How To Improve Your Focus With Guided Meditation

In a world full of tweets, pings, push notifications, and the plethora of other disruptions that demand our attention, keeping your focus and staying productive can be all but impossible.

Meditation is a great way to quiet the outer world and find the inner peace you need to put your attention towards its greatest potential and use it to fuel your productivity.

Many people have trouble with the “focus on nothing” mantra of the purest meditative practices. Guided meditation offers an alternative—one that can be used to fuel your mind allowing you to focus it on your goals.

If you’re trying to focus and increase your productivity, guided meditation is the perfect fit for any purpose.

How Guided Meditation Gets in Your Head and Gets You Going

The first step in effective guided meditation is finding a guide geared towards the effect you’re looking for. Guided meditation tapes gave way to CDs and then to mp3s, and nowadays you can turn to YouTube and other video-bound guided meditation aides.
You’re still primarily after the audio, as almost all meditation guides recommend you close your eyes to better cut out distractions, though there are a few that use certain images in an attempt to focus the mind.

The majority of guided meditation tracks and videos use a form of white noise—rainfall, rivers, and sounds of gentle surf are common—or sustained tones like bells knolls or Tibetan singing bowls to help drown out distractions and provide a simple and soft area of focus, soothing the mind without inducing slumber.

The “guided” part of guided meditation is layered on top of this underlying noise in the form of a spoken voice that direct your thinking in a variety of ways, Repeated affirmations, progress-driven processes that take you deeper into the meditation and help you release stressors and mental blocks, and encouraging statements that bring you back to a state of energized focus and readiness are all common, and are often intermingled in the same track.

When you’re done, you should have the complete mental clarity you need for powerful productivity!

Does Guided Meditation Actually Work?

In a word: yes.

From UCLA to the Mayo Clinic, plenty of well-respected research institutions have delved deep into meditation and demonstrated its physiological benefits.

Effective meditation reduces stress, improves emotional stability, has a positive impact on hormone levels and nervous system activity, and a whole lot more. Guided meditation helps focus these effects towards a specific end, and can dramatically improve productivity when practiced regularly.

Our Favorite Guided Mediation App

We’ve tested about 5 different guided meditation apps in the past 60-90 days. Of those, Headspace was our favorite by far. They have a great app with many guided mediation audios. You can even select areas you want to focus on improving like relationships, performance or health.

 

If the first meditation track you try isn’t your cup of tea, don’t ditch the practice altogether. There are as many different meditation guides out there as there are personal tastes; find one that suits you and that you can commit to practicing on a regular basis, and don’t get down on yourself if it takes a few tries to get the hang of it.

Here’s another collection of online guided meditation audio files that you can use to for empowerment, release emotions, awaken your creativity, and even awakening that inner fire.

Is Guided Meditation Right For You? 

 

Increasing your mindfulness, your self-awareness, and your focus can’t help but be a positive for your productivity. Guided meditation will help you do exactly that—you might be amazed what ten or twenty minutes a day spent doing “nothing” will do for your efficiency, your outlook, and your output.

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