How Remote Workers Can Practice Mindfulness Meditation For Greater Wellbeing
There’s no denying that 2020 has been a stressful year, and now heading rapidly into 2021, many of us are feeling tired and worn out, and this can all get a bit much.
As a remote worker, whether you’ve been remote working since the COVID-19 pandemic or before, you’ll know that anxiety is high, stress is equally up there, and productivity and your general mental wellbeing could be taking a hit.
However, you don’t need to suffer. Mindfulness meditation is a great way to ground your busy head, reduce stress, boost productivity, and even help you learn more about yourself.
Mindfulness meditation is a personal practice and can affect everyone differently, but here are some benefits, especially for remote workers:
- Enables you to stay calm and collected, even in stressful situations, allowing you to make proper and grounded decisions
- Helps you discover and focus on your priorities. When you know what you want to do, you can start creating a plan on how you want to do it.
- Helps you identify problems in your life, enabling you to understand what you’ll need to work on and what is potentially holding you back.
- Creates a balanced state of mind that can help improve your sleeping patterns, ensure you’re eating properly, and make you want to look after yourself better.
Get Started With Mindfulness Meditation Right Now
As you read this, try and pay attention to your thoughts. Maybe you hear the sounds around you: you can hear a conversation or car passing on the road, or a phone ringing. Notice how your mind tries to identify the sound and put a story to it.
As I write this, I can hear my partner cooking dinner downstairs, and my head is imagining him putting the pan on the stove and the plates onto the table. My mind is creating a story to the sounds I’m hearing. The mind has a habit of creating stories like this to try and help us comprehend the world, and this is where the stress and anxiety come from.
As I’m writing this, Google services are currently down, which is a rarity, to say the least. My mind goes into overdrive with thoughts like, “How am I going to read my email? What if someone is trying to reach me? What am I going to do with the thousands of files I have backed up on Google drive if I can’t get into them ever again?”
However, instead of freaking out, going into panic mode, and imagining the worst possible scenarios, I can take a deep breath and realize I have no control over this situation; but what I can control is my response. I can stay cool, calm, collected, and productive.
The mind makes up stories, and we can choose whether or not to believe them, but you need to be aware they’re happening in the first place. What your mind believes and says to you does not define reality; it’s just your mind’s perception of it.
Since your mind’s reality and actual reality are not the same as your mind plugs gaps into stories and makes assumptions about everything, this is where the restlessness of living starts to form.
How To Become Mindful
So, what can you do about it? The first thing to do is to take a deep breath. This creates a pause in the constant stream of thinking where you can start to watch your thoughts.
Is someone acting a little oddly towards you? Here the mind goes into overdrive and creates stories that you’ve done or said something wrong and have upset that person, and now you’re feeling super anxious about it. However, take a deep breath and say, “Oh yeah, that’s just a story because I don’t know all the facts.”
Then, when you do speak to the person next, you discover they didn’t sleep the night before or had a really bad day and just wanted to be left alone. If you thought something was wrong with you, you realize you created stress and anxiety over nothing.
Mindfulness meditation, and being good at it, is not something that happens overnight, but a skill that is learned and will bring positive results into your life. Try it for yourself, read up, get an app and practice, and you’ll see that bettering your health is not as far-out concept as you may have first believed!
Kristin Herman is a marketing writer at Studydemic.com. She writes to help businesses get creative with the ways they connect with their customers.
See also:
Three Reasons People Fall Asleep in Meditation – and Solutions
Meditation Is More Than Silence and Emptiness
