MINDFULNESS  |  TOP MIND

5 Ways Mindfulness Reduces Stress

Chad Prinsloo | Web Designer

Anneke Kirsten  |  Counselling Pychologist  |  Cape Town

December 07 2020

Mindfulness is gaining a lot of “buzz” and popularity in the corporate environment, but what exactly is mindfulness? and what does it mean to be mindful? is it just a trendy buzzword that many people use without meaning, or something that can actually reduce stress in your life?

Whether it’s worrying and about having too much work to do in too little time, fulfilling family obligations, or dealing with a major personal or professional setback, mindfulness has been known to be very effective in high-pressure situations.

Regular mindfulness sessions in the workplace can have a strong impact on the health, productivity, and employee morale of staff members. Mindfulness programs have also been shown to boost employee productivity, attitude, and creativity. This combination of benefits provides a flow-on effect for your business.

Here are 5 benefits of mindfulness and how it contributes positively to your overall health and reduces your stress levels.

What is mindfulness and how does it work?

Have you ever ate a biscuit and not remembered what this tasted like or what the flavour was? or drove to the grocery store and barely remembered the journey? This is called being in a state of auto-pilot, and it’s the opposite of mindfulness.

Now instead, imagine eating a freshly baked biscuit and being completely absorbed in the feelings and sensations of that moment. The milky smell, the crunchiness, the aftertaste taste of chocolate, and buttery goodness. The joy and satisfaction you get with each bite. That’s what mindfulness is.

Meditation and Mindfulness is a stress-relieving technique that can be utilized to deal with the daily stressors of the workplace. It involves being fully focused on your awareness of the present moment. When practicing mindfulness, you acknowledge and accept your thoughts, feelings, and sensations without judgment or negativity.

Mindfulness can be practiced both in your personal and professional life. Personal practice means simply becoming more mindful in your day to day tasks, such as focusing on the present (your thoughts, breathing, feelings, environment, etc) while sitting in traffic or enjoying a meal. Mindfulness can also be practiced in your professional life, and many workplaces are beginning to adopt mindfulness-based practices. Whichever way you practice mindfulness, the benefits can last well beyond the session itself.

Scientists believe the benefits of mindfulness are related to its ability to dial down the body’s response to stress. Too much stress, if not dealt with accordingly, can slowly start to damage the body’s immune system and make other health problems worse. By lowering the stress response, mindfulness may have downstream effects throughout the body. Also, by focusing on the present, a person is less likely to worry and to think about a negative thought or experience which they might do regularly otherwise.

Paying attention protects us

For example, say you don’t get an immediate reply to an important text you send your boss asking for paid holiday leave which you have accumulated, so you can spend more time with your family over the Christmas and new year period to plan a small vacation together with them. You might begin to worry that your boss will reject your request, get concerned that he or she thinks you’re not working to your full capacity, and then ruminate on all the possible things that could go wrong if you did go on leave.

Consider instead how you could change your behaviour and thoughts by choosing to pay attention to what is really occurring in the present moment. Instead of becoming immersed in self-created negative thoughts and worries, you might just notice the desire for a reply instead and plan from there. However, you wouldn’t react to or escalate those thoughts, but instead return to what you are working on at that moment.

This practice of paying attention to an event as it happens is not what most people tend to do. Instead, we tend to spend much of our time reacting negatively and overthinking, which leads to wild explanations, implications, and stories, all of which often creates unnecessary stress. Paying attention and living in the “now” allows us to cultivate a more direct experience of what is happening.

Decreased Depressive Symptoms

Some types of depression are known to be caused by repetitive negative thinking patterns over a long period and avoiding uncomfortable thoughts and feelings rather than facing them directly. Mindfulness helps combat depression in several ways and provides the tools needed to step back from intense negative emotions, identify them, and accept them instead of fighting them. This allows a person to better regulate their emotions, leading to better coping and management of depression. It’s also encouraging you to live in the here and now, allowing yourself to emerge in the sensory world of the present.

A new relationship to experiences

Becoming more mindful each day will help you turn from a mode of ‘being’ to a mode of ‘doing’. This state of ‘doing’ is one that is closely related to taking action as well as to better handle and adapt to the stress response. When you are in a ‘doing’ state of mind, you are living in the “now” and are more focused, rather than being in a rattled, confused, or worrying state of mind, which is uncomfortable and potentially harmful for your body.

As we do this more and more, our confidence in our ability to cope in difficult situations grows, and we are less likely to become stressed by events that would have previously felt like a threat or obstacle.

Creating Optimal Health Through Breathing

Beyond the many mental health benefits, mindfulness provides, it’s also known to improve general health. Deep breathing and mindfulness practices help to decrease inflammation and improve immune system regulation, metabolism and improve anxiety and depression symptoms. When done correctly, It also helps with cravings and improves brain functioning.

Teaches acceptance

There are two circles in a person’s life they should be familiar with. The first is their circle of concern and the second is their circle of control. The circle of concern is all the things in life you are stressed about but can’t change. The circle of control is everything in life you can directly manage or control.

Resistance comes about when we worry or have concerns over the things we can’t control. This is where additional and unnecessary stress is created. The true way to peace is through acceptance. When you can deeply understand this you can learn how to relax your urge to manage everything, and only focus on that which is in your circle of control.

I’m Anneke Kirsten, a Cape Town therapist and Counselling Psychologist (MA Counseliing Psychology) and an Accredited Integrative Enneagram Practitioner with a special interest in Mindfulness, Emotional Intelligence and Leadership training.

At TOP MIND, we provide individuals and organisations with the tools to better understand, measure, and solve internal issues and build high-performing teams. We use psychological principles to solve problems in the workplace and improve employee wellbeing.