How many times have you been on vacation, sitting on a lovely beach or walking in the green hills somewhere, when suddenly — pop! — up comes some worry or concern? How often has the stress of day-to-day life reemerged in your head the minute your relaxing vacation was over?
What is happening is that — despite attempts to relax, distract, and slow down — the mind still processes problems in your conscious and unconscious spheres. To truly stop the clutter and “traffic,” we need to control our flow of thoughts and our brain waves. Meditation is a way to do just that. Through meditation we develop the skills and power to relax and clear our minds, and through this comes rest and a great many more benefits.
What would you say if I told you that by practicing meditation you could have the following benefits?
• Improved career performance and prospects
• Better health in body and mind
• Enhanced love life!
I imagine that some of you might smile and thank me, while thinking, “Yeah, sure; how gullible do you think I am?” Well, it is true. For centuries warriors and monks alike have recognized the benefits of meditation. Today, contemporary health and medical professionals are confirming their assertions.
How Meditation Can Help Your Career
Many of us are paid to use our minds to add value to the organizations and communities we work in. To do this, we must have the clarity to make better decisions and the ability to focus our minds to the task at hand, so that we use more of our mental capacities. By actively training in these two areas, we can enhance our careers and offer more value.
Better Decision-Making Skills
It is in moments of decision making when we add or destroy value to ourselves and the people around us. The decisions may be large or small, but theoretically, for each of them, we gather as much information as we can, analyze that information, weigh our options, and make a decision. Some decisions may involve spending vast sums of money that carry huge consequences for the lives and livelihoods of many people. Other decisions might concern how to better serve a client’s needs.
If you work in the medical profession or in law enforcement, your decisions sometimes involve life and death. And, astonishingly, these decisions often need to be made rapidly, sometimes in a matter of minutes or seconds.
The most important factor in effective and sound decision making is clarity of mind. If your mind is full of mental noise or distracting thoughts, then it will have to work harder, and take longer, to process information and make decisions. Additionally, if you have unconstructive emotions bubbling up inside you, your mind will likely feel fatigued, and your decisions won’t necessarily be congruent with your internal values. Instead, your decisions will be based on the mental clutter whirring around in your mind.
In the “Before” phase of the illustration above, the thinker’s mind is full of mental chatter. As a result, he can’t clearly perceive the object at hand. By contrast, with Mental Resilience Training he is able to settle his mind and focus effectively on the object to make an insightful and effective decision.
Once you establish a sustained meditation practice, you become aware of the mental chatter and more adept at clearing it. You have the tools to develop some space to perceive a situation with greater clarity before you make any crucial decisions. The time you need to create this mental space is not hours or days; it is, literally, a few moments.
Enhanced Ability to Focus
Through the discipline of learning to focus on a single point, you will gain the skills to do your best work. Many athletes speak of entering a zone of peak performance where they are deeply attuned to whatever they need to do: hit or catch the ball, vault over a pole, or run a track. Meditation can help you harness mental energy so that you reach such a zone where you become focused. And you can do it with relative ease.
Similarly, if you have confidence in your ability to enter that zone of peak performance by bringing all of your mental energy to one precise point (for a customer, presentation, or report), you can be certain that you are using your maximum mental capacity. You will have hit that sweet spot of your own intellect.
A very important benefit of learning to focus is that, when you go home, even after a grueling workday, you will be able to compartmentalize and ensure that your mind is fully present and clear for your loved ones rather than remaining preoccupied with solving work issues. Other aspects of meditation’s benefits will be covered in later chapters. Here, it is sufficient to say that meditation will enable you to gain the following skills:
• Act rather than react.
• Manage change through greater awareness of your own state of flux.
The Health Benefits of Meditation
Our minds are the biggest contributors to our physiological well-being. If we are mentally resilient we can manage our stress and truly give our bodies what they require, not through willpower, which can wax and wane, but through clarity, which gets stronger and stronger over time.
Stress Reduction
Stress is detrimental to our health. The New England Journal of Medicine states that “managing the long-term effects of the physiological responses to stress” is critical to survival.1 Stress attacks nearly every major system in our bodies, creating myriad health problems including diabetes, high blood pressure, stroke, allergies, asthma, and colitis, to name a few; and is, reportedly, implicated in 85 percent of all medical problems. An indication of this simmering health crisis is the increase in the number of lawsuits brought against companies by employees affected by stress-related illnesses. Employers are now even more aware than in the past of their duty to provide stress-management techniques to employees who deal with stressful situations as part of their work.
Stress is not all bad. In fact, it is an important part of everyday functioning. It stimulates the body for action and, indirectly, has helped the human race survive. Our metabolism reacts to outside stimuli with a fight-or-flight response, and in this way, stress enables us to survive.2
When we feel stress, our body releases hormones like adrenaline. We may be reacting to physical or mental threats: if a boss criticizes us, for example, we may respond physiologically in exactly the same way that we did in prehistoric times when trying to escape the jaws of a particularly ravenous carnivore. Now, of course, hitting your boss on the head, which could be a strongly career-limiting move, or running like crazy, which could decrease your likelihood of getting paid, would not be appropriate reactions. But the released hormones do get our metabolism racing, and if the physical threat were real, such a response could save our lives.
So, it’s important to know that not all stress is detrimental. But, like most things in life, you can overdo any good thing. And, most of the time, our response is inappropriate to the threat. If you are stressed for a long period because of work pressures, a demanding partner or children, and financial worries, your fight-or-flight responses start to attack your own body. The automatic mechanism built to defend your body now starts damaging it by blocking your arteries, knocking out your immune system, and overloading your endocrine system until, one day, you succumb to a cold if you are lucky or a serious illness if you’re not.
Stress hormones act as painkillers. This analgesic effect explains stories we have heard of athletes who kept playing their games despite injury, unaware that they may have even broken bones or sustained other harm. Sometimes it isn’t until hours later that they realize the extent of the damage and begin to experience the depth of the pain.
This happens in daily life as well. We work tirelessly throughout the day, ignoring our feelings. When feeling tired, we may pump ourselves up with that double shot of espresso. When we get headaches, we take painkillers. We take an antacid for an upset stomach. All the time, we ignore the signs of stress and simply treat its symptoms. But one day,