Why Meditation is Important as a Small Business Owner and How to Get Started

 

When you decided to open a small business, you realized there was nothing that could’ve prepared you for it. Many sacrifices come with owning a business, both on the financial and social side alike. These day-to-day pressures can lead to feeling overwhelmed and burnt out. Over time, this all takes a toll on your wellbeing, and it’s important to look after yourself during difficult times.

Enter meditation, the exercise you can do to completely transform your overall wellbeing.

Why Manage Stress and Anxiety?
It’s perfectly normal to feel stress and frustration as a small business owner. However, if you don’t do anything to handle them in a healthy way, it can have a significant impact on your day-to-day mental, emotional and even physical health.

The Benefits of Meditation
Meditation is one of the most calming exercises anyone can do for themselves — calming the mind and body, bringing you relief from head to toe. Just 10 minutes can make a world of difference in not only your mental health for the rest of the day, but it can also be vital to your long-term health.

Daily Mental and Emotional Wellbeing
Meditation can help you build skills that manage stress and be happier throughout the day. After a session, you may find yourself being more patient and possibly improving your demeanor to those around you. Meditation has been known to help people gain new perspectives in stressful situations.

It’s important to note that stress and frustration not only make you irritable and tense throughout the day, but feeling stressed every day can lead to unhappiness in the long run, as it has been linked to major depressive disorder (MDD).

Long-Term Physical Health
According to the American Psychological Association, stress over a prolonged period of time can affect all seven systems of the body and having this occur daily can have damaging long-term effects.

Ensuring your body is in as a relaxed state as possible each day can lower your resting heart rate and blood pressure, which can go a long way for your cardiovascular health. Meditation can also do wonders for improving sleep quality and preventing shortness of breath and musculoskeletal disorders that come with feeling tense.

Increases Mental Sharpness
In addition to the health benefits, meditation can actually make you more productive and better in your work. Stressed, overworked minds tend to make mistakes and force output that is rushed and sloppy. Meditation has been known to help people focus in the moment better as well as increase imagination and creativity. With a clear mind and body, you can be more productive and efficient and produce better work.

These benefits only scratch the surface; to learn more about the vast number of benefits of daily meditation, read this article from Positive Psychology.

Quality Meditation in 10 Minutes
As a small business owner, just 10 minutes to meditate may not sound achievable. But let’s say you work 12-hour days, adding up to 720 minutes. Ten minutes takes 0.014% out of those 720. So, in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t very demanding.

If you still feel it’s a time-management struggle, here are some tips on how you can make time in the day for your mental health:

  • Lump it in with lunch – Adding 10 minutes to your lunch break is an easy way to fit in a session.
  • When you start to feel overwhelmed – Perhaps that is the perfect time to recalibrate mentally.
  • When you’ve reached a good stopping place – In between tasks or at a good stopping point during one is a good time to reset your brain, so you can come back to work with a fresh set of eyes and mind.

Resources

  • Headspace.com provides guidance for quality 10-minute meditation; one study shows using their app reduced irritability by 27%.
  • This video is one of many 10-minute guided meditations on YouTube. There are plenty to explore to see what you like and works for you!
  • This Psycom article provides lots of great meditation resources for beginners.

The hardest part of getting onto meditation is getting into a routine at the beginning. But once you get into one, you will have no problem with (and start looking forward to) your daily meditation. Just those 10 minutes every day can be life-changing for you.

The American Business Coalition is dedicated to helping small business owners have all the resources and protection they need for themselves and their families. For more information on becoming an ABC member and the privileges that come with it, visit americanbusinesscoalition.info.