Did you know that over 50% of all workplace absenteeism is due to stress? Crazy right!
As well as being the biggest killer on the planet. So stress is not just some emotional reaction we experience. It is actually a pollutant to our bodies. Good in very small doses when we are in life or death scenarios, not good day to day when we are just trying to work and get through the day.
Oh and stress also makes us stupid (when we get stressed, fearful or anxius, we lose access to our pre-frontal cortex which is basically our internal CEO. Leaving the monkeys to run the ship..), as well as more prone to illness. And there’s a whole lot of science around why, which I will go into another time.
So it is so important for us as business owners and our staff that we have ways to ensure we are not continually at the mercy of the stress response.
And guess what, the best way for that is meditation.
Oh come on Rich, please. Meditation?
Yes, meditation. Meditation for stress gives the body a proven mechanism to release the build up of stress from our nervous systems and enhance our neurological and physiological well-being.
Yet despite meditation coming a long way in the mainstream, backed by thousands of peer-reviewed science journals, a very common question I get from successful business people; “Rich, I am needing something to help me deal with stress but just so skeptical about meditation, does it really work?
Great question, and can most certainly relate. Back in the day when I first stumbled into meditation after a period of workplace burnout, meditation was a shadow of what it is today. This was 15 years ago so it was very “fringe”.
But thankfully I dove deep into the science of the practice of meditation.
And so to give you a quick answer, yes. Meditation most certainly will help people remove the toxic impacts of stress from their nervous systems.
Meditation is like a daily defrag, or shutting down the countless apps we have open on our phones.
We give our nervous system access to the parasympathetic state (the opposite of the stress state) and this is where we can unwind so much of the damage done by stress.
In case you are wondering, we can also reverse the damage. And prevent further damage.
And when we do this each day, we also increase our ability to “respond” to situations rather than react out of stress responses. Which means we are going to be far more creative and intelligent which are vital ingredients for success in business.