Post No.: 0730
Furrywisepuppy says:
Practising mindfulness was briefly mentioned as a way to minimise bouts of stress as a result of work in Post No.: 0723 by Fluffystealthkitten. Different types of mindfulness practice bring different benefits, such as stress-reduction, greater emotional stability, gratitude, social connection or pro-sociality. These benefits can be highly useful in the workplace.
You could try interoceptive mindfulness – a kind of body scan meditation that can be used to recompose yourself. Here, you pay attention to all of the sensations emanating from your body so that you can learn how stress starts to build up in your body and how to ease that bodily tension that feeds back to your mind – like the tightness of your shoulders or clenched jaws (that you can then consciously loosen), the hunched back (that you can then consciously straighten), or the churning stomach (that you can quieten by solving your hunger, without over-eating because you’ll also be paying attention to when your belly feels full). You may have just straightened your back a little after noticing how slouched you were after reading that!
So you can shift your body posture to help shift your mood – in this case from tense to more relaxed or confident. Noticing how your body starts to naturally feel tense and then consciously shifting your body into a more relaxed posture is like noticing when the water is starting to bubble or simmer then turning down the gas before it might boil over the edge of the pan.
The handshake with stress meditation is about observing and accepting how stress affects your body so that you can better regulate it. Mentally taking a step back and labelling your internal experiences with words might prevent you from getting caught up inside them (e.g. knowing that you’re feeling angry). We’re changing our attitude towards an emotion rather than attempting to change the emotion itself here, which can be unrealistic in the moment. This can be enough to stop the emotion from spiralling out of control or enough to stop ourselves from doing something we might regret. For example, our awareness might mean that we avoid impulsively lashing out at a colleague when our feelings aren’t their fault. As a consequence of not escalating the situation, the other person calms down too and nothing is said or done that creates a large, preventable mess; which is obviously beneficial for all kinds of relationships from personal to work to international relations. Figuratively step back and ask will your fit of rage or moping actually improve the situation (e.g. when you’re kicking dents in your luggage because the flight to that business meeting has been delayed)?
Both meditation practices above will also help you to sense your internal emotional states better, which could help you to uncouple the physical sensation of pain from the emotional reaction or distress about that pain. We cannot (solitarily) control many events in the world, or even within our own bodies – but we can control how we react towards them to reduce our own suffering as best as we can. We don’t have to feed the story of how bad things might be. Therefore mindfulness aims to bring about a stable state of equanimity that isn’t dependent on external stimuli.
There’s a common misconception that mindfulness meditation is meant to completely empty our minds of all distracting thoughts – but this is too unrealistic an aspiration. In concentrative mindfulness practice, we use a pleasant or neutral object to anchor our attention onto in order to practise mindfulness; without being uptight or critical about it if our focus drifts (just gently corral your attention back onto the object each time). This object, entity or device could be anything like a photograph of a loved one on the desk, the flame of a candle or the ambient sounds outside of your window, for example.
Even a simple, classic mindful breathing exercise to anchor the mind onto one’s present breath, rather than on regrets in the past or worries about the future, can help enormously. What your mind is presently paying attention to affects everything about how you presently feel. And whilst focused on one thing, we’re essentially distracted from another thing. (Mindfully playing a videogame has even been used as a general anaesthetic during surgery, to distract patients from paying attention to their pain.) This principle is why attempting to multitask is inefficient. But we use it to our advantage here.
Training our focus sharpens our concentration levels at work, and as a result our memory, and safety in manual labour settings. It improves emotion regulation, the handling of stress and in turn our social relationships, and boosts our courage (because one is less reactive to negative emotions) and resilience. When customers are treated mindfully – with our full attention and with equanimity – they will feel like they’re receiving a superior furry service too!
If we’ve wronged someone, focused-breathing meditation can potentially reduce our feelings of guilt, and in turn willingness to make reparations, though. Thus a loving-kindness meditation practice, which includes a focus on others, would be more appropriate in these situations.
Use relational or loving-kindness meditation to train your brain to respond to challenges with kindness instead of distress or despair, and so that you don’t contribute to other people’s stresses. Here, you wish warmth and care towards yourself, then warmth and care towards those around you, and then to all beings everywhere. Compassion is good for business because most employees prefer to work for receptive bosses, work colleagues must work harmoniously, and customers prefer caring businesses. Compassion for someone’s feelings shouldn’t mean not reporting their unethical behaviours just because you don’t want to hurt their feelings though.
