Stress Reduction

The World Health Organization has called stress “the health epidemic of the 21st century” and stress is a reality of the modern, 24/7 workplace.

When you repeatedly experience the fight or flight stress response in your daily life, it can raise blood pressure, suppress the immune system, increase the risk of heart attack and stroke, speed up the aging process and leave you vulnerable to a host of mental and emotional problems.

Can Mindfulness help?

More than three decades of scientific research around the world has demonstrated that mindfulness practice can positively, effectively, and often profoundly, reduce psychological distress. Additionally, such stress reduction and workplace studies have indicated that staff become more resilient, productive and happier.

Mindfulness can help you to improve your ability to be balanced under stress, focused on the task at hand and self-regulated in emotionally charged situations.

Mindfulness serves as a foundation for reducing cognitive rigidity, learning to solve problems in novel ways and freeing-up mental space for innovation.

Mindfulness brings an overall sense of connectedness, calm and happiness, which helps us to thrive and achieve greater goals.

Focused Attention

We hear word “mindful” more and more these days, but what does it actually mean? It’s best described by Rick Hanson, PH.D

Being mindful simply means having good control over your attention. When your attentions is steady so is your mind.

Attentions is like a spotlight, and what it illuminates streams into your mind and shapes your brain. Consequently, developing greater control over your attention is perhaps the single most powerful way to reshape your brain and thus your mind. ”

The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T.Gilbert of Harvard University, shows that people spend almost 47% of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing. In other words, many of us operate on autopilot. We have entered what many people are calling the “attention economy.” In the attention economy, the ability to maintain focus and concentration is every bit as important as technical or management skills.

A new comprehensive analysis of mindfulness research, co-directed by a management scientist at Case Western Reserve University, suggests that injecting a corporate culture of mindfulness not only improves focus, but also how employees work together.

The ability to concentrate on our breathing for long periods of time transfers over to other pursuits. If we can focus on a subtle object like our breath for 20 minutes, think how easy it will be to focus on home tasks, work or your partner.

Creativity

Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Creativity is characterised by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions.

Whatever you do, whether you’re an artist, ad creative or have a job you don’t think is “creative” – creativity can help you. Living a full life is a creative act in itself, and creative thinking has the power to help you open doors and take advantage of all your opportunities.

Can we become more creative?

A study by George Land reveals that we are naturally creative and as we grow up we learn to be uncreative. Creativity is a skill that can be developed and a process that can be managed.

The scientists concluded,

Mindfulness meditation reduces cognitive rigidity via the tendency to be ‘blinded’ by experience.

Researchers at the Institute for Psychological Research and Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition of Leiden University in the Netherlands found a tremendous impact of mindfulness meditation (observing without judging) on creativity.

Another study published by Greenberg, Reiner, and Meiran in PLoS One determined that mindfulness practice reduces cognitive rigidity. They found that experienced mindfulness meditators scored much lower in rigidity – that is, their minds were freer to come up with new ideas – than non-meditators who had registered for their first meditation retreat.