You're feeling overwhelmed at work. How can you use mindfulness to prevent burnout and maintain resilience?

One of the simplest yet most effective mindfulness techniques is practicing deep breathing. When you feel overwhelmed at work, take a few moments to focus on your breath. Inhale deeply through your nose, allowing your lungs to fill with air, and then exhale slowly through your mouth. Repeat this process several times, feeling the tension in your body release with each breath. This simple practice can help calm your mind, reduce stress levels, and increase your focus and productivity.

Setting intentions aligns with setting goals. During a stressful period at work, allow yourself to dissect your tasks and set expectations for yourself and your team. 1. Dissect and simplify to tasks to set smaller, more achievable goals. 2. Allow yourself to focus on tasks at hand rather than multi-tasking your way to anxiety. 3. Overwhelm freeze is a real thing - often due to the overwhelming amount of task and workload being heavy, individuals may freeze due to the lack of navigation and comprehension. Your brain allows you to understand constructs and processes but too many of them can become chaotic internally. Take out time to map it out, create directions and phase wise POA to ensure an easy way to navigate through them.

Identify and acknowledge your emotions. It’s imperative, especially during a period of cascading workload to understand and communicate with your emotions. 1. Learn what your mind and body is telling you. Signals from your body and mind will help you learn how you’re feeling. Acknowledging those feelings and addressing them helps make you more aware of not just your emotions but how to deal with them. 2. Identify your breaking point; be aware of when you’re getting tired, body is getting lazy or your mind is not being as productive as its potential. STOP. Take a breather to reset things. 3. Communicate with your emotions. Listen to what your body wants and act appropriately to avoid burnouts. It’s crucial to be aware to prevent burnout.

Burnouts and saturation come at the worst of times. Overworked, exhausted and deadlines coming close tend to push the individual to work more. 1. Allow yourself to work at your own pace, learn your pace, get insights from your own body and mind to understand your work methodology. 2. Don’t push yourself to a point that it impacts you physiologically (fever/body ache etc). Stop-take a break-start again. Clear your mind by occupying it with something else. 3. Reflect on how you’ve functioned during previous projects and take notes from there in terms of what worked and what didn’t work for you. Reflecting isn’t just to introspect your actions towards a situation but for you to comprehend your method of functioning in the best possible way