Gratitude meditation can increase a sense of contentment and resilience by thinking about the people, pets, events or things you feel grateful for. Practise this and all of the above exercises to cultivate more positive patterns of thought and emotion. Cultivate better social relationships at work to cultivate your capacity to recover more quickly from difficulties.
…Principally, mindfulness is the ability to pay careful attention to your thoughts, your feelings and what’s happening in your body in the present moment, without judging those thoughts and feelings as good or bad. Let them enter and leave awareness without reacting towards them. So it’s about accepting your internal experience, so that you can respond to your internal and external circumstances in a more rational or judicious way. Acceptance doesn’t mean acquiescing to your presumed fate though (like losing a leg and thinking you’ll never walk again). But our feelings of resistance or frustration towards pain will often only serve to increase that pain and the distress associated with it.
Mindfulness engages manual ‘system two’ rather than automatic ‘system one’ and the benefits that this engenders, like better focus, awareness and reducing bias by treating people without preconceived notions. Tai chi and yoga can also cultivate it. It can come from East Asian religious or international secular practice. Your workplace could instead call practising mindfulness ‘mind hacking’ if this helps!
Some of the effects of mindfulness practice are only small though, the practice must be voluntary, how much time is needed for optimal practice is yet figured out, and meditation programs aren’t cure-alls. It is not a panacea, and certainly not a substitute for tackling major factors that affect health and productivity like social deprivation, workplace discrimination or a lack of affordable mental health services. It’s not for everyone. Some individuals, like those recently bereaved or with PTSD, may especially find the experience of ‘turning towards’ their present mind difficult.
You can’t force the practice on others at work or in school (especially on children, who’ll likely find it boring compared to social media and other activities they’d rather do with their time). However, like with physical exercise, you’ve got to do it in order to reap the benefits from it. But if you find it boring then you won’t want to do it.
Different people find different specific practices work for them and don’t so there’s no one-size-fits-all. Bear in mind though that most of these practices need consistent practice over several months before the benefits arise so – again like starting a physical exercise regime – don’t expect much after a few minutes or days. (This is a problem with expecting only 2 weeks of workplace training to have an effect.) Regularity and total time of practice matter – although just 5 minutes today is how a habit starts. Set aside a designated time for it. You’ll only experience the benefits if you do it, and do it regularly. Once you learn mindfulness skills though, you can practise them outside of formal meditations, like when stuck in a traffic jam during the commute, when at your desk or when eating your lunch. Like with any other skill, repeated practice also makes mindfulness easier to do when you need it most (like when you’re facing a difficulty or feeling stressed because of a presentation), and it increases the speed and grace of your recovery.
The state of mindfulness allies a sharp focus with an open awareness. Meanwhile, a sharp focus on autopilot is the state of flow. Flow is usually desirable for maximising productivity but one problem with the state of flow is that one can be so focused on a particular task that one misses a meal or bedtime for not realising how much time has passed or what one’s body is saying. This can perhaps happen when playing an addictive online gambling game. When it becomes pathological, it may in certain contexts be called hyperfixation.
A distracted mind on autopilot is mindless mind-wandering. And a distracted mind with open awareness can allow random thoughts to bubble up, which can lead to creativity; but you’ll still need some focus to retain and execute those ideas.
So connected to mindfulness – open awareness is another valuable skill to unlock on our skill tree, where we simply rest ‘in the awareness of awareness’, and feel what it’s like to be conscious without paying attention to anything in particular. This tranquil and expansive feeling can help us to approach situations with fresh eyes and let go of our habitual reactions and expectations. We consequently listen rather than jump to conclusions, which improves social communication i.e. we get better at hearing what others are trying to say.
Shared humour and laughter are also gateways to connecting with others and open awareness too. Jokes are funny because they conclude in a direction that our filters didn’t expect them to go – in this way, humour opens up our minds. Perhaps the search for and openness to surprise is why witty people are usually also intellectual too?
Woof. In the business world of metrics, key performance indicators and results – nurturing well-being and happiness needs to be recognised as an indirect way to sustainably achieve these for the long-term. Happy and well employees work better and work better together, and happy and well customers come back.
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