The Busy Professional’s Guide to Effective Meditation: Finding Calm in Chaos
Amidst the stress of inflation and constant layoffs in the corporate, assumingly 80% of professionals are living a very hectic and stressful life.
For millennials, especially, the closer they get to retirement, the more worries they may have.
There may not seem to be a way out of all the chaos, anxiety, and stress for many professionals. If you are also one of the people struggling to cope with all the changes around you and find peace. You have found the gold mine, to say the least.
Being able to find moments of peace and certainty in how chaotic the world is today, it is literal gold. If not gold, then at least it’s the closest thing.
It can not just help you feel at ease but also clear the path you hope to find and a roadmap leading you to victory.
In this article you are going to explore the tools and practices that can help you find peace, clarity, stress management, and your road map to success by increasing your productivity.
Let’s get into it without wasting another second.
Understanding the Benefits of Meditation for Busy Professionals
As a professional who tends to stay busy, you need to ask yourself if you are truly happy. Ask yourself a few questions right now and answer them with whatever comes to mind.
The questions are thought-provoking, but you don’t need to stress too much about the answers. It’s because eventually, the answers will find you, and with a lot of stress being lifted from life.
- When you are in your 70s or 80s, how happy and at peace will you be about the life you are living?
- Do you have the clarity that makes you feel peace with the stress that comes with life?
- What will life look like when you imagine yourself living the best life?
There are several benefits of meditation, but being able to promptly find the answers to these questions is one of the best benefits.
The level of clarity, peace, and true happiness meditation brings is unmatched. This is coming from someone who’s avidly meditating and who never believed what meditation and spiritual growth can really do.
It can make you believe in life!
Let’s take a look at the general benefits of meditation: Health Benefits Of Meditation: A Science-Backed Guide To Meditating
Increases Concentration Power And Clarity
Meditation helps you develop the power of deeper concentration. It’s something that can give you more time within 24 hours than what other people who don’t meditate can’t access.
Enhanced Cognitive Abilities
It also enhances the cognitive functions. Think about all the times when you felt extremely drained of mental energy because of the brain efforts you needed to put. The best thing about meditating is it helps restore that energy by enhancing cognitive functions.
Stress Reduction
We all admittedly take the stress and its effects lightly. It should have been the opposite with the lifestyle we all have. Things are rapidly changing for the better, and what’s the worst way to prepare? Keep stressing and letting stress just be there, stored away in your body and mind. Meditation significantly helps manage it. There’s no better way than a walking guided meditation to help you enjoy a peaceful walk and meditate.
Related: What Is A Main Reason Why Entrepreneurs Experience Daily Stress?
Emotional Stability And Improved Productivity
Who wouldn’t want to do more in less time so that they can enjoy the rest of the day? You do, I do, we all do. Also, what about having the emotional capacity to deal will everyday toxicity? Not everyone has the privilege to get away from the toxic environment and people. The answer? Meditation, it is hard to explain how meditating makes it happen but it’s easy to experience.
Common Barriers to Meditation for Busy Professionals
Let’s address some common barriers that can prevent busy professionals from enjoying all the benefits of meditation.
Time Constraints
This is never an excuse, but busy professionals often struggle to find time to enjoy the little things in life. Most of us don’t realize that work starts consuming all of our lives.
Why would someone like to sit still and meditate when they can’t even get enough time to spend with their family, watch their favorite show or enjoy a hobby?
Well, if you can breathe for 5 minutes without doing anything else, just lying on the couch or sitting, then you earned the time to meditate already.
Meditation doesn’t take long, and it has a lot to give you if you commit to meditating every day.
Enhanced meditation app is amazing for that especially, commit to meditating for a month and you will get two best suitable meditations every day based on your profile.
Distractions and Interruptions
Sometimes life decides to test you right when you want to commit to improving yourself. It can sometimes be that the universe has decided to keep your stuck or watch how desperately you want to grow.
You can do it, buddy! But hey, there’s also a practical solution.
- The world, your office, and your colleagues can wait for you for five minutes. You can always reach back when you are done with your meditation, so don’t feel guilty for putting your phone on silent.
- You can also invest in a good pair of noise-cancellation headphones. It is definitely an investment because a good meditation session can do a lot for you.
