3 Reasons to take a mindful approach to workplace wellness
If your team is struggling with negativity, overwhelm, or burnout, you’re certainly not alone – but you may be at a loss for how to handle these challenges. Enter the mindfulness practice.
A mindfulness practice provides an incredible set of tools to improve mental health in the workplace. It doesn’t just focus on one aspect of workplace wellness – rather, it addresses your employees’ wellbeing with a holistic approach.
In this article, we’ll explore how mindfulness supports mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing, and how you can integrate it into your workplace wellness programs.
3 benefits of mindfulness at work
Most people spend one third of their entire lives at work. And as a dedicated HR professional, you know it’s worth the effort to try to make the workplace as enjoyable as possible for everyone. So, let’s explore 3 areas where mindfulness at work can have a positive impact.
1. Improves mental wellbeing
Your employees’ mental wellbeing directly affects their day-to-day experiences at work, and their ability to cope with stress on the job and avoid burnout.
Healthy mental wellbeing leads to greater mental resilience. What does this look like in action? Mental resilience can be the difference between a team member getting frustrated and snapping at a colleague, or navigating the situation in a cool and collected manner.
💡The physiological lifespan of an emotion in the body and brain is 90 seconds, according to Harvard neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. Our reaction beyond that point is entirely within our control, if we can hone the ability to free ourselves from the emotional loop.
Practicing mindfulness at work hones emotional control. It reduces mental overwhelm and calms the mind. Meditation – a key element of a mindfulness practice – can help your employees ruminate on their worries less, instead of replaying the hardest parts of their day before bed, keeping them up at night.
Training the mind to be in the present moment is a crucial part of improving workplace wellness. A mindfulness practice stops the brain from racing, lost in endless thoughts. When your employees’ minds are more present, they’ll be able to experience a greater sense of calm and enjoyment at work.
2. Improves emotional wellbeing
Mindfulness promotes positivity and optimism, especially during challenging times. This is critical in today’s socioeconomic climate, when layoffs and concerns about artificial intelligence replacing human jobs dominate our newsfeeds.
The brain’s default state is to be focused on the negative. This is known as negativity bias, and research on the topic shows that the brain uses two thirds of its resources to search for threats and problems. You can bet your employees’ brains are functioning similarly at work.
💡Meditation can counter negativity bias by increasing alpha waves, which occur in the brain’s relaxation state. Alpha waves have been linked to emotions like gratitude, hope, inspiration, and pride. This is good news for both your team members and your company.
Positive emotions directly affect happiness and wellbeing. And according to researcher and author Shawn Achor’s book The Happiness Advantage, more than 200 studies on nearly 275,000 people show that happy workers:
perform better as leaders
receive higher performance ratings
are less likely to take sick days, quit, or become burnt out
In addition, positive emotions like optimism are tied to increased goal-setting, effort, and engagement, and the ability to move beyond obstacles and cope with high-stress situations more easily. This is why leveraging a mindfulness practice to boost positivity and improve mental health at work, is a smart move.
3. Improves physical wellbeing
The mind and body are closely connected, and it’s important to consider both when addressing mental health in the workplace. Implementing mindfulness-based workplace wellness programs can help your employees calm their nervous systems, promoting relaxation to reduce stress, illness, and burnout.
💡How does the mind-body connection work?
Dr. Mladen Golubic explains it well in a University of Ottawa article:
“In 2010, researchers discovered a positive feedback loop between high vagal tone*, positive emotions, and good physical health. In other words, the more you increase your vagal tone, the more your physical and mental health will improve, and vice versa,” Dr. Golubic says.
*Vagal tone is related to the activity of the vagus nerve, which is the longest nerve in the body. When your body has a higher vagal tone, you can relax more quickly after experiencing stress. [Source]
Meditation is known to increase vagal tone, which lowers heart rate and blood pressure, encourages digestion, and boosts immune function among other benefits.
Using mindfulness to foster workplace wellness
Addressing mental health at work doesn’t have to feel like an uphill battle. Incorporating carefully designed mindfulness-based workplace wellness programs can give your employees powerful tools to cope with negativity, overwhelm, and burnout.
Want to find out more about effective mindfulness-based workplace training?
