Mindfulness is the new black. 4 reasons to try it - Women's Agenda

Mindfulness is the new black. 4 reasons to try it

Mindfulness meditation is the new black. In fact its burgeoning popularity is being fuelled by a rapid growth of scientific research revealing what Buddhist monks have known for about two and a half thousand years; it is an effective mental technique for enhanced wellbeing and mental focus.

It’s a practice which supports your capacity to stay focused on what you are doing as you are doing it. Its a powerful antidote to the distractible nature of the mind and the information-overload of our digital world. When practised regularly, it can bring more calm, creativity and effectiveness into everyday life, reducing stress and enhancing our mind’s capabilities.

Like many people who are driven to create and make things happen, I used to wonder why anyone would “just sit there” doing meditation. As a compulsive doer myself, sitting down to meditate was profoundly challenging. Where was the productivity in that?

As much as I loved being creative and working on new projects, I discovered that without a way to tune in and calm down I was going to burn out. As meditation became part of my regular mental fitness regime, it not only re-wired my brain but re-directed my entire career from full time doctor trained in psychiatry to full time social entrepreneur.

Four years ago I created Mindful in May, a global online meditation campaign that teaches people mindfulness meditation and raises money to build clean water wells in developing countries. The idea came to me one day whilst I was sitting in meditation. I imagined there were many people in the world who wanted an easy, accessible way to learn how to meditate. It has inspired thousands of people from around the world to learn how to master their minds and make a huge difference through raising over $300,000 to fund clean water projects in Africa, helping the one in nine people on the planet to gain access to one of life’s most basic needs.

Companies, including Google and NAB, are getting on board with an understanding that mindfulness is a necessary tool that can support leadership and innovation.

Mindfulness has been a crucial ingredient in supporting me to grow this global campaign and continue to increase its social impact. It is a powerful practice that can help you too. Here are 4 ways it can make you more successful.

1. Manage stress

The energy required to run a business, lead a team or achieve whatever success you want, can make burn out a very real risk. Your stress response was not designed to be sustained for extended periods. In fact, the stress response was designed for a very specific reason – to redirect the energy and blood flow in your body so that you could literally run away from a physical predator. The problem is that these days our stress response is triggered many times in a day. When the stress response is chronically switched on, it puts us at a higher risk of diabetes, infertility, obesity, anxiety and depression to name a few. 

Mindfulness meditation is a powerful practice that supports us in bringing our bodies back into a balanced, healthy state, protecting us from the long term impact of stress. There are studies that have demonstrated that mindfulness meditation can positively impact our bodies down to the level of gene expression in ways that counter the effects of stress and inflammation. Research has also demonstrated that with regular meditation you can strengthen your immune system, meaning fewer colds and viruses that can cost you time.

2. Stay cool under pressure

Whatever the field in which you work, chances are your working week involves communicating under pressure. When your stress response is in overdrive it affects higher parts of your brain, including the prefrontal cortex, which is the highest functioning part of our brain required for things like inhibiting our reactive emotions and communicating effectively.  Regular mindfulness meditation has been shown to increase the thickness of the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with such higher level brain functions as calming ourselves down in the heat of emotion and being able to communicate and problem solve more effectively. We now understand that emotional intelligence, a quality that is essential for effective leadership, is a skill that can be enhanced through practices including Mindfulness. As we practice mindfulness we become more skilled at managing our emotions and staying calm under pressure 

3. Sharpen your focus

Staying focused is an increasing challenge in this distractible world. We need to upgrade our “inner technology” of attention to meet the demands of an increasingly complex world. For many of us, multitasking has become the new survival tool. However, research has proven that although we feel like multitasking helps us get more done in less time, it actually reduces our productivity. Mindfulness when practised regularly, develops parts of the brain that strengthen our capacity to stay focused and can help us master the art of mono-tasking.

4. Manage self-doubt

Being ambitious, running a business, charting your own course and achieving your goals requires you to push yourself out of your comfort zone. For most of us this inevitably comes with moments of fear and self doubt. The inner critic can become quite loud and persistent in its attempt to protect you from failure. The problem is that without training we can be fooled into listening to these compelling thoughts which are very often just useless negative mind chatter that is being generated by underlying feelings of fear. Mindfulness gives you a completely new way of relating to your thoughts through helping you discover that your thoughts are real but not necessarily true. This helps you unhook from unhelpful, self doubt that would otherwise get in the way of you taking action towards what you really desire. 

If you’re curious to learn mindfulness it can be as easy as taking ten minutes a day to practise. You can join me and thousands of other people around the globe this May in exploring the power of mindfulness meditation through a one month global campaign. It costs $30 to register which gets you access to the one month online course delivered straight to your inbox from May 1st. You’ll receive meditation downloads and exclusive video interviews with leading world experts in mindfulness, the brain and wellbeing. The campaign not only supports your wellbeing but through getting sponsored to take the challenge you’ll help raise money to build clean water projects in the developing world. It’s a win, win. Create a clear mind for you and clean water for others.

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