The most comprehensive list of the benefits of office meditation classes.
The 10 most compelling benefits of workplace meditation classes are:
Stanford University School of Medicine conducted a study that shows meditation can lead to a 30% decrease in stress-related symptoms that often lead to serious illness.
Multiple neuroimaging studies have shown that meditation enhances neural pathways in the brain responsible for concentration and attention.
A study found that 10 days of guided meditation can reduce stress by 14% and reduce irritability by 27%.
Three weeks of use was shown to increase compassion by 23% and reduce aggression by 57%.
Frontiers Media conducted a study to assess how mindfulness training affects the workplace environment. The results showed the training was very effective in reducing burnout (mean difference = 0.3, p< 0.001), reducing perceived stress and improving wellbeing.
Stress reduction is the most widely studied area of mindfulness in the workplace. We know by reducing stress we are able to minimize the occurrence of unpaid absences, lowering healthcare costs and boosting productivity overall.
However, lowering costs should not be our only driver. Reducing stress for employees is an act of compassion and skillful leadership.
Stanford University School of Medicine conducted a study that shows meditation can lead to a 30% decrease in stress-related symptoms that often lead to serious illness.
58% of Americans say work is a significant source of stress. The main sources of stress include workload (36%), people issues (31%), work-life balance (20%) and job security (8%).
A 2005 study showed that health care professionals who participated in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program improved mood and empathy while lowering levels of stress.
Headspace conducted an internal study regarding the benefits of guided meditation. They found that 10 days of guided meditation can reduce stress by 14% and reduce irritability by 27%.
Three weeks of use was shown to increase compassion by 23% and reduce aggression by 57%.
A study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine looked at the Dow Chemical Company to determine how meditation could minimize stress while enhancing the well being of employees. It was found that the 89 employees who participated in meditation for a six month period were less stressed and more resilient overall.
Hindawi.com conducted a study that showed the effect of chair-based yoga and guided meditation on employees with desk jobs. “Yoga and meditation significantly reduced perceived stress versus control, and this effect was maintained postintervention. In conclusion, yoga postures or meditation performed in the office can acutely improve several physiological and psychological markers of stress.”
This is great news because it shows that small, mindful changes to corporate training can make tangible differences, even from the comfort of your chair!
Researchers at The Wellness Institute in Cleveland conducted a study at a busy corporate call center to determine how mindfulness could reduce stress. After eight weeks, results showed that workers experienced a 31% decrease in stress levels and a 28% increase in vitality.
Frontiers Media conducted a study to assess how mindfulness training affects the workplace environment. Four companies were studied with results that showed the training was very effective in reducing burnout (mean difference = 0.3, p< 0.001), reducing perceived stress and improving wellbeing. Interestingly, the study also showed an increase in team and organizational climate and personal performance-two, lesser-known indicators of reduced stress.
Another recent study proved that mindfulness meditation “lowers the cortisol levels in the blood suggesting that it can lower stress and may decrease the risk of diseases that arise from stress such as psychiatric disorder, peptic ulcer and migraine.”
“Our study suggests that mindfulness training produces an improvement in three capacities that are key for successful leadership in the 21st century: resilience, the capacity for collaboration, and the ability to lead in complex conditions.”
– Megan Reitz
A 2003 study found that meditation “can produce increases in relative left-sided anterior activation that are associated with reductions in anxiety.”
This kind of brain activity helps individuals recover relatively quickly after an “emotional hijack.” An emotional hijack refers to a situation in which the amygdala, our emotional processor, “hijacks” or bypasses your normal reasoning process.
“Mindfulness is recommended as a treatment for people with mental ill-health as well as those who want to improve their mental health and wellbeing.”
– The Mental Health Foundation
“Psychological safety, according to Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, is the ‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’
As Charles Duhigg wrote in the New York Times, the most productive teams listened to – and were respectful of – the ideas, feelings, beliefs and suggestions of their peers”
A study conducted at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands found a strong link between mindfulness and creativity.
Employees who meditate regularly tend to improve their problem-solving abilities and come up with more “out-of-the-box” ideas.
Researchers from Harvard Medical School have found that a meditation program can cause changes in the regions of the brain responsible for learning and working memory capacity. In a high-stress work environment, this can result in employees staying on task longer, improving time management skills and having better task performance.
A study of more than 85,000 adults showed that worker groups with low rates of engagement in mindfulness practices could benefit the most from workplace meditation training interventions.
A 2018 study showed that a workplace mindfulness intervention may be associated with improved psychological well-being and productivity.
“The main business case for meditation is that if you’re fully present on the job, you will be more effective as a leader, you will make better decisions and you will work better with other people.”
William George, Goldman Sachs
“Meditation invokes that which is known in neuroscience as neuroplasticity; which is the loosening of the old nerve cells or hardwiring in the brain, to make space for the new to emerge.”
– Craig Krishna
One study, led by A. D. Amar and conducted at the University of Westminster looked at a sample of senior managers who participated in a 12-week meditation training program. It was shown that the program resulted in boosted self-confidence, communication skills and moral intelligence.
Research has shown that more mindful supervisors can improve an employee’s job satisfaction.
Many major companies use meditation as a means to improve productivity and employee wellbeing. These include Apple, Google, Time Warner, Yahoo, Nike, Astra Zenica and more. The companies offer meditation spaces for their employees as well as workshops their employees can participate in.
“You can’t force people to be mindful at all… I think you can make it easier to be mindful. If it’s on your calendar, and there’s a room over there to sit in and there’s someone there to guide you, you’re 10,000 times more likely to do it.”
– Evan Williams, Co-Founder, Twitter
Highly stressed employees can incur an additional $2,000 per year in health care costs as compared to their less-stressed peers. For companies, this can quickly amount to millions of dollars per year in stress-related charges.
Because of the number of businesses that invest in meditation programs for their employees as well as the number of meditation apps and other resources available, as of 2015, meditation had become a billion-dollar business. This number continues to skyrocket.
Health care company Aetna did a study with Duke to determine the ROI of their mindfulness programming. Aetna figures the productivity gains alone amounted to $3,000 per employee, an 11-to-one return on its investment.
Prolonged stress is like a tax on an organization — paid through productivity loss and increased health care costs.
Stressed workers tend to be tired, prone to mistakes and more likely to take time off. Most significantly, stressed employees incur healthcare costs two times the average of other employees. In the United States, the consequences of stress-related illnesses, such as depression and heart disease, cost businesses an estimated $200 to $300 billion a year in lost productivity.
“If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse, but over time it does calm, and when it does, there’s room to hear more subtle things. That’s when your intuition starts to blossom and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more.”
– Steve Jobs
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