There is no doubt that we currently live in a cut-throat competitive world which forces us to stay on our toes at all times. With hardly any time to eat, sleep or spend time with our loved ones, we have started roaming around with frayed nerves that affect our physical and mental wellbeing considerably. Hopefully, all is not lost yet. There are ways in which you can change your personal and professional life for the better. Mindfulness meditation happens to be one of them.
Study on Meditation and its effects on the body
Meditation is a proven method to de-stress the body and mind. As little as 15 minutes of meditation every day can reduce your stress levels to a great extent. A recent study on the subject has in fact revealed that individuals who meditate regularly tend to face fewer hurdles in their personal and professional lives.
Published in the Psychological Science journal, the study aimed at equating mindfulness meditation against a factor called sunk cost bias. Sunk cost bias can be considered as a physical or emotional investment made by an individual that cannot be recovered again. In psychological terms, it would mean having regrets over or losing out to past options or decisions.
The study has revealed that mindfulness meditation has a positive effect on the sunk cost bias, diminishing it to a great extent so that the individual is able to perform better on both personal and professional fronts. How then would this affect one’s career? Read on to find out.
Ways in which meditation can boost your career
Meditation is said to have a direct impact on one’s career. Here are 4 factors that prove this point.
- Meditation helps you become more mindful and aware
Regular meditation would make you more mindful of the changes around you. It would clear your mind to the extent that you are able to make better business decisions. You would be able to make more organized and rational choices with little or no room for error. This, in turn, would project you as an effective and competent worker and leader.
- Meditation helps you deal with stress better
Meditation helps transform the way you deal with stress on a day to day basis. Stress would help offer the necessary adrenaline rush to sustain in a high pressure working environment. However, staying fixated to that stress can be detrimental for your physical and emotional wellbeing in the long run. Meditation helps avoid this deadly pattern by letting you drain out your stress hormones, thus reducing side effects like exhaustion and premature aging in the process.
- Meditation helps you eliminate unwanted patterns
All of us follow a specific pattern in our day to day lives. While some of these like taking a shower and getting dressed are considered essential, emotional ones like stressing out over household bills or low performance in office are useless and can drag you down.
We hardly tend to come out of our daily grind to notice these useless patterns, thus incorporating them as well as the stress related to them, in our lives. Meditation on the other hand, tends to avoid this scenario completely. It helps you sit down and take note of these useless, unproductive patterns and eventually remove them from your system. This, in turn, would make you more effective in the long run.
- Meditation teaches you to empathize
The workplace is rife with conflicts, irritations and judgments on a daily basis. These can have a toll on your emotional wellbeing. Meditation on the other hand, helps you develop a positive attitude towards yourself as well as your colleagues. This would help you empathize with them better, thus developing a sense of tolerance that would keep the workplace non-biased and working in proper order.
A study has revealed that meditation can ease the stress caused by workplace pressure. Regular meditation can help individuals gain a better understanding of their personal and professional lives.
