As an online business owner, you likely have insane stress and anxiety levels because owning an online business is not easy. You need to overcome so many challenges and factors to consider to achieve success, no matter what business you are running.
All of those challenges can be taxing on your mind and your body. As a business owner, you need to consider your mental and physical health. These often go neglected when it comes to running a business. You can do some things to help maintain both your physical and mental health, with meditation being one of the best.
This article discusses some of the best meditation techniques for business owners to relieve anxiety levels and get better sleep. Meditation is becoming increasingly popular because of its proven benefits, and yes, there are many benefits.
Effects of Meditation – The Benefits
Before we talk about the various forms of meditation and some techniques, we want to address the benefits of meditation. The fact is that meditation comes with many benefits, both for the mind and the body. However, keep in mind that this list is not entirely exhaustive.
One of the most common and well-known benefits of meditation is that it can reduce stress. Specifically, mindful meditation is shown to be one of the best techniques to reduce stress. It has even been shown to be able to reduce inflammation caused by stress. On that same note, it can also improve symptoms of stress-related conditions.
There are various forms of meditation that help improves your confidence and self-image, and outlook on life. Meditation can make you feel good about yourself and make you feel emotionally sound.
Meditation can reduce anxiety. Mindful meditation has been shown to reduce symptoms related to various anxiety disorders.
Meditation involves a lot of focus and concentration, and in this sense, meditation for your brain is like weightlifting for your muscles. It is something that can help increase both the strength and endurance of your attention and focus. It has been proven that meditation helps improve a person’s ability to concentrate on a specific task.
There are forms of meditation that can help you develop more self-awareness. Having a good understanding of yourself and your own problems will help you become a better business owner.
Although this is not proven, meditation can help reduce age-related memory loss. As we mentioned before, meditation is for the brain as strength training is for your muscles, and the stronger the brain is, the better it will perform into old age.
Did you know that meditation is often used in addiction treatment? There’s a special kind of meditation known as transcendental meditation, which is which helps treat addiction.
One of the most significant and well-known benefits of meditation is that it can help you sleep much better.
Various Techniques and Forms of Meditation for an Online Business Owner
Now that we know the significant benefits of meditation, let’s take a look at the different forms of meditation, as well as some of their specific benefits.
Mindfulness Meditation
One of the most common and popular types of meditation is known as mindfulness or mindful meditation. As you may gather from the name, this type of meditation is based on being mindful. In other words, it’s about having increased self-awareness and accepting the fact that you live in the current moment.
This type of meditation is about broadening your conscious awareness and focusing on what you’re experiencing during meditation. One of the most common things to focus on in mindfulness meditation is your own breathing. It’s all about focusing on your own thoughts without reacting or passing judgment. In terms of beneficial forms of meditation, this is one of the very best.
Mantra Meditation
In case you didn’t know, a mantra is a word or a phrase that you can repeat yourself over and over again to have a specific mental benefit. A mantra could be something as simple as ‘today I’m going to have an adventure.’ Of course, the mantra you choose should match the benefits you are looking for.
In this case, you want to look for a mantra that relates to your online business. The point of mantra meditation is to silently repeat a common word or phrase. The simple aim is to prevent any kind of distracting thoughts. The primary purpose of this type of meditation is to help you feel relaxed, decrease anxiety, and increase your confidence and emotional health.
Transcendental Meditation
Another common type of meditation is transcendental meditation. This type of meditation is similar to mantra meditation but also incorporates elements of mindfulness meditation. While it comes with many physical and mental benefits, this type of meditation takes more practice to do correctly than the previous two. Transcendental meditation is the kind you may first want to watch a tutorial for.
Guided Meditation
For beginners who have no prior experience of meditation, guided meditation is an excellent place to start. As you can probably tell, in guided meditation, you have a teacher teaching you on the journey, whereas you’re on your own in unguided meditation. If you’re on your own and have nobody to help you, getting started can be difficult.
Guided meditation can take many different forms. For example, it could be guided Tai-Chi, guided yoga, guided transcendental meditation, guided mantra meditation, or anything in between.
In guided meditation, someone helps you. They explain how the mind behaves during meditation and how you can apply that specific meditation technique to your personal life. For beginners looking for maximum benefits, any form of guided meditation should be considered.
Yoga
Yet another form of meditation is yoga. Most people don’t think that yoga is a type of meditation, but it is just that. Naturally, yoga is a lot more about the physical side of things than the mental side, but the mental side still plays a role.
Yoga is all about performing a series of controlled breathing exercises and various postures to promote a flexible body, a calm mind, muscle strength, and more. Yoga requires a lot of concentration, focus, and balance.
Yoga provides benefits that meditation as a whole feature. In fact, yoga is one of the best things you can do for both your physical and mental health.
Tai Chi
Tai Chi is very similar to yoga, although there are some differences. Tai Chi is all about performing a series of postures in a slow and very graceful manner while practicing deep breathing. Moreover, Tai Chi is something that you do at your own pace.
It is very similar to yoga, but yoga is a lot more about balance and muscle strength, whereas Tai Chi is about slow movement and breathing. In terms of calming the mind and reducing stress Tai Chi is one of the best forms of meditation out there.
Qi Gong
This is a particular form of meditation used in Chinese medicine. This type of meditation involves the combination of physical movement, breathing exercises, and relaxation to maintain balance in your body. Although it’s not one of the more popular forms of meditation in North America, it is very popular in China.
Focused Attention Meditation
This type of meditation is all about focusing on one specific thing, which is usually going to be your breathing. As soon as you feel your mind wandering away from your breathing, do everything you can to shift your focus back to your breathing. In terms of building focus and concentration, this is one of the most beneficial forms of meditation, one that can be fantastic for stressed-out business owners.
Visualization Meditation
Yet another form of meditation is visualization meditation. This is a specific meditation technique that involves mentally visualizing one specific thing. This could be an object, scenery, or a person. The point is that you use all of your brainpower to focus on one specific mental image. The benefits include being able to observe our own minds, being able to observe our physical sensations and inner feelings.
FAQs
What Does Meditation Do for the Brain?
Both meditation and mindfulness imbue a heightened state of awareness and attention, plus it can also help relieve stress, anxiety, improve memory, concentration, and other cognitive abilities.
How Long Should You Meditate Every Day?
The official recommendation is that meditation should be performed for 40 to 45 minutes per day for full mental and physical health benefits.
How Long Do You Have to Meditate to See Results?
Although the official recommendation is that meditation is done for 40 to 45 minutes per day, it has been shown that as little as 10 minutes of meditating can produce beneficial results for the human mind and body.
How Do I Know if I’m Meditating Right?
If you are meditating right, you should be totally still; you should not have any reactions, you should be totally aware, and time should pass very quickly. If you are constantly fidgeting and just waiting for time to pass, you are not doing it right.
Recommendations
As a beginner, meditation can be difficult. It’s not something that you can just jump into and start doing, and it takes a bit of practice and training. However, there are quite a few applications there that can help you along your mindfulness meditation journey. Some of the best apps include Headspace, Calm, and Insight Timer.
These apps help you achieve the personal growth you are looking for by guiding you through various forms of meditation. If you need help getting started, we recommend taking a look at any of those three apps.
Conclusion
There are dozens of different meditation techniques, and as an online business owner, finding a suitable form of meditation for you could make the difference between personal growth and failure. Whether it’s your mental health or physical health, or your personal life, meditation can be beneficial in many ways.
If you want to see the full effects of meditation, we recommend looking into some mindfulness techniques. Being an online business owner can be stressful. Meditation can help relieve that stress and anxiety and help you get a good night’s sleep. Most successful people engage in self-care.