), 26-32.
- Harrison, E. (2008). Aprenda a meditar: más de 20 ejercicios sencillos para tener paz, salud y claridad mental. Editorial AMAT.