Incorporating mindfulness into your lives is a journey. It is not something that you can achieve in one day. Recently, Idanim held a webinar on ‘Mindful Productivity: Moving from coping to thriving’. The session was conducted by one of our teachers, Toby Ouvry, who is a Mindfulness coach at INSEAD business school, Singapore. It was a very insightful session for workplace stress management. The key takeaways of the sessions were
Below are a few questions that our attendees had during and post the webinar and their responses by Toby.
1. What advice would you give to someone who has brain fog issues post COVID , and how can mindfulness at workplace help in this situation?
One active way would be to find a realistic pace at which you can work without causing brain fatigue to degrade further. Go slow in order to get faster. You need to rest to recover properly. You can start by just sitting and gently being mindful of your brain for 5-10 mins and extend a little love and care towards it, allowing it to rest. This will help you send good energy to the brain. For example, breathing in, breathing out, and maybe visualizing the brain as bright, healing, and high functioning. This exercise might help the process of healing and coping with stress at work.
2. What is the ratio of meditation we should do between single pointedness and field awareness?
You can find a ratio that suits you. There is no right or wrong answer here. For example, you can do 20 mins of single-pointedness followed by 5 mins of field awareness. If you like, you could spend a little more time breathing in, in the beginning and then get to the field awareness. This can help you stay focused during field awareness.
3. What does it mean when I am sleepy during field awareness but I am not during single pointedness?
When you are doing field awareness, you are allowing yourself to relax more because you are not focusing on a single thing. When you are practicing single-pointedness, you are leveling up the focus by a little bit. This might be one of the reasons why you don't feel sleepy there.
4. I encounter a few people saying that they perform better and perform more effectively if they are under pressure. Are there research findings that support this?
Some people cannot work without a deadline. So, in his opinion, we could develop this capacity to motivate ourselves to do work today even if there is no deadline. This will help you in managing stress at work better and procrastinate a little less.
5. How is mindfulness useful regarding depression and suicidal thoughts?
Mindfulness is helpful because you can sit down and focus on breathing or some other object. This will help you temporarily take your attention away from the suicidal thoughts. Second, you can use mindfulness to focus on memories or ideas that help you lift.The third way mindfulness can help is you can reach out to the part of you that is depressed and extend compassion to yourself and accept things in a better way. Although this is an intense conversation, these are the three immediate things you can do to heal yourself from your thoughts of grief and depression.
During the webinar, our expert Toby Ouvry answered a few queries regarding mindfulness at the workplace managing stress at work, etc. If you want to hear them, watch the video below:
Hope these answers were helpful to you in incorporating mindfulness at workplace and helps you reduce stress within the workplace. To see the entire webinar, click here.
