How to Boost Productivity and Focus With Meditation

What does sitting quietly have to do with getting more done? It almost seems like a paradox, doesn’t it? If you’ve ever meditated, you’ve probably felt that natural urge to get up and do something “more productive.” 

Yet when you consider how often your mind bounces from one thing to another, you might notice a connection between mindfulness and productivity. Do you get things done faster when you’re laser-focused on one thing? Or when your brain is scattered and you jump from one task to another? 

A clear focus is the main ingredient to efficiency. And mindfulness and focus go hand in hand. The more you meditate, the more you strengthen your brain’s key focus pathways. So let’s explore the science behind this a little deeper and review how meditation –  especially a daily practice – can help you get more done faster.

Bring your focus back to the present moment

Our busy minds don’t make it easy to be fully present. That’s why certain meditations that you may learn in our Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) classes are solely focused on cultivating the ability to pay attention. 

These types of meditations might have you focus your attention on something specific such as your breath, an area within the body, or a mantra. 

Every time you notice your mind wandering, the task is to bring your awareness back to the object of focus. When you notice that your mind has wandered, you’re cultivating the skill of awareness. As you keep bringing the mind back, you turn down the volume on your mental chatter.

If you do this practice consistently, you strengthen your brain’s ability to pay attention in the moment. The neural networks associated with scattered attention weaken while those related to focused attention get stronger. 

Outsmart the greatest thief of productivity: stress

The key reason meditation is so great at enhancing productivity is because it reduces stress. Think about it. When you’re ruminating on something that happened yesterday or worried about tomorrow, how fully present are you with the task at hand?

As you reduce stress, you free up energy in your brain and body. When your body’s under the stress response, it’s constantly scanning your environment for threats. But often, these perceived threats are nowhere but in your mind. 

Yet your brain still releases the chemicals of stress to prepare the body to run or fight as if there was a tiger around the bush. This diminishes your mental capacity, decreases memory, and clogs the natural flow of well-being throughout your body.

Meditation allows you to recognize the perceived stressors in your mind for what they are: often a set of conditioned thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions. You can then choose to respond to your thoughts in a way that helps you stay focused and productive.

Get better at creative problem solving 

The moment your mind feels at ease, your brain gains the capacity to see things more clearly. You start thinking differently. You notice opportunities where you only used to see challenges or problems.

Research has shown that mindfulness supports creativity by allowing our brains to access deeper states. When you learn something, your brain has to integrate it before fully using it to solve a potential challenge. This integration happens when your brain is in the alpha state – the exact state that meditation brings you into.

As new learnings integrate, new neural connections are made between existing information in your brain. You start seeing new solutions. This makes you a much better problem solver, allowing you to spend less time figuring out solutions and more time doing what drives results.

If you would like to explore how you face a challenge, download the Guide to Navigating the Nine Dot Puzzle. This mindfulness puzzle is designed to help readers develop their problem solving skills. 

Say goodbye to distractions

It’s much easier to manage distractions when you’re mindful and fully present during your work. If you meditate in the mornings, you might make it part of your practice to set your intentions right after your meditations.

When you set a clear intention, you’re giving your brain a roadmap of what it should focus on. You’ll then feel a sense of discomfort when you’re not working on something that you know you should be working on.

When you’re fully present, you’ll recognize distractions much faster and address them without judging yourself too harshly. Like, if you find yourself going down a rabbit hole of social media for example. You can gently bring yourself back to the task at hand while noting that you’ll reward yourself with limited social media time after the task is completed.

Feel the satisfaction of delayed gratification

It takes effort to create something meaningful and worthwhile. But our brains are always looking for the path of least resistance. And that’s why you often find it hard to focus on your assignment and much easier to turn on Netflix.

So, ask yourself – which of these activities is going to cause you to feel more fulfilled and satisfied a few years down the road?

Practicing meditation daily helps you become more familiar with that hard-wired desire for immediate gratification. While your body would rather be sleeping, drinking coffee, or knocking out that to-do list, just sitting there can seem like the most challenging task. 

But each time you delay the gratification of the easy thing (stopping your meditation), you train your mind to keep doing the hard thing even when you get up from your meditation cushion. This is how you’re able to master emotional regulation so that you can stay focused on those big goals that truly bring meaning and fulfillment.

Get into a flow state 

Have you ever worked on something to a point where you completely lost track of time? You were so focused on the task at hand that you blocked out all distractions and just kept going until you got the thing done? 

Getting into flow states often happens when we do something that’s relatively challenging. Skiing, surfing, or climbing a mountain are often cited as examples of flow activities. These activities force us to pay close attention to what we’re doing - because if we don’t, we could perish.

The good news is, there’s a way to bring that flow state into your daily life so you can get more done with that feeling of effortlessness.

While completing your daily tasks might not be as thrilling as skiing down a mountain, you can still become so fully present in the experience that it almost feels like the job is doing itself. Research on flow shows that being present enhances performance. That’s because the judgments that typically occupy the mind are silenced. 

Meditation as practice for the rest of your day

Meditation is a great way to practice the art of focusing in the quiet space of your own mind. Each time you’re able to bring your awareness back to your breath or to your meditation object, you’ll find it easier to do the same next time. Then when it’s time to focus on an important project, you’ll already have practiced this skill in the morning so it will feel much more natural in the midst of your day.

If you’d like to improve your meditation skills, join me for the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. You’ll learn how to work with the monkey mind and walk away with practical mindfulness tools to help you improve productivity across daily life. Sign up for a FREE orientation session here.