Meditation Helps Anxiety
in the Workplace
Anxiety disorders affect 40 million adults in the United States age 18 and older, or 18 percent of the population, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Annually, anxiety disorders cost the United States more than $42 billion a year, almost one-third of the country’s $148 billion total mental health bill.
Those costs do not include the sick days and leaves of absences that cost corporate America millions annually.
Enter insight mindfulness meditation
According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, evidence suggests that meditation is useful for symptoms of anxiety and depression in adults.
“People with anxiety have a problem dealing with distracting thoughts that have too much power,” says Dr. Elizabeth Hoge, a psychiatrist at the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “They can’t distinguish between a problem-solving thought and a nagging worry that has no benefit.”
Thankfully, through meditation you can train yourself to experience those thoughts differently. Instead of panicking over everyday issues, you recognize that your mind is out of control and you have the tools to change the conversation in your mind. You realize it is just a thought. Instead of reacting you learn how to respond when faced with a difficult problem.
How meditation helps
One of Hoge’s recent studies determined that people with generalized anxiety disorder who participated in mindfulness meditation were better able to quell their anxiety symptoms, which include hard-to-control worries, poor sleep and irritability.
How we work
In corporations, we work with groups of 20 or less, teaching participants how to breathe, enjoy and appreciate life, turn down the critical inner voices and focus on the present moment, freeing them from concentrating on past baggage or worrying about the future.
They will understand how to better communicate with their fellow employees, to focus on tasks, to reverse stress that often brings on anxiety, and to improve efficiency and productivity.
We will teach them how to build a sustainable daily insight mindfulness meditation practice, which is always at the ready to calm, center and focus them. They will discover how to show loving kindness to themselves, which then enables them to show the same tenderness to others.