The Resilient Workplace: Breathwork Challenge Benefits
What is resilience, and how can it help us manage stress in the workplace?
Resilience can be defined as the mental reservoir of strength that helps us handle stress and change. Resilience, as defined by the American Psychological Association, means finding healthy ways to cope with stress and manage change rather than being immune to stress or never feeling negative emotions. Resilience is a skill anyone can build over time with the help of resources like social support and mindfulness, not a personality trait only certain individuals possess.
Here are a few ways that resilience can help us manage stress in the workplace:
Resilience helps us bounce back from setbacks. When we're resilient, we're better able to cope with setbacks and failures and move forward. This can be especially important in the workplace, where we're often faced with challenges and obstacles.
Resilience helps us adapt to change. Change is a constant in the workplace, and being able to adapt to new situations and environments is key to managing stress. Resilient individuals are better able to cope with change and adapt to new situations.
Resilience helps us maintain perspective. When we're feeling stressed or overwhelmed, it's easy to get caught up in negative thoughts and emotions. Resilience helps us maintain perspective and focus on the bigger picture, which can help us manage stress in a more healthy and effective way.
Why Breathwork?
Mindfulness is a great tool to have in your resilience toolkit. Breathwork, in particular, is a method of consciously changing your breathing patterns for enhanced emotional and physical well-being. It’s also a powerful tool that helps us to connect with our physical and emotional needs during the workday.
In our fast-paced professional world, it can be difficult to focus on healing and wellness, and our daily experiences in the professional realm can activate our body’s stress response. Workplace stressors can promote stress and anxious feelings. Workplace stressors can include poor sleep quality, long commutes, difficult conversations with colleagues, or public speaking. Breathwork is a great resilience tool that promotes self-regulation and wellness in the workplace.
The goal of this challenge is to facilitate internal and external evolution by providing you with an accessible resource for mitigating stress and anxiety. Our breath is something that we can easily access to support our health and wellness, and it doesn’t cost a thing except our focus and attention. Practicing giving focused attention to our breath builds our ability to thrive and reclaim our peace in times of uncertainty. It’s quick, it’s accessible, and it only takes a moment to breathe. The benefits are immediate. When we breathe intentionally, the body exhibits a relaxation response. Angst and anxiety subside, and we actually feel more energetic, productive, and resilient.
As you engage in the Resilient Workplace breathwork program, you will enhance your workplace wellness toolkit by engaging in an experiential and collaborative mindfulness practice. The results are quick, and over time, you can begin the process of reprogramming your nervous system to reduce workplace stress and anxiety. Check out some of the evidence-based research on the benefits of breathwork, also known as Diaphragmatic Breathing, below.
Program Benefits
Anxiety Relief
Alleviates Depression
Stress Relief
Supports people with Type 2 Diabetes
Supports people with Hypertension
Team Camaraderie
Peer Reviewed Research on the Benefits of Diaphragmatic Breathing on Health Conditions
Hypertension
Yau, Katherine K., and Alice Y. Loke. "Effects of Diaphragmatic Deep Breathing Exercises on Prehypertensive Or Hypertensive Adults: A Literature Review." Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, vol. 43, 2021, pp. 101315-101315. 15
Diabetes
Yadav, Abhishek et al. “Effects of Diaphragmatic Breathing and Systematic Relaxation on Depression, Anxiety, Stress, and Glycemic Control in Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.” International journal of yoga therapy vol. 31,1 (2021): Article_13. doi:10.17761/2021-D-19-00061 16
Anxiety
Chen, Yu-Fen et al. “The Effectiveness of Diaphragmatic Breathing Relaxation Training for Reducing Anxiety.” Perspectives in psychiatric care vol. 53,4 (2017): 329-336. doi:10.1111/ppc.12184 16
Psychological State
Ma, Xiao et al. “The Effect of Diaphragmatic Breathing on Attention, Negative Affect and Stress in Healthy Adults.” Frontiers in psychology vol. 8 874. 6 Jun. 2017, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00874
