While physicians and other medical professionals are great at taking care of us when we need it, they shouldn’t forget about their own health—and we shouldn’t either. Especially when it comes to their mental and emotional health during these unprecedented times. How would mediation and mindfulness come into play in helping our healthcare heroes and us as well? The life of anyone in the workplace is chock full of stress and, sadly, we learn next to nothing in our lives about how to manage it. In addition to all the busyness of our days, we tend to have particularly busy minds, full of worries and concerns. Mindfulness provides the exact tools we need to manage all the stress, quieting the busy mind, and bringing calm to even the busiest and most challenging day. We interviewed Dr. Gail Gazelle MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Master Certified Coach for physicians provides a few of the many benefits of meditation and mindfulness that can help us at work and in our lives. Keep reading for more!
The Benefits of Mediation and Mindfulness for All of Us
1) Meditation builds calmness
The life of anyone in the workplace is full of stress. To survive our careers, we need tools to build moments of calm into their day. Mindfulness teaches us how to do this in an effective and meaningful way that helps cultivate not just calmness and quiet in the mind, but gratitude and joy as well. To start your day off with a clear mind means having a healthy gut. Your gut and brain are linked and so much of our happy neurotransmitters are found in the there. We love the Cognibiotics from BiOptimizers to create the perfect environment for meditation. It is a nootropic blend that improves brain health, mental clarity, learning, memory, and focus by improving the gut bacteria. This probiotic blend also helps a ton with brain fog and procrastination as well. Bonus points for the added Bifidobacterium bifidum that helps reduce the levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) in your body. Too much stress can lead to anxiety and depression which cannot allow you to move forward with the practice of meditation.
2) Meditation builds focus
It’s important to know to focus and clear your mind in any work environment. For example, a physician’s day is typically full of distractions: abnormal lab results, patients calling with urgent problems, callbacks from a specialist. Even brief periods of meditation build the ability to hold their attention exactly where they want and need it to be. It is practice that happens daily that makes the strongest of minds.
3) Meditation builds positivity
The public may find it surprising just how much we all criticize ourselves. Comparing ourselves to others and looking at how they are coming up short, believing they are an imposter, and focusing on what’s going wrong and not what they’ve done well. With mindfulness and meditation practices, people can build their ability to focus on all the good they do, each and every day, and learn to let go of that inner self-critic. It’s a way to look at a situation from a different perspective and see how amazing you truly are. There’s nothing like a good positive reinforcer to move the needle towards happiness and positivity.
4) Mindfulness builds resilience
Mindfulness builds resilience tenfold. For example, Doctors get worn down by all the sickness they see, all the responsibility they bear, and the very long hours they have to work. This is even more true now, during the pandemic. Mindfulness helps us build resilience to all the demands and difficulties of their careers, making them more agile, capable, and even more compassionate to their colleagues and patients. We can allow this to help us in our workplace and our lives as well. Resilience is a great way to master your mind and strength it. The less stress, the better for your brain health.
5) Mindfulness builds mastery over their mind
Our minds are a busy place, full of worries, fears, anxieties, and more. With mindfulness, we learn how to work with their mind, developing the same mastery an expert surgeon has every time she or he operates on a complex case. It can help build compartments in the brain where we can store information that we can access at any time without anything clouding our vision. This can be incredible for being a total boss in the workplace and keeping a sense of knowing everything off the top of your head.
