Is your job seriously stressing you out? Learn how to meditate at work and beat stress at the office.
Everyone has felt pressure at work. Whether that’d be fulfilling a looming deadline or dealing with a toxic coworker, any job can have triggered those stressors.
Stress can be controlled and oddly healthy at times. But when it becomes chronic and overwhelming, stress is detrimental to your health. As much as it affects your wellbeing, stress can release risks and tensions at home, relationships, and social life.
One way to lessen the tension is to meditate. Here’s what you need to know.
Factors that increase workplace stress
Feeling cranky all the time at work? All your work-related worries can increase your risk of burnout and fatigue. Check the ones below if you think these add to your work stress.
• Excessive workloads
• No room for growth and advancement
• Working long hours with little break
• Working on unrealistic targets
• Conflict with coworkers
• Low salaries
• Lack of managerial or unit support
• Lack of organizational knowledge and execution
• Discrimination based on race, gender, age, or educational background
• High mental or emotional work
• No clarity of work role
• Poor communication
• Little recognition and rewards system
• Little to no workplace camaraderie
These factors serve as stressors at work – though there could be more issues we haven’t tackled here. It’s best to do a personal health risk assessment at work if your work brings excessive strains to your health.
Just take a 15-minute break to analyze stressors in your workplace and if you’ve experienced any of these symptoms.
Signs of work-related stress
You can never avoid stress at work but you can take measures to mitigate the tension. Before anything else, try to analyze and track your stressors. If you persistently feel constricted, then stop – before it can take a toll on your wellbeing.
Physical symptoms
• Headaches
• Flu
• Stomachache or other gastrointestinal problems
• Heart palpitations
• Muscle spasms
• Hot and cold flushes
• High blood pressure (some people account to having low blood pressure or hypotension)
• Insomnia
Mental or psychological symptoms
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Irritability
• Disinterest
• Poor decision making
• Poor concentration
Emotional and behavioral symptoms
• Aggressiveness
• Isolation from coworkers
• Problems with authority figures
• Disinterest in work
• Reduced productivity
• Mood swings
Stress begins and ends in the mind
You’re trying to cram on a project that’s due this afternoon, but your email and office phone won’t stop buzzing for a meeting about another work expected tomorrow.
Your heart beats fast. Your jaw clenches tight. Your stomach churns to whatever you ate at lunch. Then, your mind explodes.
Literally, stress begins in the mind. What you see, hear, or feel sends a message to the brain. Afterward, your brain communicates with the rest of your body to put up defenses against stress, which can be noticed in your fight or flight response. Your body also releases cortisol and adrenaline – stress hormones – that are responsible for causing your breathing to quicken, your heart to pound faster, or your blood pressure to rise.
Stress can be good, at times, like when you instinctively put up your arms to protect your face during one of those bathroom incidents. Or, how your senses become sharper and more focused to finish the tasks at hand.
But when stress continues in the long run and in hapless directions, it can take a chronic toll over your health. I believe that if stress starts from the mind, it can also end there.
Will you think about stopping for a minute and just breathe?
Will you think of saying “no” to a project for peace of mind?
Will you think and identify the stressors in your life?
Will you think of ways on how to mitigate stress?
Will you think about doing that right now?
What I mean to say is to become more cognitive and aware that you’re stressing out – badly, if it comes to that. Awareness is the first step if you want to beat the pressure.
One of the best ways to combat stress is through meditation. Being mindful of what you’re feeling can help alleviate a lot of work strains, health problems, and more.
Learn how to meditate at work
Work stress is detrimental not only at work but at households as well, as it can cause rifts at home relationships too. The constant, mounting pressure in the office makes employees assume more job roles they can handle or disagree with coworkers and authority figures.
With meditation, it can impart a sense of cognizance and positive responsiveness to tackle the responsibilities at hand. Learn how to meditate at work and beat stress with these techniques.
Mindfulness meditation
Mindfulness meditation is perhaps considered as one of the best techniques to practice when facing work stress. What you do is focus on the present by accepting events, sounds, emotions, and thoughts existing at the moment. The goal is to become more aware of where, what, and how you are now without dwelling and being too objective of your emotions.
You can take a five-minute break at work and let your thoughts enter and pass without judgment. Sit on a chair, put your hands on your lap, close your eyes, breathe, and let your thoughts wander starting from internal conflicts to external conditions that make you feel that way.
Mantra meditation
Mantra meditation involves repeating a phrase or word as a means of focusing your mind. A mantra is not necessarily to be a declaration to convince yourself on what is. Many even argued that the mantra can be an irrelevant word as long as you can stay focused and keep your thoughts cleared up.
However, I believe that the mantra should be in line with what you’re feeling right now to further boost mood and productivity. A simple, “I can do it,” or “Calm down,” can already make your day.
Guided meditation
Guided meditation is where you form mental images through the use of your senses to evoke serenity. It’s led by a teacher, yogi, or narrator to help you carry the visualization in your head. Since you can’t have that in your workplace, the next best thing to do is download a meditation app in iTunes or Playstore.
