Using Meditation to Slow Down Your Thoughts, Actually Increases Your Productivity

I'm your host Kara Stein-Conaway and this is The Business Mamas Podcast. The Business Mamas Podcast is made for women who know they should be doing more self-care and practicing more self-love but are overrun with balancing it all. This podcast provides the tools and support you need so you can have a successful career while also being a present and loving mom.  

In this season, which is Season 4 of the podcast, I am sharing with you about my journey with meditation. I'm also sharing a particular meditation in each episode that I love, and that I hope you will love too.

I'm excited to have this conversation with you about meditation, and what I have seen as the benefits of meditation in my life since I've started practicing slowing down my mind.

If you are like me, then sometimes you feel like you are moving so quickly through your day that you barely have time to breathe, and you certainly aren't making the time to take deep breaths, where you observe yourself breathing the air in and you observe yourself breathing the air out.

Being a person who has spent much of my life to-date working at a very fast pace, slowing down my mind is something that if you would have talked with me about it a few years ago, I'm not sure that I would have seen the value in it.

As professionals, and career people, we value our minds. We value our minds’ ability to process information quickly, to make decisions, to weigh advantages and disadvantages of different situations that we come across. Thinking about slowing down our minds isn't something that might immediately sound like it has value. But it does.

Now, having practiced meditation for some years now, I have found immense value to being able to slow down my mind.

I remember that when I was talking to you in one of my earlier podcast episodes, Episode 2, which was about the life experience that I had that ultimately led me to create a daily morning routine for myself. At that time, I was moving so fast that I burned myself out; I literally exhausted my mind, body and spirit all at the same time.

And so, a huge lesson that I learned from that experience, and that I've continued to learn in the years since, is about slowing myself down before I get to the point of crashing.

As I have continued to get more and more in tune with myself, with how I'm feeling, and the more that I've been able to observe my feelings and observe my thoughts without judgment and from a place of compassion, the more I have recognized when I feel like I'm moving into a state of feeling like there's too much.

Do you ever feel like you are having trouble sorting out what to do next because it feels like there are just too many things on the list?

When I experience that unsettled place now, I have the consciousness to know that that is my body and my intuition and my knowing telling me, it's time to slow down, it's time to pause, it's time to take a break, it's time to reset.

Because once I do take that time, once I do slow down my body, my breathing, my thoughts, and spend some time in a peaceful still state, then I re-open my eyes, and it's an entirely different experience. The same long list no longer looks insurmountable.

Now, the long list looks like a fun challenge, a challenge I can't wait to dive into.

I'll see the list as what do I get to do now.

I'll be able to restructure my time from an empowered place.

That is the power of slowing down.

It may be counterintuitive, if it's not something that you've tried before.

I can tell you from personal experience, conscientiously choosing to slow down is one of the best productivity tools that you can develop in your life. So, when I came across this meditation that I'm going to share with you today, I knew that I wanted to try it. It's called Slowing Down Your Mind with davidji. I will link to this 20 minute meditation in the show notes for Episode 34, so that you can try it out and see if it helps you enjoy slowing down your mind as well.

For me, learning to observe my thoughts and learning to slow down my thoughts has been such an empowering tool.

Because as things arise in my daily life outside of meditation, I find myself observing myself, observing my thoughts, and conscientiously being able to choose which thoughts to believe and which thoughts to let go of.

You may have heard the term ‘Namaste’ before as being used in meditation. It's commonly translated as “the light in me honors the light in you.”

By choosing to meditate, you are honoring the light within yourself, and it also naturally leads to you honoring the light in others.

The more we see our own light, and the more we honor the light in others, by doing this internal work, we not only make our internal experience of our lives more beautiful, but we also make the world a better place.

I hope you'll take this time to try out this meditation on slowing down your mind.

If you enjoyed Episode 34 and this blog post, I would love it if you shared the blog or the podcast with someone you think could benefit from them. I would also be incredibly grateful if you could leave an honest rating and review of The Business Mamas Podcast on Apple Podcasts as that helps more people find the show and it helps me in sharing this message of practicing self-love and self-care with more people whose lives I know could be enriched by hearing it. Sign up to download my Morning Routine Guide and receive my twice-monthly newsletter at The Business Mamas Podcast. Until next time and with gratitude, Kara Stein-Conaway, @karasteinconaway on Instagram.