Your New Favorite Mindfulness Hack to Try at Work

Sometimes the most difficult things in life are also the most necessary. That thing for me, on a recent weekday afternoon, was somehow making it to my yoga mat.

Turning on a yoga practice on YouTube was my method of choice for slowing down. I quickly scrolled through the overwhelming number of options for “slow” and “gentle” yoga practices, a task which was almost enough to dissuade me from taking a break. “I can rest later,” I thought. But I knew better. Later usually turns into late at night which turns into tomorrow which easily turns into never.

So I defaulted to a chill Yoga for Lower Back practice by my go-to, Yoga With Adriene. I moved through the first few stretches as cued—knees-to-chest and seated Cat-Cow. But by Low Lunge, I sorta lost all motivation to move my body. So I gave myself what I actually needed: an excuse to lie down in the middle of the day, under the guise of practicing yoga.

Although there was no chance I was going to abandon my comfy spot and come into Rag Doll, many of the cues still applied to me in my pseudo-Savasana. “Take a deep breath in, and then let it all go,” Adriene suggested. So I did. “Listen to your body.” Check. As Adriene encouraged all of this body awareness, I became aware of my own feet—I was chilly. I pulled a blanket over myself and, from my comfy cocoon, let the rest of the video wash over me, following the cues I wanted and letting the rest dissolve into the air.

At first, there was a twinge of guilt in the pit of my stomach, as if I had let myself and Adriene down by allowing the video to play and not moving my body as instructed. But I realized the video was simply a tool—a container that gave me permission to pause, regardless of what I chose to do within that pause.

A Slack ping was the work-from-home version of a sound bowl, chiming me out of my state of rest and back into life mode. Before taking a moment to pause the end of the yoga video or close the app, I hopped onto my computer to respond to the message. Another yoga video started playing as I was typing my message, but I didn’t pay much attention. I was back in work mode, answering emails and jotting down to-dos as they came to me. “I should really turn that off,” I thought as I heard Adriene cueing Sun Salutations in a different video. But then I heard her say, “Relax your shoulders,” and without even thinking about it, I drew my shoulders away from my ears mid-keyboard stroke.

A few seconds later, Adriene cued, “Breathe into your belly,” and, again, my body responded. I un-shrimped my spine, slowed my usually obnoxiously fast typing pace slightly, and was reassured that “I was enough” and that I don’t have to push myself so much.

So I let autoplay do its thing. The yoga videos kept playing. I kept working.

Listening to yoga videos while sitting at my desk felt illogical, in some ways. Work Laura’s bar for success is how much she can accomplish while remaining so highly caffeinated that her body might be studied by future generations. Yoga Laura’s objective is to disentangle identity from career and productivity from self-worth. Meshing these two sides of me was anxiety-inducing, like when you host a dinner party with friends from completely different phases of your life. But it was also a relief, like when those two friends get along brilliantly and you think “I should’ve done this sooner!”

Since then, playing yoga videos while working has brought more awareness to how my body sits in the chair and how long my eyes are looking at the screen without looking away. But it’s also brought balance to wildly different aspects of my personality and how those play out in real time. When I become overwhelmed by everything I have to do in a given week, I hear Adriene, Bird, or Kassandra cueing ways to slow down. Similarly, when I’m excited about something I accomplish, I hear one of the yoga teachers in the background draw my awareness to a part of my body that I’d otherwise neglect. It’s soothing and grounding in ways I suspected my work life was lacking, although didn’t necessarily know how to remedy.

The endless stream of different soundtracks, teachers, and vibes makes it feel like I have an active support system rooting for me, reigning me in, and calming me down.

I started playing yoga videos during non-working hours, too. On the weekends, when I want to get a lot done (laundry, creative projects, hanging out with friends), I play a yoga video and make sure autoplay is turned on. The playlist reminds me that I’m not alone, and it grounds me in that same warm and irrepressibly good way I get from going to yoga class—without me having to go anywhere or do anything.