Since the onset of Covid-19, the demands of working from home have taken a toll on our mental health. The stress of negotiating space with family members and juggling homeschooling, increased social isolation from friends and coworkers, and the overstimulation of staring at screens all day are just a few of the ways working from home has affected our psychological state.
Luckily, there is one simple, time-tested way to keep the mind healthy: meditation. More and more companies are turning to workplace meditation programs to help their employees combat the symptoms of anxiety, depression, and burnout associated with working from home in the time of Coronavirus. Here are five ways meditation can help:
Meditation grounds you and focuses your attention.
With the Coronavirus pandemic these days there are even fewer boundaries between work and home. The blurred lines of multiple, overlapping responsibilities causes the mind to work overtime. As a result, you might experience symptoms of anxiety like a racing mind, shortness of breath, or a quickened heartbeat.
I like to begin my meditation sessions with a grounding practice to feel calmer and more centered. Start by noticing the sounds around you. Which is farthest? Which is closest? Try not to create a narrative around the sound or what’s causing it. Just let the vibrational quality of it wash over you. Can you hear silence underneath? Then narrow your attention to the surface of the skin. Notice the temperature of the room or any movement of air. Feel the texture of your clothing. Notice the variation in the weight of the parts of the body touching something solid. Which is heaviest? Which is lightest? Next, narrow your attention to the qualities of the breath --its pace and depth. Observe the temperature of the air you breathe in versus out. Notice if the breath is rough or smooth. Which nostril is clearer?
Practice narrowing your attention in this way to stop the mind from multi-tasking. The benefits of a mind that can focus on one thing at a time will carry over into your work-related tasks, making you more productive and efficient while keeping you relaxed.
Meditation gives you a break from constant worry.
Working in post-pandemic times is a pressure cooker --if you don’t let out some steam, you’ll explode! In a meditation practice, you give yourself the time and space to decompress.
As a recovering perfectionist, I know the relief of writing down my to-do list so that I don’t have the pressure of trying to remember the million things I need to get done. This is why I begin each meditation practice by giving myself permission to put my worries down on paper. I know the same pressures will be there when it’s over, and I am much better equipped to manage responsibilities after relieving their weight for a bit.
If you pay attention to how the mind works, you will notice that the more attention you give to a thought or emotion, the more it grows. A single negative thought can snowball into an avalanche of anxiety. Meditation interrupts this process by training the brain to achieve sustained focus on an object (like the breath), so when a negative thought or emotion arises, you can instead choose to focus your attention on your breath for a few minutes and break the cycle of worry.
Meditation does not try to block out negative thinking. Instead, it teaches you to let those thoughts and feelings come and go without entertaining them.
The next time you have a stressful work day and can’t stop brooding over it, try repeating the mantra “Let it come. Let it be. Let it go.” This will give your mind the break it needs to stay calm and centered amidst the endless demands from life and work.
Meditation helps you to not overreact.
Even while working remotely, part of office culture is navigating the often complex interpersonal dynamics between colleagues. When you find yourself in a challenging work situation, notice your emotional response --do you get irritated? Impatient? Defensive? Passive-aggressive?
In situations that drain your conscious capacity, such as dealing with an urgent problem at work, your attention can become too focused on the difficulty. You lose perspective and let emotion take over. A meditation practice allows you to safely explore the underlying causes of your stress and teaches you how to feel and process these emotions without analyzing, suppressing, or encouraging them, so that their intensity fades. When you have the right balance between focused attention and relaxed, open awareness, you can respond to situations more effectively instead of overreacting, making poor decisions, or misinterpreting what’s really going on.
To practice increasing your emotional stability and resilience, try taking five deep breaths before you react. Taking this pause helps put some distance between the stimulus that is triggering your emotion and your behavioral response to it. A consistent meditation practice helps you recognize that, although emotions affect you, they are temporary and are not you.
Meditation gives you a way to connect with yourself.
So much of our vital energy is directed outward. With work, personal relationships, and the constant barrage of social media and news draining our energy, it’s no wonder we’re exhausted! We often then turn to external means to sustain our energy like nighttime sleep aids to help with restlessness, and caffeine and sugary snacks to rev us back up.
Meditation, on the other hand, gives us the opportunity to turn our focus inward, to put our energy back into ourselves. Taking time and space to sit and connect with yourself will replenish your energy reserves so that you can continue showing up as your best self for all the people in your life. By examining your own mind, you’ll also gain insights into your personality, behavior, and relationships and can begin to recognize and change any past conditioning or counterproductive views you may hold that contribute to mental distress.
To practice turning my focus inward, I scan my body, part by part. Starting with the head and working my way down, I notice any sensations that are present in each area. I’m systematic and thorough, focussing on each bone, joint, muscle, and organ. Pain or discomfort can take center stage here, so I also try to identify what’s pleasant, or at least neutral, about being in my body. Try incorporating into your meditation routine a body scan, sending words of gratitude to each part, and see how your mindset begins to change!
Meditation gives you a sense of connection to others.
Even pre-pandemic, many people struggled with feelings of social anxiety or isolation. In addition to meditation being a beneficial way to reconnect with yourself, it also helps you have greater awareness of and sensitivity to others.
How does meditation make us more compassionate?
Once you learn how the mind works, you can appreciate that everyone’s mind essentially functions in the same way. We all have stressors, emotions, past conditioning, and a little gremlin inside of us that judges, criticizes, and generally sabotages our mental health with negative talk. Realizing that we’re all subject to the same psychological pitfalls gives us the capacity for compassion.
Also, when you are hyper-focused on your stressors there is a strong concern for “self,” as you’re mostly concerned with things in relation to your own well-being. The peripheral awareness you foster through meditation is less personal and helps tone down self-centered tendencies, making perception more objective. When your peripheral awareness increases, the way you perceive things becomes less self-centered and distorted.
Finally, meditation allows you to find contentment that is not dependent on material goods or sensory pleasures. Though meditation does not necessarily involve repressing worldly desire, it does give you experiential insight into the ways these desires lead to anxiety and suffering. A consistent practice frees you from being ruled by desire so that you can practice non-attachment and equanimity. Your motivation in work, and also in life, can then come not from a place of individual, competitive survival but from a sense of shared thriving through generosity, kindness, and joy.
To increase your connection to others, try a loving-kindness meditation. In my practice, I repeat positive affirmations like “May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you be free from pain. May you feel connected and calm. May you accept yourself just as you are. May you find joy in living.” I direct the sentiments first toward myself, then toward someone I love, then toward a neutral person, a difficult person, and, finally, toward all beings. Feelings of connectedness to others stave off depression and help you keep a positive mental outlook.
In conclusion, a consistent meditation practice focuses and grounds you. It short circuits the cycle of worry to relieve symptoms of anxiety. Its inward nature prevents burnout by replenishing the energy you’d otherwise expend outward. It gives you perspective so that you don’t blow things out of proportion or selfishly consider only your own needs.
As you can see, the benefits of meditation for improving your mental health extend far beyond the workplace. As you continue to navigate the delicate balance of working from home during Covid-19, I hope you use these meditation techniques to improve both your personal and professional lives!