Boost Your Well-being and Success at Work: The Science Behind Mindful Breaks
In Hong Kong’s fast-paced working environment, getting caught up in tasks, projects, and meetings is incredibly easy. So we completely forget about taking breaks or even lunch.
However, we don’t realize that by not creating pauses for ourselves to regroup, we actually end up hurting the quality of our work and, more importantly, ourselves.
When we take mindful breaks throughout the day, we can:
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- Reduce stress. When our bodies are stressed, they produce cortisol which negatively impacts our physical and mental health.
- Improve focus. Clearing our minds can help us return to the present with new eyes and better concentration.
- Boost creativity. Combining relaxation and focus can improve creativity, leading to coming up with new ideas and solutions.
Why do we need mindful breaks?
Mindfulness is the practice of paying attention to the present moment without judgment. In theory, it doesn’t sound too complicated, but in reality, it takes quite a lot of practice to resist judgment.
For example, we manage to grab a salad and try our best to gobble it to get back to work as fast as possible. As we sit there, some of the thoughts that come to our mind could be:
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- Why did I leave everything for the last minute? Now I have to rush through everything.
- The task I completed was not excellent; I really could have done better.
- Why didn’t I say ______ or _______ to that colleague? It would have been so much simpler to finish this.
- I hate I have to eat so fast.
These are just a few thoughts we can name, and as you notice, they all navigate in judgment of either something we did wrong or it could be something someone else did we deem as wrong.
We produce up to 50,000 thoughts daily, and 70% to 80% are negative. This translates into 40,000 negative thoughts a day that need managing and filtering.
What is a mindful break?
Practicing mindfulness, we focus on our breath and our surroundings without letting our minds wander to the past or future. This can help us relax our bodies and minds and return to the present moment with a fresh perspective.
By taking mindful breaks, we can improve our overall health and well-being to become more productive and successful at work.
A mindful break can look many different ways. Some of the activities we suggest are: walking in nature, listening to calming music, reading a book, and meditating.
Positive Psychology and Mindful Breaks
Positive psychology studies what makes people happy and successful. It focuses on the positive aspects of the human experience, such as strengths, virtues, and resilience.
By pairing up positive psychology and mindfulness, we can make the impact of our breaks even more meaningful by creating spaces in our lives where we take care of ourselves, and by doing that, we can better take care of others.
Some examples of incorporating positive psychology into our lives can be:
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- Focusing on our strengths. We notice our shortcomings and weaknesses more than our strengths. Yet, by doing so, we can find better outcomes and solutions to our problems and build our confidence.
- Practicing gratitude. There are countless studies about the positive impacts of being grateful. The bottom line is that taking even a short moment to appreciate what you have can go a long way for mental and physical health.
- Helping others. Practicing service is a great way to boost our happiness. When we help others, we feel good about ourselves and can positively impact the world.
We can build a more positive and productive work environment by taking mindful breaks and practicing positive psychology. Take a mindful break now.
Tiara Hoquee
Psychologist and Emotional Intelligence Coach
Get Better EMOTIONAL RESILIENCE Results By Following 3 Simple Steps
The world is changing at a frightening pace. To the point that sometimes it’s hard to catch our breaths in the midst of the waves of challenges that we meet on a daily basis.
Today’s working force grew up without cell phones, and now we can’t leave home without them. We went from cassette tapes and radio to CDs, to mp3 players, to streaming platforms in less than 30 years.
To say the world changes fast is a bit of an understatement. In We find ourselves constantly adjusting to new situations, elements, and deadlines. Trying to keep up with soft and hard skills in an increasingly demanding work environment.
They say we live in a VUCA world, which stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. In these conditions, it’s challenging to plan and know what will happen next because the circumstances keep changing. There is an increasing number of variables to consider and motivation is hard to pin down.
The concept of a VUCA world plants a seed of uncertainty and fear, which leads us to feelings of self-doubt, instability, loss of motivation, and lack of trust. With so many moving pieces and unsure about what our next step can be. Our mental health gets affected by what is perceived as a lack of control over many outcomes. It’s a standard response - our brains are programmed to try to predict the future.
We need an anchor that can steady our boat in the face of the stormy seas of uncertainty. Let’s dive into how we can create stability in a world that’s always changing.
How to Grow Resilience?
The American Psychological Association defines resilience as the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.
A simple way to put is the more resilience we have, the better our ability to adjust, adapt and "roll with the punches" that life throws at us. Alternatively, people with low resilience will struggle more to pivot when faced with challenges and changes.
Research shows that those who deal with minor stresses more easily also can manage major crises with greater ease*. So, resilience has its use in the daily stressors we face every day like, a spilled coffee as well as a bigger crisis like losing our job.
Martin Seligman proposed the 3 Ps of Mindset to help us navigate the waves of change. By considering the following three concepts we are able to take some perspective and look at a situation from different lenses:
- Permanence. Refers to how we think a bad situation will last forever.
- Personalization. Refers to thinking that the problem is yourself.
- Pervasiveness. Refers to thinking a bad situation applies across all areas of your life.
| Instead of This | Try This | |
| Permanence | I will never achieve X. | I haven’t achieved x, yet…How can I achieve X? |
| Personalization | I am not smart enough. | I am lacking in this specific skill. (speaks of the skill, not you as a person) |
| Pervasiveness | Everything is ruined. I fail at everything. | This bad situation is about X. I can separate it from the other areas of my life. (can remind yourself of success in other areas) |
Becoming resilient doesn't happen overnight. Much like riding a bicycle, employing a new skill feels very awkward at first, yet the more we practice the more it becomes a habit. To the point of feeling natural and second nature to us.
Practicing self-awareness will allow us to catch ourselves in moments where we fall victim to permanence, personalization, and pervasiveness. Once we have gotten used to catching it, we can then start replacing it with more positive thoughts that will allow us to build up our resilience and deal with changes big and small.
Tiara Hoquee
Psychologist and Emotional Intelligence Coach
*Southwick SM, Vythilingam M, Charney DS. The psychobiology of depression and resilience to stress: implications for prevention and treatment.