Other than downloading apps, you can alternatively listen to podcasts, YouTube, or Spotify playlists to get those guided meditation sessions in both audio and visual formats.
Activity-oriented/Exercise Meditation
Some people get into their zones by performing activities or motions to keep them focused. In the office, you can perform a short series of micro-workouts if you can’t totally find time to run, brisk walk, or perform yoga.
For example, you can perform:
• Chair leg raises
• Chair flutter kicks or scissors
• Stretches
• Arm Raises
• Chest expansions
Breathing meditation
Breathing meditation involves sitting and focusing on your breath as you quiet your mind and push away any foreign thoughts. You invite calmness in especially when you’re feeling stressed from work.
People who practice breathing meditation experience improved mood, clarity, better concentration, and less stress. Remember to inhale and exhale slowly and deeply.
Sit down, place your hands on your lap, close your eyes, and breathe in…1, 2, 3…breathe out, 1, 2, 3. <- that’s the typical way to do it.
Sonder or empathy meditation – Metta Meditation
Sonder is a modern term which means “realizing that everyone has a story and life of their own.” by being sonder, you get to empathize a person by realizing that one has a history, experience, likes, or dislikes also. Other people refer to this meditation technique as “loving-kindness,” which also means “Metta.”
Metta meditation is used to promote empathy, love, and kindness in this progression:
• Self
• Family and friends
• Neutral people or people you don’t know
• Enemies or difficult people who give you headaches
Just sit down, breathe, and gradually enter thoughts in your head with the people you want to think about.
For example:
Yourself
Think about where you are right now, how you feel, and what makes you interact with others like that. You can say it aloud if you want to for affirmation.
Next, you can say well-wishes to yourself like:
I can make myself happy. I can change that. I can do that. I can be at peace.
May I have happiness. May I shine happiness to other people. May I be happy.
I can. I will. I must.
Family and friends
Are they going through rough times? Are you trying to patch things up with them? Extend your loving-kindness to family and friends with these mantras.
May you be safe. May you be healthy. May you be at peace.
I’m sorry. Forgive me. I love you.
May God bless you, keep you, and love you forever.
You can always make your own!
Neutral people
There are people in this world where you feel neutral with them. It’s mostly with acquaintances or people you don’t even know YET in your office. Spreading Metta vibrations can help you feel good and form meaningful relationships with them.
May we work together for a better future.
May we work together in harmony to reach what we want to achieve.
Thank you for your hard work and commitment.
Enemies or hard-to-love persons
Of course, it’s hard to love people you hate. But forgive them if you must (even if you can’t tell it to them) for your own sanity’s sake. Even if you can’t work out with each other, just be professional at work.
May you be filled with love, patience, and happiness.
May you be the reason people enjoy working at the office.
I wish you more blessings to come from God.
Too fake? You can try it MY style – the ones I keep telling myself whenever I meditate:
“Listen – I don’t like you and you don’t like me. But can’t we just work in peace? Professionally, speaking? If you can’t do that, then ^*(!bjaf%, be off! I’m just gonna be here and do my shat with or without you.”
BOOM. Instant motivation for me.
Make your own
Some meditation techniques won’t work for everyone. I’ve tried breathing, yoga, and even Metta meditation (still working getting past the idea of giving your enemy a blessing). But here’s what I do:
I face a blank wall and sip hot tea for five minutes.
I know someone who breathes and listen to metal music because it’s meditative for him too. All in all, you have to find the right method that can help you calm down and motivate you at work.
Meditation takeaways
Meditating at work can keep things in perspective for you. If you’re overwhelmed with stress, a little workplace spirituality can help boost your mood and productivity.
How often should you meditate?
No one can really tell when you should meditate. For some people, it’s every day. Others have it during Mondays (as the start of the work week), Wednesdays (middle of the work week), and Fridays (end of the work week).
It’s better to meditate at a specific time of the day to incorporate and reinforce a better habit of your meditation lifestyle. If you’re getting a hang out of it, you can increase the number of times or length of your meditation. Just enough to not disrupt your work.
Does it work right away?
Some people may say yes, and some people may say no. It really depends on the level of commitment and focus a person has. The best way is to not think hard about it because that’ll just stress you out.
Do businesses integrate workplace wellbeing?
There are businesses that cater to the health and wellbeing of their employees. For starters, companies under the manufacturing, construction, or engineering have a set of questions to new hires if whether they can handle the pressure. That alone says a lot about the company and whether the person is ready to handle the stress.
What’s more, some companies have integrated special, third-party health programs to employees if they want to relax after work. The human resource department (should be the one) even include some stress-relief company activities that can help alleviate depression, improve relationships, and boost productivity.
Ask yourself if the company you’re in cater to the health and wellbeing of its employees. If you’re a business owner, would you like to incorporate meditation or stress-relief programs even just for an hour per week?
