On an article published at her blog, Anne Loehr shares the benefits of Mindfulness and provides 6 tips to include it in our workdays.

Mindfulness is an ancient mental methodology that enables you to control your attention, enhance your awareness and see things more clearly. In other words, it is a way to get out of “autopilot,” a mode that we easily fall into in our day-to-day lives. Instead, it’s a practice of consciously and deliberately directing our attention to the present moment, and experiencing it in a non-judgmental way.

Mindfulness provides several benefits. For instance, it increases your levels of happiness. At the workplace this can be observed in the fact that the more mindful a colleague or supervisor is, the lower an employee’s emotional exhaustion is. It also improves work-life balance and teamwork.

Mindfulness can also help you make better decisions and focus on tasks, as it increases cognitive skills and attention. Therefore, having multiple things to do, it helps us focus on what needs to be accomplished, and how to best execute the tasks. In addition, mindfulness reduces stress.

According to Loehr, there are 6 easy steps to incorporate mindfulness.

Waking up

Right after waking up, take two minutes to notice your breath before checking email. Focus on your breath when your mind jumps to the day’s tasks. Set your alarm so you don’t fall back asleep.

Arriving at work

Once you get to work, boost your brain activity with 10 minutes of mindfulness practice. You can do this in your car before entering the office, or at your desk. Simply sit up straight, close your eyes, focus on breathing and count during inhale and exhale, trying to extend each.

During the day

When multitasking, our efficiency drops up to 40%. So throughout your day, resist the urge to multitask, and instead focus on one thing at a time.

Loehr also states that it is important to take control of your email addiction. It takes an average of 15 minutes to re-orient to a primary task after checking email. Sending an email tells our brain that it has completed a task, releasing dopamine (a pleasure hormone). But we all know not every email actually accomplishes something.

Attending a meeting

Mindfulness can be used to keep meetings short with laser focus. First, spend two minutes focusing on breath and body movement on the way to meetings. Then, end meetings five minutes early to allow people to transition into the next meeting or task with mindfulness.

After midday

Set an alarm to go off every 90 minutes. When it goes off, spend one to five minutes practicing mindfulness. This can be as simple as sitting up straight and focusing on your breathing, or doing some light stretches.

On your way back home

Instead of looking at your commute as a boring waste of time, look at it as a time to de-stress. Turn off your phone, and do not listen to music or podcasts. Simply be, focus on your breath, and allow yourself to relax and recharge.

Loehr challenges her readers to take these steps during their workday at least two times in the next week. Prior going to sleep each night, write what you noticed about your day. Were you more or less stressed? Were you able to focus? The more you practice mindfulness, the more improvements you will see in your mental and physical health, interpersonal relationships, and productivity at work.

Source: Anne Loehr