Elevate Yourself Through Mindfulness

by Cheryl White, CFE, Consulting Manager

Posted on March 21, 2023

Focused attention can sometimes be hard to come by in our workday. With the flood of emails, chats/IMs, and meetings, both virtual and non-virtual, we need to be able to switch our focus from one thing to another and be focused on each task at hand. Being fully focused on each task can become challenging when we must transition between tasks quickly. Luckily, there is a way we can exercise and elevate our minds to do just that through mindfulness.

But first, what is mindfulness?

Mindfulness Basics

Mindfulness is a type of meditation in which you focus on being aware of what you are sensing and feeling in the moment, without interpreting or judging what you are sensing and feeling.

Mindfulness has many known benefits that help us in both our personal and professional lives, including:

  • Reducing stress
  • Relieving anxiety
  • Combatting depression
  • Improving sleep
  • Improving many health conditions
  • Improving attention span and focus
  • Decreasing job burnout

There are many ways to practice mindfulness from simply paying more attention to things throughout your day to focusing on your breathing when you start to have negative thoughts.

More structured mindfulness exercises include:

  • Body scan meditation
  • Sitting meditation
  • Walking meditation

Mayo Clinic’s Healthy Lifestyle article breaks down these easy to follow Mindfulness Exercises.

How and why are these mindful exercises so powerful?

The Power of Mindfulness

Many experts in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and business tout the power of mindfulness from increasing our productivity and focus, to increasing our overall level of happiness, to actually changing our brains.

According to Rasmus Hougaard, an expert in training the mind, founder and CEO of the Potential Project, and co-author of the book, The Mind of the Leader: How to Lead Yourself, Your People, and Your Organization for Extraordinary Results, many of us associate mindfulness with being a spiritual practice about slowing down our thoughts. However, mindfulness is really a cognitive exercise of being mentally present that is meant to help speed up our mental processes to be more effectively on task with what we are doing, i.e., to increase our focus and productivity. He believes mindfulness is a tool that addresses the world of distractions we live in that kills our focus, stunts our productivity, and makes us addicted to multi-tasking. Mindfulness is one of three qualities he believes are foundational for today’s leaders in the MSC Leadership Mind model he developed with his colleague Jacqueline Carter. The MSC Leadership Mind model describes the ideal mind of the leader as having the qualities of mindfulness, selflessness, and compassion.

Emma Seppala, Science Director of the Stanford University Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, Director of the Yale College Emotional Intelligence Project, and author of The Happiness Track, believes that finding happiness and fulfillment is the most productive thing we can do to thrive professionally, and that mindfulness is the key. According to her, research shows that our mind wanders about 50 percent of the time. Thoughts pop into our mind that cause us to worry about the past or the future that distract us from the present task at hand. Research also shows that we are never as happy in those moments when our mind is wandering than when our mind is in the present moment. When our mind is in the present moment, we are more focused, more productive, and happier. Additionally, Seppala reinforces the idea that calming or settling the mind by being present allows us to actually see or collect more information, which is how mindfulness translates to being more productive. The fact that we are able to be more productive naturally, or with relative ease with a present mindset then leads to being happier. This is the real goal of mindfulness and how mindfulness can help you live a more engaged, productive, and happier life.

Another example of how powerful mindfulness is comes from Sam Harris, neuroscientist, philosopher, multiple New York Times bestselling author, host of the Making Sense podcast and creator of Waking Up. He explains the concept that by simply thinking about our emotions, we extend the life of our emotions. In particular, when we engage in over-thinking about our negative emotions, we keep those emotions at play for much longer than their normal half-life, which can easily leave us feeling overwhelmed, if not consumed by our negative emotions. He believes that mindfulness can interrupt this process of fueling our emotions in this way by learning to simply witness our emotions when they arise and letting them pass, rather than hanging onto them by continuing to think about them.

There is even scientific evidence that mindfulness, specifically, with deep meditation and Olympic level meditators, can physically change your brain. Wendy Suzuki, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the New York University Center for Neural Science and author of Healthy Brain, Happy Life: A Personal Program to Activate Your Brain and Do Everything Better, explains that monks who meditate for thousands of hours show increased levels of gamma waves in the brain, which are correlated with large scale brain network activity, including cognitive functions of memory and attention. Daniel Goleman, psychologist, co-author of The Science of Meditation: How to Change Your Brain, Mind and Body, and author of several books on emotional intelligence, confirms that even beginners in mindfulness have a better reaction to stress. This is due to mindfulness lowering activity in the area of the brain responsible for your stress response, the amygdala, which can make us angry or anxious all of a sudden. Mindfulness essentially quiets this part of the brain, which allows us to be calmer when dealing with stress.

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