A Brilliant Strategy to Reduce Workplace Stress
The biggest benefit to using mindfulness at work is the potential for stress reduction. Workplace stress is real and it’s one of the primary reasons for employee turnover. Mindfulness instruction teaches breathing techniques and strategies for clearing your mind that help to reduce or eliminate stress. One of my favorite characterizations about mindfulness at work is that it helps to “clear out the cobwebs,” in our brain. That helps to improve focus.
Mindfulness helps you to stay in the moment and remember that whatever you’re going through will pass. Then I usually try to throw in a little gratefulness. I’m always thankful that whatever happened to stress me out wasn’t even worse. I know that’s probably a negative way to look at it, but it really works for me. Because it’s the truth. Whatever happens to you, things can always be worse. That’s my way to find the positive in it.
Mindfulness also helps me to find another Living Happier at Work program pillar – kindness. It’s important to be kind to me, no matter what I am going through. As I go through the finishing touches of my new book, “Is It Monday Already?” I am finding how critical both mindfulness and kindness are to all the facets of living with positivity. So many of the tips for living happier at work incorporate both those life tools.
Mindfulness also helps you develop courage. In order to make the changes to live happier at work, you have to have enough courage to make the small changes consistently. Then you’ll develop the chops to take bigger steps because you’ll see the effect on your life.
Mindfulness allows you become the master of your brain because you begin to really control your thoughts. The reason we feel stressed is usually because of fear and loss of control. So it makes sense that a strategy that helps you regain control would help reduce stress.
One of my favorite quotes that sums it all up perfectly:
