Meditation can be useful to relieve stress that happens at work. This doesn’t mean popping into a lotus posture and taking an hour to find your breath — you can do this technique anywhere, even standing up.
When work stress happens but you don’t have time to fully process and let it go, you need tools. This video leads you through a simple technique that takes 30 seconds to a few minutes to help you anchor away from work stress.
Anchoring away isn’t the only meditation technique to relieve work stress, but it can be useful at the moment.
This guided meditation covers:
00:00 Introduction
00:45 Turn toward vs. anchor away meditation techniques
00:57 How this technique helps with work stress
01:29 Practice instructions
02:44 When to use this meditation technique
When to use this meditation technique
This meditation doesn’t need any special postures, you can do it anywhere. It encourages you to let go of the stress by paying attention to objects in your visual field. It takes your attention away from the stress and brings it to a steady place. This creates a type of buffer zone between the stress and your reaction, which allows you to drop it and then return to your job.
How this meditation helps to relieve work stress
When you experience being overwhelmed by work stress you usually feel it physically or emotionally. You might be replaying a negative scene over and over in your inner-see space. Or you might be listing off all the things you need to do. All of your attention is on the stress event(s) and your reaction to it.
A crude visual of the before:
In this meditation technique to invite yourself to bring your attention to what you can see in the space around you. This invitation moves your attention away from the stress and towards what you can see. You spend 30 seconds or a few minutes noticing what you are drawn to look at. When your attention stops on an object. Notice that and say aloud, or silently in your mind “see.”
Your attention might stay with one object the whole time.
Or move from object to object.
The stress in your body has not changed. It’s still there, but you haven’t focused on it anymore.
After a few moments, you stop the technique and return to your body. You’ll likely notice that while you still feel the stress residue, you are no longer consumed by it. It’s still there, but it’s like you built a buffer to it. You can now be more composed as you move into the rest of your workday. You know you can return to this meditation technique at any time you need to.
Doing this practice several times a day at work, even before you feel stressed, can help build concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity. You can feel confident that you know what to do when you experience stress and still need to perform at your job.
If you enjoyed this exercise, you’ll likely love the Career Contentment Club — a place to learn, try, and develop mindfulness skills to help you feel better at work. It opens in January 2022, be sure to subscribe to my newsletter to know when the doors open.
