Mindfulness can help in reducing stress and improving wellness. In fact, practicing mindfulness can prove very useful for seafarers while at sea, when they need the tools to respond rapidly to an emergency while also maintaining a steady state, especially when they are surrounded 24/7 by the many stressors of the complex world we live in.
First things first; mindfulness is a type of meditation in which you focus on being aware of what you are sensing and feeling it in the present moment without interpretation or judgement. Namely, meditation is a great way to recognize and take the right measures to manage stress, helping achieve a clear and calm state, reduce stress, anxiety, depression, and pain. Specifically, mindfulness meditation involves the process of developing the skill of bringing one’s attention to whatever is happening in the present moment.
By practicing mindfulness, we can change how we react to stressful situations and improve our mental and physical well-being, be safety-conscious and work more efficiently. So, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that being mindful may assist them in preventing casualties at sea.
Basic practice of mindfulness onboard
In practice people may face both internal and external obstacles such as boredom, a wandering mind, physical discomfort, and difficulty in staying committed- but with the right amount of strength, courage and perseverance you can overcome such obstacles and keep going. Remember! Practice makes better. Some may have better mindfulness skills, which further enable greater situational awareness during a case of emergency, but as many skills, mindfulness can be practiced and learned, getting better with time.
Several meditation exercises have been designed to develop mindfulness meditation. This can fuel performance by managing distressing emotions such as feeling out of control, jumping from one thought to the next, or ruminating on negative thoughts. Exercising mindfulness meditation even onboard can help you:
- Start your day with more energy and clarity
- Find inner peace and not be dominated by toxic thoughts
- Deal with creativity backwards
1. Relax: Calm your body and empty your mind in order to reverse the physiological changes which happen to your body when stressed. Relaxation will help you to lower your overall tension and stress levels.
2. Try the progressive muscular relaxation: Are you familiar with the difference between how our muscles feel when they are tense and how when they are relaxed? Try tensing specific muscle groups in your body, such as your neck and shoulders and then release the tension and notice how your muscles feel when you relax them.
3. Control your breathing: Breathe slowly and deeply from the bottom of your lungs. This technique helps the heart slow down and the body to return to its resting state. Controlling our breathing before entering into a difficult situation can help balance our anxiety level and bring the desired performance.
7 Key Benefits of Mindfulness
#1 – Being mindful of your thoughts and emotions promotes your well-being
Mindfulness is a state that is characterized by introspection, openness, reflection, and self-acceptance. What is more, there has been strong evidence recently that mindfulness is significantly correlated with positive affect, life satisfaction, and overall well-being. Even more, this ‘enhanced self-awareness’ diminishes stress and anxiety, and in turn, reduces the risk of developing cancer, disease, and psychopathology. In retrospect, it can also help you ‘be present’ in the moment helping in harvesting safety performance.
#2 – Being mindful can improve your working memory
Have you ever found yourself unable to remember what others have just said during a conversation? Or worse, have you found yourself not being able to recall what was your last action? In fact, working memory is the memory system that temporarily stores information in our minds for further recall and future processing. What is more, many studies suggest a strong interrelationship between attention and working memory. Mindfulness leads to attentional improvements, particularly in relation to the quality of information and decisional processes, which are directly linked to working memory.
#3 – Mindfulness acts as a buffer against the depressive symptoms associated with discrimination
Mindfulness can also act as a protective factor that mitigates the effects of discrimination on the development of depressive symptoms. This means that although discrimination may be associated with depressive symptoms, the association seems to become much weaker as mindfulness increases. According to studies, it appears that practicing mindfulness may be an effective method of preventing the onset of depression.
#4 – Mindfulness can help you make better use of your strengths
Let’s think about it; how effectively can we pursue our goals if we don’t really pay attention to our inner workings? Pursuing and achieving our goals requires attention to be paid to inner states, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Therefore, to be able to see our strength, we need to have access to our inner state of mind. To access our strengths and our true self, mindfulness is the key. According to Ryan Niemiec
Mindfulness opens a door of awareness to who we are, and character strengths are what is behind the door, since character strengths are who we are at core.
#5 – Mindfulness practice can raise your happiness set-point
Our brain is divided into two hemispheres: the left and the right. We know that the right prefrontal cortex (the front-most part of the brain that controls higher functions) is highly active when we are in a depressed, anxious mood. Research now comes to show that a simple 8-week course of 1-hour daily mindfulness practice can lead to significant increases in left-side activation in the brain- maintained even after 4 months of the training program, proving that short-term mindfulness practice increases our happiness level significantly, all the way down to the physical level.
#6 – Mindfulness can make you more resilient
Resilience refers to an individual’s ability to recover from setbacks and adapt well to change and is controlled by the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), located deep in the center of the brain. The ACC plays an important role in self-regulation and ‘learning from past experience’ to promote optimal decision-making. Research shows that mindfulness training groups that completed 3-hour mindfulness practice session have higher activity in ACC and also show higher performance on the tests of self-regulation and resisting distractors, proving that with even just a small commitment to practicing mindfulness, we can change the way our brain reacts to setbacks and improve our ability to make smart decisions.
#7 – It shrinks the stress region in your brain
Every time we get stressed, a little part in our brain called the amygdala takes control! The amygdala is a key stress-responding region in our brain and plays an important role in helping us cope with anxious situations. It is needless to say that high amygdala activity is associated with depression and anxiety disorders. The good news is that mindfulness practice can actually shrink the size of the amygdala and increase our stress reactivity threshold. Research shows a connection between long-term mindfulness practice and an amygdala that is decreased.