- You can always schedule your 5–10 minute meditation time during the least busy hours of your day. For example, right after you wake-up or right before bed. You can also do walking meditation during lunchtime.
Misconceptions About Meditation
The are a lot of articles and people suggesting that you need a special meditation space or more time to meditate well and get all the benefits.
You don’t!
It’s more about starting a habit and sticking to it. Yes, you may or may not start to see immediate benefits of meditation but keep at it for months, six months or a year even.
Trust the effect of compounding! The more times within a month or a year you meditation to stronger, deeper and more beneficial your meditation will become.
Time constraints can sometimes be very real. Sometimes your mind can’t let you rest. It can easily get you feeling guilty when you can be doing something predictive with your five minutes, like sending an email or taking a call.
In those moments, think about meditation as a necessary brain and body recharge, something else can’t replace it just like you need food, your mind also needs its fuel.
Quick and Effective Meditation Techniques
It’s time to convince you even more to meditate by providing the best and easiest meditation techniques and help you see the change after meditating.
It’s obvious for busy and intelligent professionals that there’s a constant urge to make everything easier and accessible to maximize the time.
Mindful Breathing:
A very simple and easy technique. Mindful breathing can be done anywhere. You only need to focus on your breath.
You can actually extremely deepen your breathing meditation by focusing on the sound of your breath.
It can sound like “so” when inhaling and “hmm” when exhaling. Try it and see how incredibly easy it is.
Mini-Meditations
You can also start with mini-meditation sessions. Starting with a 2-minute meditation, then making progress towards 10 minute meditations slowly.
They will be very easy to fit into your schedule without making you feel strained and bored.
Body Scan Meditation:
Body scan meditations are very effective. It helps a lot to release the stress that gets stored in your body and muscles.
It’s very important to actually let go of stress from your body. A lot of the time, even a workout won’t help a lot with relaxing tense muscles.
Body scan meditation is easy; you need to lie down on a flat surface and focus on each muscle group, tensing and relaxing them with each breath.
It’s easy but guided meditation can make the experience even more relaxing.
Guided Visualization:
These are also very easy, often narrated by meditation experts. If you have vivid visualization abilities, then they can send you on a mini vacation.
You can find various types of visualization meditations online or on meditation apps such as Enhanced. You can also visualize on your own.
- Visualize peaceful nature scenes and yourself relaxing and enjoying there. For example, forests, beaches, gardens, mountains, etc.
- If you have a memory of a comforting space, like a childhood home, or a vacation you’ve been to, you can visualize that.
- You can also visualize your desired life, successful outcomes, and your best future self.
The possiblities with visualization meditations are endless and Enhanced app has some really creative visualization that you can’t always get online.
Integrating Meditation into Your Daily Routine
It’s also very important to be able to integrate meditation into your everyday life.
- Morning Rituals: You can try to add meditation with your existing morning rituals. It will be a lot easier to use “when and then” rule. For example, When I am working out then I’ll meditate for 5 minutes.
- Breaks at Work: Utilize lunch breaks and coffee breaks for a quick meditation. If you are having difficulty taking a lunch break, then that’s another story. You really really need to find a way to make it happen now.
- Commute Meditation: If you are not involved in actively driving during the commute then try open-eye meditation. Fix your gaze on an object gently and let your mind be still as if you are zoning out. You can also practice mindful breathing on your commute. If you are driving then try to enjoy the driving without rush on your mind because you know it will take the same amount of time to reach even if you are stressed about getting late.
- Evening Wind-Down: You can also try ending the day with meditation for better sleep quality.
Conclusion
If you are busy and your entire world relies on you for everything, then you must take great care of yourself. There’s nothing more important than your physical and mental health.
The stress of work will eventually take a toll on your physical health too. Also, there are more benefits of meditating than not meditating.
As a busy and hardworking professional you know the importance of your time and investing it well. Consistent meditation practice is something well worth the investment of time, even if you decide to meditate for 5 minutes or 10 minutes, do it and do it consistently.
Enhanced meditation app is offering 40% off right now on a yearly subscription and also a free 7-day trial on the monthly subscription. So, it’s a great time to try the premium version of the app.
So download the app now and let us know in the comments how you feel about starting meditation practice now after knowing what you know!
