Mindfulness and workplace stress: 4 hacks to help build embodied resilience
According to ACAS in 2015/16 over 480,000 people in the UK reported that work-related stress was making them ill, amounting to nearly 40% of all work-related illness.[1] The World Health Organization calls stress the global health epidemic of the 21st Century[2] and many of us now work in overconnected and overloaded work cultures on the cusp of burnout. It is doubtful that this will change soon, so it makes it more crucial than ever before to build skills of resilience in and for the workplace.
This good news is that this can be done: balance and the faculty of managing emotional dysregulation, taking time out and recharging your battery can be done and done well in a series of simple steps.
One of the first steps is to make a simple distinction between good stress and bad stress. Good stress is the stress of challenge, where the tasks of work helps us grow and do our jobs leaving us feeling satisfied having done a rewarding day’s work: this is the “green zone” of stress where we work in a dynamic balance sometimes called flow[3]. Bad stress is when we don’t have the resources inside to deal with the challenges of work and we keep going long after we have ceased to be productive in any meaningful way. It’s this bad stress that stands out and impacts on us more, probably due to our propensity to absorb and retain negative experiences, leaving us in an overstressed red zone.
Here are some mindful hacks to help you approach stress and build resilience in the workplace:
- Break up your workload: at the end of each day make a list of the next day’s tasks. Leave it behind at work; when you go in you are ready to hit the ground running (so to speak) with your jobs list. Leave space for overnight tasks.
- Take a pause: we can only productively work for so long, probably around 90-100 minutes. Every 95 minutes take pause, it need not be long, but simply walking out the office and down the hall can take us out of the “office mind” and into our bodies where we can feel more present.
- Defuse: similar to taking a pause but taking time to get a felt sense of any stress you might be experiencing in the body. Notice it working its way through the body, notice how it leaves the body (which it will) and how your emotions calm and regulate accordingly.
- Mind yourself kindly: one of the single most overlooked skills in the resilience set is self-compassion[4] -which literally strips away the lethal layer of self-attacking which leads to burnout. Relating to yourself with more self-acceptance is a critical skill in building resilience [5]
Implicit in these 4 hacks-especially 2 & 4-is the notion that in order to build a truly lasting resilience we need to move beyond a merely cognitive response. Rick Hanson[6] calls this a practice of installation, whereby passing states of mind are transformed into embodied traits: true resilience is an integration of mind and body.
The ability to build workplace resilience is a fundamental skill that will help all of us in the increasingly hyper stressful world of work; employees, managers, companies families and society all stand to value from a resilient workforce: building workplace systems that have a resilient culture at their centre just makes good business sense.
[1] ACAS http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=6062
[2] WHO http://www.who.int/whr/previous/en/
[3] See flow at https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-father-of-flow/
[4] See Neff and Germer http://self-compassion.org/
[5] See http://self-compassion.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Durkin.2016.pdf
[6] See http://www.rickhanson.net/being-well-podcast-enriching-absorbing/
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