Can meditation make you more productive? Yes! It influences a number of things in your life positively to help you be more productive throughout your days. Whether you want to be more productive at work, at home, or with your family, meditation is something to add to your productivity toolbox.
How Exactly Can Meditation Help With Your Productivity?
1. Meditation Makes You Happier
Meditation has a huge impact on happiness. It helps you release negative emotions, be more present, and appreciate more. All these things make you happier overall.
When you are happier, you are more productive.
Emotions like worry, regret, fear, anxiety, and sadness all take away from happiness. The more you focus on them, the less happy you will be.
But, meditation helps you reduce them and focus on positive emotions that drive you forward into productivity, such as inspiration, motivation, optimism, and expectancy.
2. Meditation Improves Your Focus
As you practice meditation, you get better and better at focusing your mind. This ability to focus is essential to productivity as distractions can eat away at your time and energy.
If you’ve ever been down a social media rabbit hole – initially looking for an answer to a specific question you have and waking up one hour later not knowing how you got to the picture of the cat with the top hat – then you know how easily distractions can take away from tasks at hand.
You also become less distracted by things in your immediate areas, such as noises, unwanted phone calls, and other people. This is because meditation requires you to work through or ignore the distractions and stay focused on the task at hand, which carries out in your personal life very nicely for more productivity.
In fact, if you can work yourself up to it, try meditating in a particularly noisy place such as a park. You will be practicing your ability to rein in your attention to yourself, which improves your ability to focus when you need to be productive even further.
3. Meditation Makes You Less Reactive
When a negative emotion bubbles up to the surface, we can easily get caught up in it and let it ruin our productivity.
For example, let’s look at the emotion of annoyance. If you get annoyed at something, it becomes easy to let it carry you into a negative state where you are short with people and maybe even a little mean. This ‘mood’ and your reaction to things around you can take away from your productivity.
It’s not easy to get into a productive flow when you are allowing your reactive emotions to control your thoughts and actions and distract you from what’s really important.
Emotions are going to pop up as soon as you start your day and read the news, talk to other people, or start your job, and the awareness that comes from meditation can help you recognize the emotion as just that – an initial reaction to what is happening. Then you can shift to being mindful and become proactive instead of reactive.
4. A Good Visualization Meditation Can Help You Handle Your Day With Ease
If you know what you need to do for the day or how you want your day to go, then you can meditate on it in the morning to help you have a more productive day.
Mentally go through your day and visualize yourself feeling and being productive. Visualize yourself getting everything done and handling any unexpected situations like a pro. It will reinforce a mindset of being able to handle anything that comes your way and conquer your day.
If you don’t want to go through your to-do list for the day, here’s a meditation that helps you feel like you will be aligned with flow throughout the day.
5. You Notice More Things That You Can Use For Your Productivity
As you meditate, you become more mindful, which brings more of what is into your awareness.
I love this tweet as it sums it up perfectly.
After a particularly productive meditation session this morning, I noticed, for the first time, a sizable object in my house
It had been there for eight months, I had no idea
Would’ve testified against its existence in court and been jailed for perjury
— Sasha Chapin (@sashachapin) April 14, 2020
What does this mean for productivity? A lot!
When you can clearly see what and who is around you, you can utilize more things to your advantage and be more productive in the process.
Note: Being more productive is just one of the things that meditation can help you do. Here are 7 more reasons you should take a challenge to meditate more often.