One of the best methods to hack your body and mind’s capability to boost your productivity is meditation. Really? Yes, meditation. An article written previously on meditation showed how meditation improves your daily performance.
Some see meditation merely as a unique type of exercise that helps a person get relieved from stress but there’s more to it than that. Meditation helps calm the mind, sharpen your focus, stay healthy and improve your daily performance. Meditation is one such method which works to help. Like most seeking hacks that will boost their productivity to an incredible level, you will find these meditation techniques easy. We have narrowed down incredibly easy mediation techniques to turbo-boost your productivity. Don’t worry about being a first-timer in practising these techniques, you will find that they are a lot of easy-to-use or first-timer techniques.
Here is a full list would just share a short list of a few of them.
Meditation Techniques #1: Breathing Meditation
This is one of the best meditation techniques for beginners. Ancient, powerful and effective, by simply watching your breath, you give your mind something to focus on in a relaxed way.
Get yourself in a comfortable position, close your eyes and begin to observe the sensations of breathing. Pay attention to how it feels as you draw air in through your nose, down into your lungs and back out again through your mouth. You don’t need to control or force your breathing in any way. Just watch. If your mind wonders — and it will — don’t worry or criticize yourself, this is normal in the beginning. Gently bring your attention back to your breathing and continue.
Meditation Techniques #2: Mantra Meditation
The ancient Sanskrit word, “aum” is a mystical syllable often used in chants or as a meditative mantra. By repeating a sacred word or meaningful phrase (including short affirmations) you can bring your mind to a state of focused tranquillity. You can say the mantra out loud or repeat it silently.
Meditation Techniques #3: Walking Meditation
If sitting still for too long makes you squirm, try the walking meditation technique. You can do this just about anywhere, although a garden or other pleasing environment is ideal. Simply focus on your body as it moves: your arms as they swing, your legs as they lift and extend, and your feet as they rise and touch the ground. As with all meditation techniques, when you find your mind wandering, gently bring your attention back to the movement. Try not to judge, rather feel the sensation derived from walking.
Meditation Techniques #4: Candle Staring
If you have trouble focusing, you can light a candle and stare at it. Your attention will be held. If your mind races, just observe what it is doing and let those thoughts be released.
Meditation Techniques #5: Visualization
Another easy and down-to-earth meditation technique is to picture an idyllic being or setting in your mind. Focus on the picture and let yourself embellish it as much or as little as you need to.
Meditation Techniques #6: Present Moment Meditation
Close your eyes and begin to focus on your breath. Take a few moments, then allow your focus to broaden your body and the sensations that it’s feeling. Now expand your focus to anything touching your body, noticing those sensations. Lastly, expand your awareness to everything you can hear and sense. Now reverse this process and come back, one step at a time to your breath.
Meditation Technique #7: Become the Observer
Focus on becoming the observer of your mind. Close your eyes and focus on the spot about an inch above the spot between your eyebrows (Third Eye Chakra). Begin to watch what your mind and body are feeling, thinking and doing.
Meditation Techniques #8: Guided Meditations
There are hundreds of resources online that have a huge supply of guided meditations and music to help soothe your soul. YouTube, Spotify, and google play offer music and meditation podcasts as well. Or you can try any of the apps from the following.
Apps which help you on the way to success with meditation
These days there are apps out there for every activity or need we have. It is the same with meditation. As you could see different methods help to improve different parts of our life. As you will see the applications you can find here in this non-exhaustive list have just the same approach, they mostly focus on one specific area. If you need further details on any of the following up, visit this blog post.
Aura: Daily micro-meditations that last only three minutes, customized with AI, level-ups, challenges, gratitude journal, and track moods.
Breethe: a free app, five-minute meditations, along with tips for overcoming pressure, feeling love, and living with intention and inner peace, My Space feature for keeping everything at one place.
Buddhify: Meditation sessions are organized by theme, anxiety, stress, sleeping disorder, and over 80 custom meditations, the team is constantly making an improvement to the app.
Calm: Focus areas are joy, peace, sense of clarity, automated background noises, good for keeping the habit of meditation, and great value for prize according to users.
Headspace: 350 hours of guided meditation lessons, benefits from attention span, equanimity, sense of alertness, to the ability to deal with stressors in daily life, 10 minutes daily, 10 sessions pack free for beginners,
iMindfulness: Three guided meditations, including power pause, breath meditation, and body scan, in-app purchases, good for beginners and professionals, in English, Danish, and Norwegian.
Insight timer: 4,000 guided meditations from over 1,000 teachers, a wide range of topics, and the strong community around it, meditation is a privilege, not a product, meditate as long as you feel beneficial.
10% Happier: Trains those who are sceptical towards meditation, people from any religion or background can learn about mindfulness, based on neuroscience, has no spiritual components, good for newbies.
Mindfulness Daily: Good for reducing stress and promoting sleep, wide range of experts behind the app (scientists, physicians, researchers, trainers, and coaches), effective guided practices, few minutes courses daily.
Omvana: Helps improve every area of life, 20 minutes courses, highly versatile, possible to create new meditation sequences depending on what works best.
Sattva: Possible to join accountability groups, connect with friends, gamified meditation with trophies and challenges, good for those who love social media.
Simply being: 100% free, length and background music could be chosen, beginners to professionals, step-by-step guidance, sessions from 5 to 30 minutes.
Smiling mind: Programs divided by age group, 100% not-for-profit, free app, teachers use it in schools worldwide.
Stop, Breathe & Think: More structure and motivation, good for kids and adults getting their way back to daily habits.
The Mindfulness App: With or without a narrator, tracks range from 3 to 30 minutes, and can be personalized to your individual needs.
Recommended for Reading:
Emma Seppala: The Happiness Track (Book review)
As a young intern working in a major newspaper in France, she observed an interesting phenomenon. Her job was to run between the second floor, with the American writers and editors and the basement, with the blue-collar French press labourers. There was a striking difference in atmosphere. On the second floor, you could feel the tension. It was quiet. Workers kept to themselves. They hunched over their keyboard and ate pizza at their desks. In the basement, the mood was friendly and even festive with laughter and jokes. The workers enjoyed wine, cheese and bread together.
The two groups both achieved their goal – to get the newspaper out on time. But one group was stressed, burned out and unhealthy looking; while the other group was happy, energetic and thriving!
That observation ignited a fascination in Emma to study the psychology of health and happiness. She discovered in study after study that what she and her friends were doing to achieve success and happiness was actually backfiring! She studied highly talented people with huge potential who sadly burned out their greatest asset: themselves.
She realized that most people are compromising their ability to be truly successful and happy by falling for outdated theories about success. In The Happiness Track, she shares decades of research that shows that happiness is not the outcome of success but rather the precursor.
She wrote this book to show us how our happiness can maximize our resilience, creativity, productivity, charisma and other skills critical for success. She shares skills to help us be productive without chronic stress and how to achieve more without burning out. In short, she shares ideas to help you maximize your professional potential and personal fulfilment. She outlines the false theories we must reject and replaces them with new strategies; a few of which I outline below.
It is Emma’s hope that this book provides you with relief that you already have what it takes to be happy and successful; that a stress-free and fulfilled life is not only possible but also the secret to personal and professional success.
PS: Feel free to try any, and let us know after a few weeks how it worked for you. We would love to know about your experience with any of these techniques in the comment below.
