How Meditation Can Improve Your Mental Health, and Your Quality of Life

How Meditation Can Improve Your Mental Health, and Your Quality of Life

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Whether or not you struggle with a mental health condition, meditation is a powerful tool to support your mental health. There are countless mental health benefits including reduced stress, decreased anxiety and improved quality of life. Continue reading for a short overview of how meditation can improve your mental health and how you can begin your journey. 

Less Stressed, More Blessed 

Stress reduction is one of the many profound benefits of meditation. So many people experience chronic stress on a regular basis, which takes a toll on our bodies and minds. When we pause and meditate, we have the opportunity to decrease the stress response in our bodies and declutter our minds. There is also no right or wrong answer when it comes to how long you meditate for and where you meditate. You could pause for 5 minutes while on the bus, or spend 10 minutes of your lunch break in a silent, meditate state. You could meditate in the shower, or first thing in the morning when you wake up. However you choose to meditate, you are sure to benefit from reduced stress levels over time, which is connected to a decrease in anxiousness and feelings of irritability or tension. 

Over time, meditation has the power to shift your perspective and encourage a more positive outlook of gratitude and contentment. The process could even help you reframe negative experiences as opportunities for learning and growth. Because of the positive mental health benefits, anyone who has taken an addictions and mental health program or a personal support worker program should consider introducing meditation into their practice as an additional support for clients. 

Recommended Meditations 

There are many countless styles and types of meditation for you to explore. Ideally, the process should be inclusive and adaptable. What works beautifully for one person may not be ideal or comfortable for you. Depending on your style and preferences, you may prefer listening to a guided meditation with spoken words from a meditation teacher or spiritual guide. You may also enjoy silent meditation with or without a simple timer on your phone, or meditating to ambient music or even binaural beats. There are many accessible and completely free mobile apps you can explore, including Insight Timer, Calm, or Headspace. If you are fairly new to meditation or are unsure where to start, here is a shortlist of recommended guided meditations to get you inspired: 

Meditation and Addiction 

Meditation plays an integral role in many alcohol and drug recovery programs, because of the numerous mental health benefits. There is also plenty of research to support this. An extensive study was conducted in 2018 on the integration of transcendental meditation into treatment plans for alcoholism and substance abuse. The study featured participants from a number of substance abuse treatment centres in Maryland, Baltimore and the research was conducted in association with Maharishi Foundation International, University of Maryland, and Friends Research Institute. The findings were overwhelmingly positive. Over a period of three months, the more consistently participants practiced transcendental meditation each and every day, the less they experienced chronic stress, cravings or thoughts of relapse. The daily practice of meditation also positively impacted psychological wellness, with fewer participants reporting feelings of distress. Most impressively, people in recovery who practiced transcendental meditation on a daily basis were statistically safer from relapse. On average, 25% of the participants who meditated returned to drinking, compared to 59% of the participants who did not meditate.

Continuing Education 

Recognizing and appreciating the mental health benefits of meditation is particularly worthwhile if you are considering completing a mental health worker certificate program or a developmental services worker program. Mindfulness and a strong foundation in education will help you do a lot of good, whether or not you have lived experience. To learn more, you can also check out our previous blogs about emotion regulation for improved interpersonal effectiveness and how to explore mental health through open and accessible conversations. 

The 4 People You Should Know in Cybersecurity

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There is so much leadership in the cybersecurity field and no shortage of influential people. That makes it hard to know who to pay serious attention to. In a growing a shifting sector, there are always people making massive differences.

While your Network+ training program instructor is DEFINITELY a person you should stay in touch with, there are others you are less likely to interact with in-person that you’ll want to follow on social media and get to know from a distance.

These are the people making changes in the industry. Not only are they leading the way in security, policy and exploration of cybersecurity, what they do is likely to be included in things like Security+ training and IT best practices.

Get to know our top 4 in cybersecurity:

Santha Subramoni, Tata Consultancy Services

It’s nice to lead the list with a woman who is paving the way for more women to   get involved in cybersecurity. Santha is the Global Head of the Cybersecurity   business unit with Tata which is a consultant-led IT services provider.

She has noted the ongoing pandemic as a critical time for resiliency testing (anticipate, withstand and recover from a cyber attack) as part of a cycle of improvement. Education is part of the answer in her opinion and although some of that may mean things like CySA+ training in the IT team, she’s really referring to everyone in the company practicing safe security habits and behaviours.

That being said, our guess is that she may recommend those new to the industry get as much education as possible, like A+ training for individuals looking to grow.

Charles Henderson, IBM X-Force

The Global Head of IBM’s X-Force, Charles and his team are leading the way in incident response, penetration testing, vulnerability processes and attack testing.   He’s an advocate of vulnerability research, something many organizations could   benefit from.

In an article about Tenable and IBM X-Force working together, Charles spoke about the need to fix Active Directory weaknesses to prevent attacks. He sees vulnerable and misconfigured Active Directories as the source of nearly every major cybersecurity attack currently.

