By Lucy Edwards
Some people are hesitant to embrace mindfulness because they worry it will be hard to fit into a busy schedule. But mindfulness reduces stress and can help you become more aware of stressors in your daily life. Some techniques that help you embrace mindfulness, such as meditation, may even change the body and mind, allowing us to live longer and feel more happiness. Also, mindfulness makes you more resilient when new stressors appear in your life.
Mindfulness Increases Focus And Reduces Exhaustion
Studies have introduced mindfulness to the workplace in a variety of ways. One studied had mandatory breaks during which participants could meditate to relieve stress, while another introduced online mindfulness programs to help reduce stress in a corporate call center. Research continues to suggest that those who use these breaks to practice mindfulness return to work less stressed, and more focused than before. They are overall more productive at work. After recognizing the positive effects of mindfulness, some individuals were even open to trying other methods, like tarot to achieve a sense of mental clarity.
Learning To Be Mindful Can Make Us Resistant To Mental Stress
You can practice mindfulness in your daily life. Mindfulness can be trained by paying attention to details. For example, the raisin test is a mindfulness technique in which you focus on a raisin, and consider its shape, size, coloration, and as many details as you can think of. Attentive listening is another mindfulness technique. In conversations, or when watching TV, focus on the details of a topic, and don’t divide your attention by listening to multiple sources of noise at once.
We often hear humans are capable of multitasking, but research continues to cast that idea into doubt. When we divide our attention, we tend to have a primary focus on our various tasks. Dividing our attention increases our stress, and makes us worse at all of the tasks overall. Practicing mindfulness involves focusing on one subject at a time until it's completed, and then moving on to the next step. This reduces stress and makes us more efficient overall.
Mindfulness Improves Your Health, Which Reduces Stress
Some techniques to embrace mindfulness, like meditation, may even alter how we think and feel. Stress is unique because there is always a stressor or a cause of stress. Stressors can be physical or mental, and meditation helps us to relax and identify potential stressors around us. Removing physical stressors can allow our bodies to stay healthier, possibly lengthening our lives. Some studies suggest it can reduce wrinkling and skin aging.
Mental stress is cumulative. Being affected by one cause of mental stress makes you weaker and more susceptible to new causes of mental stress. Meditation can help you alleviate the mental stress you already have. Some research even suggested meditating causes additional folds in the outer layer of the brain, which may affect mental health. It also affects the amygdala, the center of the brain that controls our emotions, helping us to remain calmer in the future.
Mindfulness can help us reduce the mental and physical stress that already exists, and identify stressors that may cause more stress in the future. Meditation and mindfulness techniques may affect the shape of the brain, our emotions, and our body's health. And mindfulness reduces personal stress, as well as stress in the workplace, allowing us to be more focused and productive in our work and personal lives.
