With offices set to move at an even faster pace, I investigate whether mindfulness helps you find zen
Close your eyes. Take a deep breath. Now, imagine you are walking towards the ocean. You can hear the waves up ahead and smell the ocean spray. The air is moist and warm, the water is transparent and the sand is like soft powder under your feet. You feel cradled by the sound of the waves crashing on the shore and revitalised by the cool breeze and the smell of the salty ocean...
When you are ready to return from your paradise, do so slowly, maintaining the feeling of calmness and relaxation, ready to open your eyes and return to your desk.
How beautiful would it be to relive your favourite holiday for just 10 minutes a day?
For those unfamiliar with visualisation techniques, the exercise sums up the concept behind the popular Buddhist credo - taking time to focus on the present moment. In a world where a work-life balance has become non-existent, being able to stop and relax for a minute seems to be a privilege for the few.
According to the UK Labour Force Survey, almost 13 million working days were lost due to stress in 2019 and more than 600,000 employees suffered from work-related stress issues.
However, mindfulness programmes and retreats seem to have taken hold amongst employers. A survey conducted by Forbes estimated that, in 2019 alone, more than 450 companies in the UK had started to introduce mindfulness activities in their offices. They aimed to reduce occupational stress and increase productivity.
Of course, these corporations have not become uber holistic all of a sudden; there are financial motives behind this. Mindfulness advocates say meditation focuses the mind and increases productivity. Reduced stress and anxiety in the workplace means one thing: less absenteeism.
"Mindfulness seems to be a win-win," says Roberta Dombrowski, who has been conducting multi-phased research about the use of mindfulness in the workplace since June last year.
"Managers want their employees to be as productive and creative as they can be, while workers want to slow down and feel less oppressed. Mindfulness has proven to be the perfect common ground."
Roberta blames technology for decreased performance in the workplace.
“Distractions and frequent interruptions due to digital connectivity have drastically reduced productivity," Roberta says. And, she is right.
Data from the Office for National Statistics show that labour productivity - the amount of work produced per working hour - was lower over the past decade than at any time in the 20th century, with productivity declining by 0.5 percent on average every four months.
But, how could mindfulness be the solution?
Companies including Google, Facebook and Motor Ford Company have been using mindfulness for years under the name of leadership development training programmes. These are workshops and techniques which focus on improving attention, self-knowledge and creativity.
"A mindful day in the office would start with 15 minutes of meditation to become aware of sensations of the body, followed by breathing exercises and visualisation techniques when feeling distracted and scattered to focus attention," says Sara Varo who has created her own mindfulness programme which she shares with her co-workers.
Her colleagues are also encouraged to take two minutes out from work every hour and meetings start with a 'mindful minute' to help the transition between prior activities. They end with a note of accomplishments.
Sara explains it has been hard to convince her managers to introduce mindfulness in the workplace.
"I know I needed to talk in a business language: how could mindfulness benefit the company?" she says. "I had to bring lots of evidence such as how absenteeism has dropped by 71 percent since Transport for London introduced a stress management course."
After her programme went on trial, Sara had to undertake regular surveys to understand if mindfulness was beneficial. After six months, she collected the final responses from her colleagues, and the results were positive. Productivity had increased by 40 percent in her office, while people felt three times less burdened by workload.
However, initial scepticism was not only among the employers.
"Some of my colleagues did not take part at the beginning because they thought mindfulness was just a waste of time," she says. “They were busy already and even five minutes of meditation looked like an additional task to accomplish. But I let time run its course."
Sara explains she has seen an increasing number of co-workers joining her mindfulness programme after they overheard their colleagues saying it was having positive effects.
"It is normal for people to be unwilling to try something which doesn't necessarily have strong scientific evidence," she says. "But when people start noticing positive changes in others, that is when even the biggest sceptics are going to give it a go. You do not need scientific proof to be happy."
Roberta Dombrowski, a mindfulness researcher, found that some employees were hesitant about practising mindfulness in the workplace because they feared their employers would misuse data taken from surveys and analytics and use it to control them.
"Since the impact of mindfulness in the workplace is still largely evaluated by feedback provided by employees who practice it, there is fear that this data could be used on a larger scale to shape trends in the market," Roberta says. She explains the research behind the effect of mindfulness is still very poor and this is affecting the credibility of the practice and its successful outcome.
If employees are not ready to trust the growing "health-first" trend, some mindfulness coaches think companies should be as transparent as possible about the possible outcomes of mindfulness in the workplace.
Darren Yap has pioneered a mindfulness programme called Wimble Wellness, which has sessions dedicated to work-stress reduction. Darren is often hired by organisations to deliver stress-management sessions to their workers.
"When you are going to influence people's minds, it is important to let them know that mindfulness practice is optional and how it could be beneficial to their mental health," Darren says. "I give employees the freedom of analysing all the options available. They then decide whether to attend the sessions or not."
According to Darren, who suffered from regular work-related anxiety, meditation has been the getaway.
"I was losing lucidity at work, could not stay focused and constantly had a sense of heaviness in my body," he says. "I looked on the internet ways of getting away with it and I found a visualisation technique which was making me relive my favourite holiday every time. So, for 10 minutes a day, I was able to feel the waves and smell the salty sea air."
Darren believes in the power of connecting the mind to the present moment. "Our thoughts can trap us in a fictional reality," he says. "The only way to escape it is by surrendering the need to analyse every single thought."
"Just see them for what they are - a thought or a feeling," he says. "Let them come and let them go."
Do you feel better already?
Tags: #mindfulness #office #workplace #zen