Jordan Kendall, Starman Cybersecurity

It’s not often that a marketing and sales professional makes a who’s who list in     cybersecurity leadership, but Jordan Kendall is a bit of an enigma. President of  Starman Cybersecurity, his background is rich in digital solution operations and    he understands the cybersecurity space thoroughly.

Now, with more than 30 years of experience, he believes in solving complex business issues through a transformational process. While this isn’t confined to cybersecurity, Starman Cybersecurity is a group of professionals, like Jordan, who have exceptional track records in the space. The firm is based in delivering the cybersecurity talent organizations need to bridge the current gap in the workforce due to the exceptional needs in the market.

John McClurg, Blackberry

John McClurg is almost too hard to accept as being real, he seems like a spy novel character. Formerly counter-intelligence with the FBI and CIA, he’s now the     Senior VP and CISO at Blackberry. He talks about cybersecurity globally and introduces the options of machine learning and AI to help identify, address and mitigate the challenges.

He notes that cyber criminals are becoming just as savvy about their business as legitimate operations. They connect and share tools to create cost-savings and more serious threats. As they form partnerships to make them more powerful, John suggests that the security community needs to do the same – come together and share information in the face of the challenges.

Getting to know the leaders in cybersecurity and what they are talking about can be greatly beneficial to understanding the industry and knowing what to watch for. While it won’t always lead to in-person connections, it will lead to greater knowledge.

 

Is Technology Killing Your Creativity?

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Do you think it is possible or even probable that technology is making you less creative? Technology enthusiasts and creative types are bound to disagree on this debate, and there are some fascinating arguments on both sides. Read on to learn how technology can both challenge and simplify creative processes, causing us to question romantic notions of creative ingenuity and technological superiority. 

The Death of Creativity 

How does technology cut us off from creativity? Some would argue that through mass production and standardized creative processes, technology can move us away from our more authentic folk art roots and individual styles. Heavily processed and overproduced content arguably robs us of originality, ingenuity and individuality. It often seems as though everything has already been done before. Consider the excess of reboots and relaunching old media for a new audience. Perhaps this too is a byproduct of our expanded technological capabilities, because we have limitless access to external content and endless opportunity for comparison. Technology does so much for us that we can often rely on clever software and other digital processes to fill in the gaps in our creativity. 

With our pop culture obsessions and celebrity worship, society certainly has a tendency to romanticize what it means to be an artist or creative person. We have this romantic notion of the starving artist who is unconstrained by technology or corporate financing. But is that really an accurate picture? Could technology actually be helping our creativity? 

The Birth of Efficiency 

This may sound counter-intuitive, but technology has the power to enhance, empower, and challenge us. When used with intention and mindfulness, technology can unexpectedly inspire us and support creative processes by removing routine obstacles. One of the most impactful ways that technology supports our creativity is through automation, simplifying repetitive processes to free up more mental energy and creative capacity for our critical thinking and ingenuity in other areas. Did you know that can even create your own music using a coding language such as Python? How cool is it that computer science professionals who earn their Python certification could use their coding skills to compose beautiful symphonies or hypnotic electronic dance music? 

Adaptive Design 

Technology is a powerful tool that can help us elevate and improve our work, but software limitations and rigidity can often hold us back. In an academic article on the impact of technology on creativity in design, researchers Nathalie Bonnardel and Franck Zenasni assess whether or not new technology enhances or hinders the creative design process. They argue that “technologies can contribute to both divergent and convergent processes, which underlie creativity” and the creative process. They also describe how people who have a higher “tolerance for ambiguity” are ideally suited for creative thinking and finding unconventional connections between disparate ideas. These qualities and characteristics could potentially be included in design software to make the technology better suited for creativity. Overall, Bonnardel and Zenasni emphasize the importance of adaptability in software design. They envision a future where “a more intelligent system would be able to adapt… parts of the creative process to the personality of the creators.” We all have a better shot at creative success when we use technology in conscious ways instead of allowing the technology to do the thinking for us. 

Unexpected Creative Uses of Technology 

Are you passionate about creative problem solving and finding clever solutions to common business problems? Continuing education and ongoing curiosity can help you to work with technology instead of fighting against it. A good place to start is with storytelling training, where you can learn about narrative structure and explore emerging digital platforms such as virtual or augmented reality. By combining literary analysis with technology, you will develop a stronger understanding of both disciplines. 

People who love creative problem solving may also enjoy the challenge of pursuing their Azure certification or AWS certification in cloud foundations, architecture, development and operations. But if cloud computing is not your style, there are plenty of AWS courses with a focus on machine learning or data analytics. You can also read up on artificial intelligence or take a robotics course if you really want to fall down the rabbit hole. Whatever inspires you, look for purposeful uses of technology to support and even expand on your creative processes. 

Further Reading 

Looking for additional reading material? Check out our previous blog featuring a list of the best science fiction to motivate your technology studies or read up on how businesses are coping and adapting in the world of digital transformation.