A byproduct of many people transitioning into working from home is that it's easy to feel like you're always on and there's no escaping your work. For a long time this was broken up by driving to and from the office, but as a society we're facing a point of burnout if we don't find new ways to break up the stress of work from our personal lives.
One method that many people are leaning into is a daily meditation practice. This time can reset your mind to focus in on any task at hand and the transition from work to personal life or vice versa.
Stress Reducer
Meditation is a natural calming agent and will help regulate the anxiety or stress that you may feel when on a work deadline. The process of meditation can right your increase in circulation while in these moments and will allow you to return to the project at hand with a calm mind.
Improve Focus
Similarly, mindfulness and meditation have improved our ability to maintain focus and reduce external and internal distractions. By calming your mind from anything external, you will be able to focus on any task at hand with an improved level of focus. Essentially, taking what may have seemed like a daunting task to something manageable.
Enhance Creativity
When faced with finding a solution to a problem, taking the time to meditate when working on a project can allow you to look at it in a new way. Meditation can allow you to access past knowledge and different ideas that when combined can give you the solution you have been looking for, while your mental capacity before was clouded by other distractions.
Improve your Mood
Consistent mindfulness meditation practice can have a significant positive impact on our general mood, including reducing severe depression and anxiety.
Meditation can act as mini mental resets throughout the day while transitioning between tasks and from personali life to your work. At the end of the day, these will help you feel accomplished and not as if the day all blended into one.
Daunting Task?
Don't Worry.
There are companies like MomentCo that are in the business of making this more attainable for everyone. Their approach is based on the power of the mindful micro-moment that are taken AWAY from your phone, and can all start with a few deep conscious breaths.
The following was written by one of their co-founders, Fiona.
"Back in 2015 Google created a new term - ‘micro-moments’. These were defined as times when we ‘reflexively turn to a device to act on a need to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or buy something’. The world at our fingertips. Sounds good, right!?
However, the addiction to the need-to-know things, buy things and go places right now, not to mention hours of social media and constant notifications, has led to one of the main every-day psychological challenges of our time - disconnection.
On average, Americans check their phones 262 times per day—that's once every 5 ½ minutes.1 The mindless micro-moment behaviour has become so addictive that Google’s research showed 91% of smartphone users looked up information on their phones while in the middle of another task. And you can bet that a high portion of this scrolling is in the middle of a conversation, a meeting, or even on a date (apparently 47% of us own up to scrolling during this one!)2
What has this done to our health and happiness? In short, our stress levels have increased; we find it harder to focus on tasks (it takes us up to 23 minutes to refocus after a phone interruption) making effective communication and decision-making more challenging. We have become disconnected from our surroundings, nature, family, friends - and ourselves.
What if the micro-moment could be used as a power for good?
The simple intuitive action of the breath, something we do around 23,000 times a day, if made conscious, has the power to stimulate your vagus nerve, calm the nervous system and allow you drop emotional baggage to face tasks with a fresh perspective. We just need to remember to do it.
That is why we created the Moment Pebble, a natural stone breathing device that acts as an external reminder and anchor for conscious breathing techniques. The light guided breathing sequence programmed within shifts the nervous system from a stress to a calm state.
We are realistic and appreciate that completely breaking the addiction cycle to our phones is extremely unlikely, however, imagine the impact if for just 5% of the 262 times we went to pick-up, we didn't reach for our phones.
Instead, imagine in that micro-moment that we took some conscious breaths, what could we experience in that moment of peace? Perhaps we would mindfully listen and connect with our family and colleagues, allow our imagination to open up and run wild, use our memory to answer a question or we could simply look up and enjoy our surroundings.
Small steps build up over time and will allow you to reconnect with who you are, to your surroundings and allow you to live more mindfully in each micro-moment."
