Why Guided Meditation is Essential For Every Entrepreneur Wouldn't you love to increase your attention span, bounce back quicker from negativity, and keep calm in the middle of a crisis?

The culture of the 21st century marketplace presents a number of challenges to new entrepreneurs, including ever-shorter lead times, high-performance expectations, and 24/7 availability.

In such a high-pressure working environment, how are business professionals and new start-ups to keep themselves mentally healthy and ready to face challenges as they appear? The answer, it seems, is to do exactly the opposite of what the market demands—stop working and take some focused time out.

The Best Way to Take Time Out

What kind of "focused" time out can help the most? While a vacation to Cuba may be fun and refreshing, this kind of escape isn't usually feasible on a regular basis and can just as easily be spent enjoying mojitos as contemplating the meaning of life. A much more accessible way to center yourself and gain a new perspective is to spend time every day in guided meditation.

In basic form, meditation is the discipline of focusing and redirecting your thoughts. It is like a workout for your brain that works to tame its tendency to wander. Wouldn't you love to increase your attention span, bounce back quicker from negativity, and keep calm in the middle of a crisis? Meditation—and particularly guided meditation—could help you to achieve all that and more.

Here are just a few of the many research-based benefits that meditation could have for a more productive and happy work life:

Reduce Feelings of Stress and Anxiety

Short timelines, upcoming sales pitches, and talent shortages can make the workplace feel like a pressure cooker. This, in turn, can send stress and cortisol levels through the roof and lead to stress-related diseases, mood-related disorders, and burnout (a.k.a. adrenal fatigue).

How do you keep a smile on your face and persevere when challenges arise? As successful business owners explain, it's important to stay positive and laugh your way through the tough times. Often, when things seem to have reached a standstill, a breakthrough could be just around the corner.

According to research, guided meditation could help you through the lows of starting up a business by activating and strengthening the positive thinking areas of your brain. Being able to maintain optimism and bounce back from a fall or workplace disappointment could be the difference that helps your business succeed in the long term.

Boost Your Creativity

The present marketplace is constantly changing, and niches can become saturated much faster than expected. In this landscape, the ability to think outside the box could be the edge that helps you maintain the loyalty of your customer base and employees.

As it appears, meditation could help to increase creative thinking and reduce rigidity. Controlled experiments in 2012 involving a program of mindfulness meditation showed that those who meditate tend to have less rigidity in their thinking and are able to find quicker and easier solutions when faced with the same problem as non-meditators.

By including guided meditation in your daily routine, you could have a creative edge over your competitors byoffering a more innovative customer experience and a more inspiring workplace for your employees.

Encourage Kindness in the Workplace

When things get hectic at work and everyone is feeling the heat, a little kindness and compassion can go a long way towards helping everyone to remain calm and perform at their best.

According to research, kindness-based meditation could help to produce increased feelings of kindness and compassion. A 2014 review and meta-analysis of kindness-based meditation (KBM) observed that this kind of guided meditation helped participants to increase positive feelings, compassion for others, and self-compassion. These feelings increased with progressive relaxation.

So, by introducing guided KBM at work or practicing it at home, you might be able to promote a culture of kindness even in the midst of a stressful situation.

Sleep Better at Night

Finally, the best way to maximize your work performance and stay ahead of the game is to get a quality night's sleep. Getting enough sleep can improve your health and wellness as a professional and is actually a strategic business move.

According to a 2015 review, guided meditation could improve your sleep quality by helping you to fall asleep faster and stay asleep for longer. The two kinds of meditation that appeared to be especially helpful were mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and mindfulness-based therapy for insomnia (MBTI).

While it may seem counterintuitive, investing a short amount of time each day in guided meditation certainly does appear to make a big difference in terms of productivity and mental health on the job. To begin, simply join a meditation class or sign up for a guided meditation app and start enjoying meditation's many benefits today.