Numerous people are guilty of carrying on with their day, even when they’re not feeling their best. And as a result, it’s hammering away at their mental and emotional well-being, exposing their health to risk factors that shouldn’t be there in the first place. One of the leading and most relevant causes behind this tragic transformation of difficulty into a deep-seated problem is none other than work-related stress. Often, upstanding people bottle their grievances until they experience job burnout.
Luckily enough, despite the associated seriousness of this issue, it’s not impossible to overcome. That is if you’re willing to practice some mindfulness exercises regularly and invest a just amount of time to create change. So to help spread the good word of meditation and grounding oneself to combat work stress, let’s go over how mindfulness works its wonders and what exercises you can start with ASAP.
Understanding the Source of Your Work Stress
To put things into context, it’s necessary that you identify, highlight, and understand the source of our work-related stress. This will provide you with a clearer picture in our minds of what’s important to you right now. And while pressure can vary from one workplace to the next, some common ones you can observe everywhere include conflicts with time management and assuming too much responsibility.
- Conflicts with Time Management: You only get 24 hours a day. And once you subtract the recommended sleeping time of 8 hours, you’re virtually left with only 16 hours, give or take, to spare. As a result, the world is seeing a rise in the popularity of time management books, teaching readers how to improve their time boxing skills and what tools to utilize when crunching on a deadline. However, no matter how good you think you are at time management, we all run into conflicts that spiral our schedules into a convoluted mess.
- Assuming Too Much Responsibility: If it’s not a time constraint that’s holding you back and causing stress, the second most common reason is the assumption of too much responsibility far beyond your job description. Sometimes, tasks get delegated to your desk without proper verification. When you try to juggle too many things at once, it starts to take a toll on mental well-being.
How Does Mindfulness Resolve Burnout?
On paper, most people would associate mindfulness with buzzwords that influencers and blogs include in all sorts of content, videos, and catchy titles. Still, mindfulness is so much more than just being alone with your thoughts. Mindfulness resolves job burnouts because the little bit of time you spend dedicated to yourself creates a safe space for you to reflect and go over your experiences and thoughts. Specifically, you can expect the exercises to bring back some sense of clarity and shift your focus on the “now.”
- Brings You Back to Clarity: Stress and all degrees of burnout have a way of clouding your judgment and making the mind feel more cluttered than usual. But if you can successfully ground yourself and spend some time looking inward, your thoughts will appear more clear. In doing so, you will feel a lot less irritated and can focus on more pressing matters like working on your program or furthering your studies. However, there are some things you can do on your own. In other more severe issues, you’ll need professionals to help you. One severe epidemic right now that many people might not have noticed is the world’s over-consumption of and addiction to porn. Suppose you want to break the chains this addiction has caused. You can check yourself in a porn rehab facility to get the help you need.
- Shifts Your Focus to the Now: Job burnout often leads to fatalistic thinking. While fatalism is often seen as poetic, convincing yourself that everything is already decided by fate with nothing you can change is bad for the mind. That’s where mindfulness exercises swoop in because they subvert expectations for more realistic goals.
What Mindfulness Exercises Can You Do?
Realistically speaking, there are many exercises that people can try. But since covering all the possible approaches to mindfulness under the sun will need a book’s worth of pages, let’s go over some accessible and universal practices: meditation by deep breathing and writing down positive reinforcements.
- Meditation and Deep Breathing: Meditation exercises that utilize deep breathing patterns are one of the most effective mindfulness tools at your disposal. Although you won’t be turning into a millionaire after meditating, you’ll feel a lot more at ease. Some experts recommend doing this regularly first thing in the morning because it’s perfect for calming the nerves and starting the day right.
- Write Down Positive Reinforcements: Another very effective mindfulness exercise, especially for those dwelling on self-doubt due to job burnout, is writing down positive reinforcements and creating a gratitude journal. The gist is listing something you’re thankful for every day, slowly filling out the notebook with callbacks you can resonate with in the future. Some prefer adding five to ten lines to increase volume, but simply writing one and staying consistent offers the same benefits.
Stress is a dangerous adversary. If you stoop down to its level, you risk hurting your overall health and well-being, especially if your livelihood depends on maintaining composure. So incorporate some of the mindfulness tips mentioned here to stop stress from dictating the flow of your life.
