Meditation and mindfulness have been quickly adopted by Americans due to its benefits in improving work performance, personal relationships, and health. In an average 9-5 workday, just 5-minutes of deep breathing, reflecting, and releasing any tension can work to decrease stress levels and increase overall productivity.
The implementation of daily meditation has helped many working adults. After personally discovering the benefits of mindfulness, I founded Simple Habit for working people to listen to on-the-go 5-minute meditations. Even just one week of brief daily mindfulness meditation practice has been found to produce significant benefits, like these:
1. Improved Focus. Get Distracted Less.
Practicing mindfulness and meditation has repeatedly been shown to improve our ability to sustain attention and decrease external and internal distractions. Researchers from Harvard Medical School found that a meditation program led to changes in brain regions involving learning and working memory capacity. Working memory is important for reasoning and guiding our decisions and behavior. Those who worked in high-stress work environments and practiced meditation were able to stay on a task longer, managed their time better, and received positive feedback after a task performance.
2. Improved Creativity. Think Outside the Box.
Mindfulness meditation practice can lead to improvements in problem-solving creative solutions as well as promote divergent thinking. Research done at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands has found a link between mindfulness and creativity including increased insight problem-solving and reduced cognitive rigidity. The more a person continues to practice mindfulness meditation regularly, the more open they are to bold ideas.
3. Improve Your Mood
Consistent practice of mindfulness meditation can also have a notable beneficial impact on our overall mood, including depression and anxiety. A study from Boston University has shown mindfulness and meditation-based programs have lead to significant reductions in clinical levels of anxiety and depression across a range of conditions and increase in patience and positivity.
4. Stress Less.
Stress has been linked to a wide range of medical problems, including hypertension, heart disease, substance abuse, anxiety, and depression. A study done at Standard University School of Medicine has shown that those who practice mindfulness meditation display greater reductions in stress related symptoms, and report increases in their sense of control in their lives. For instance, mindfulness meditation can produce a 30% reduction in symptoms of stress among those with a serious illness.
5. Strengthen Your Relationships
Learning to be more mindful has a positive impact on yourself and those around you. Increased mindfulness leads to significant improvements in work relationships and friendships, due to communication and expression of emotions. Once becoming more emotionally intelligent internally through meditation, relationships become easier and natural. In fact, people who meditate tend to show more acceptance towards each other.
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