You’ve probably heard or read at some point that meditation provides many health benefits, both physically and emotionally. However, you may not have heard as much about how meditation helps you to be more productive, perform better, and make it easier to achieve your goals.
The pace of life today is contaminated by haste, stress, and noise, a lot of noise. And in the middle of this chaotic panorama, we are required to achieve good results and a great capacity for performance. The problem is that our mind is saturated by circumstances. We have a thousand and one pending tasks, both at work and personal and family level. How can we find that key point from which to balance everything that happens to us? Meditation is the answer. Let’s go deeper.
Meditation to calm the mind.
Meditation, especially mindfulness, is a practice inspired by Buddhism that aims to focus the mind on the present, on the here and now, on what we are doing at this moment. The goal is to avoid chaining ourselves to expectations, worries, and guilt, to savor each moment, and in this way, not waste time between the past and the future.
Today, it is a widely accepted practice for its instrumental benefits, especially in the business world. For example, large companies such as Apple, Google, and Nike have rooms for their employees where they offer short meditation sessions during the work day. According to their data, sick leave has been reduced by 78%.
Top executives around the world publicly extol its benefits. And no wonder: the practical rewards of mindfulness are backed by studies that link it to job satisfaction, rational thinking, and emotional resilience. It also fosters a state of calm that allows us to observe what is happening to us from another perspective, whether at work or on a personal level.
Meditation helps you be more productive.
Meditation helps you to be more productive because it frees you from stress and reduces the intensity of your negative thoughts. This way, your mind can function without stress, pressure, and constraints, to work in a more effective, focused, and calm way.
On the other hand, the right hemisphere of our brain, responsible for creating new ideas, will work more actively if we meditate regularly and as a result, our performance at work will improve. That is, you will be more focused on work because your mind will not wander or get lost in other thoughts. In addition, it will also help you feel fresher, and less heavy, which will allow you to work more agilely.
Meditation helps you to be more creative when solving problems and coming up with ideas for improvement.
You may find it strange that just by closing your eyes, staying silent, and focusing your attention on your breathing you can improve your productivity levels, but it’s true. You just have to check it out for yourself. The most surprising thing is that it somehow also positively influences your mood throughout the day.
Benefits of meditation
Practicing meditation has great calming, relaxing, and stress-relieving effects. Hence, it promotes greater productivity. Some of its most important benefits are the following:
- Provides great recharging capacity.
- It provides large doses of energy throughout the day.
- Increases blood circulation to the brain.
- Slows down aging.
- Facilitates better planning capacity.
- Improves attention focus and memory.
- Encourages creativity.
According to a study carried out by Gonzalo Hervás, Ausiàs Cebolla, and Joaquim Soler, mindfulness provides numerous benefits such as improved attention control, greater emotional regulation, or transformation of self-awareness, among others.
However, despite its positive consequences, there are a large number of people who reject this type of practice or who show disbelief when its benefits are mentioned. One of the problems that occurs is that many of them give up the practice of meditation as soon as they try it because they find it difficult. And it is indeed difficult. Shakti Gawain rightly says that anyone who has practiced meditation knows how difficult it is to silence our “mental chatter” to connect with our deeper, wiser, more intuitive mind.
The good news is that it’s okay to fail. It gradually gets easier. And as your willpower increases in the effort of meditation, so do its benefits in other aspects of your life.
All sources cited were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, timeliness, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Capdet, PPA (1998). The usefulness of meditation as a therapeutic modality. Rev Cubana Med Gen Integr , 14 (3), 250-255.
- Gutiérrez, GS (2011). Meditation, mindfulness, and their biopsychosocial effects. Literature review. Iztacala Electronic Journal of Psychology, 14 (2), 26-32.
- Harrison, E. (2008). Learn to meditate: more than 20 simple exercises to have peace, health, and mental clarity. Editorial AMAT.