All jobs come with their fair share of stress due to hectic work schedules, interpersonal conflict, financial challenges, commutes, or long hours. Mindfulness is a must at the workplace as it helps you cope with various challenges, improve your quality of life, and performance.
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the ability to be in the present moment without having any judgments. When you’re mindful, you are “here and now” and you accept this moment fully without labelling it as good or bad. This makes you in charge of your emotions and you’re in greater control of the curve balls that life throws at you. Mindfulness can be as simple as taking three minutes out, three times a day to practice any one technique. It will help improve productivity, cognitive skills, and even quality of life. With International Day of Yoga around the corner, here’s how you can implement it in your everyday work life.
Practising mindfulness
Pause: Take a moment to stop doing whatever you’re doing and start noting where you are, how you’re positioned, what type of room it is, or how your skin feels. Start observing your environment purposefully. You can even close your eyes and visualise yourself sitting in the room. Recreate the scene with as much detail as possible. This could be a short pause for a couple of minutes and can be repeated often throughout the day. You will be surprised how helpful it can be to solve problems at work or gain a fresh perspective.
Take a walk: Get up from your seat and start walking purposefully and deliberately. Pay attention to how the feet make contact with the ground as if you were intently studying your walking, making notes, and trying to understand it better. Moving around is in itself rejuvenating but doing it mindfully will help you feel refreshed and de-stressed.
Find focus: Pick any object around you. It Could be a pen, printer, book — whatever catches your fancy. Spend a few minutes intently observing it. Use your senses and notice its shape, colour, texture - whatever is possible. Allow your entire attention span to be invested in this object. Spend a few minutes on this object and then rest. It’s a great way to enhance focus.
Stop multi-tasking: Being mindful means doing one thing at a time. Don’t eat while you work or have a phone dangling in one hand while reviewing a file with the other. Do one thing at a time. A good way to incorporate this is to use the Pomodoro technique where you identify blocks of time and only do one task during that time.
Focus on your breath: Take a few minutes out on an empty stomach and focus on your breath. Close your eyes and mentally repeat to yourself “I am now breathing in” and “I am now breathing out”. As you find a rhythm with your breath, maintain your attention on the sensations and experience of breathing mindfully. Recruit deep belly breathing (Diaphragmatic breathing) for a deeper experience of relaxation. This helps calm down the nervous system, reduces food cravings, and helps you feel relaxed and rested. Great for moments of anger, frustration, or other powerful emotions.
Guided meditation: It is highly effective as guided meditation helps you become more disciplined and structured. On your own, you may become restless, feel lost or distracted. Having a teacher to guide and give you timely cues will bring you back to the present. It gives you access to various techniques and visualisation practices that may not be feasible for self-practice.
(Namita Piparaiya is a Yoga and Ayurveda Lifestyle Specialist, Founder — Yoganama)
