Business travelers can have very hectic lives filled with stress, anxiety, and poor habits from their numerous business travel trips. Among several recommendations that can be found to relieve the large amounts of stress business travelers experience, one that seems to be incredibly effective and often preferred by business travelers is meditation. Meditation has been used for thousands of years by cultures and civilizations all around the world for its numerous benefits.
Why is meditation recommended while you are traveling for work?
1. Meditation Helps Cope with Stress
Meditation has been gaining popularity for the amazing benefits it has in reducing stress levels. By putting the body in a deep state of relaxation, you are able to influence and improve your cognitive skills as well as mental stability. With controlled breathing, reduced pulse, and a clear mind, the body lets go of the tension created by the high levels of stress.
Psychological scientists such as Charles Elder from Integrative Medicine at Kaiser Permanente Northwest found that meditation can reduce psychological distress and burnout in workers. By conducting a study with teachers who presented symptoms of stress, fatigue, and depression in a school for students with behavioral problems, he found that after months of implementing mediation into their routines, drastically reduced their serum cortisol levels which is a marker for stress.
2. Meditation Improves Mental Focus
Being able to focus properly on the task at hand is extremely important for business travelers. Not only do they need to stay focused to not miss any flights, ground transportation, and hotel reservations, they also need to be focused on the business they traveled for.
Meditating is so beneficial for regaining mental focus because it teaches your brain how to gain control and stop wandering off into random and negative thoughts. After practicing meditation, your mind is trained at staying focused and not letting negative thoughts take control of your mind.
A study conducted by the University of Waterloo suggests that even 10 minutes of daily meditation helps increase mental focus. Researcher and phycologist Mengran Xu says “Meditation promotes a switch of attention from internal thoughts to external environment”.
3. Meditation Boosts Creativity
Creativity is extremely important in business decisions. Being able to come up with a new and innovative idea or concept is an essential characteristic of successful businesses. Creativity also helps you make important decisions as it gives you alternative ideas or options and is necessary to be able to deal with unique problems.
One of the issues business travelers face is that creativity is severely affected when a person is under fatigue, stress, anxiety, depression, or any of the problems caused by the difficulties of business traveling. A mind cannot work properly and unleash its full creative potential when it is confronted with these problems, which is why it’s crucial for business travelers to find ways, such as meditation, to help them mitigate these problems and truly take advantage of the creativity their minds have to offer.
How do we become more creative through meditation? By being able to tap into our subconscious parts of the brain, clearing our mind from distractions for a few minutes, and focusing on our breathing, creative ideas start to come out. Guided meditations that are created specifically for creativity can be easily found on applications like Headspace, where they claim to be able to increase focus by 22% with only one session.
4. Meditation Regulates Mood
Making big decisions when in a bad mood is not a good idea. Emotions can have a severe impact on our decision making and be emotionally stable and healthy is important when making important decisions.
Frequent business travel has proven to have many negative consequences on mental health. By helping you clear your mind from all the various stress factors affecting your life, meditation will give you a sense of mental peace, balance, and focus which will stabilize your mood, and you will be able to make the best decisions possible. Meditation affects the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex of the brain, which are the areas responsible for emotion regulation.
5. Meditation Creates Self-awareness and Helps Develop Healthy Habits
Due to the poor health choices business travelers have on the road, they often see themselves gaining weight, not being able to exercise like they should, and resorting to unhealthy behaviors such as smoking and drinking to cope with their stress.
Meditating has shown to be a great substitute for the unhealthy habits usually used by business travelers to deal with the stress. You are able to reach your subconscious and self-reflect without all the outside noise keeping you distracted from what’s really important.
Overall, Meditation has been a powerful tool for many years to a lot of people, and the studied and proven benefits it creates will certainly have a positive impact on your life as a business traveler. Next time you’re on a business trip, make sure to find a quiet spot by yourself and give it a try! If you find one hour of your time, try meditating outdoor in a breathtaking landmark. While indoor meditation is also excellent for your health and well-being, practicing outdoor meditation is associated with greater feelings of regeneration and energy. The feeling of the sun on your skin, the sound of ocean waves, or the stroke of the breeze through your locks will energize and inspire you.