No time for adequate sleep? Meditation might help in replenishing energy

When entrepreneurs feel exhausted but don't have enough time to catch up on adequate hours of sleep, they can replenish their energy with mindfulness exercises such as meditation, a recent study suggests.

While mindfulness exercises cannot work as a substitute to the goodness of sleep, according to the researchers, the exercises might help compensate and provide a degree of relief.

"As little as 70 minutes a week, or 10 minutes a day, of mindfulness practice may have the same benefits as an extra 44 minutes of sleep a night," said Charles Murnieks, lead author of the study.

Entrepreneurs are generally defined as people involved in the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of new business opportunities, often with a stake in the ownership of new ventures. Entrepreneurship can be exhilarating, but it also can be difficult, stressful and tiring work. "You can only work so hard for so long," Murnieks said.

Finding of the study were published in the Journal of Business Venturing.

Generally, when people are feeling exhausted, their drive to achieve goals is lowered, they have less desire to complete work tasks and they may find it harder to rise to and address challenges, all of which are important processes of entrepreneurship.

Exhaustion is a pervasive problem for entrepreneurs working on new ventures, but there is little existing research exploring the levels of exhaustion experienced by this group or how they handle it. In their research, Murnieks and his co-authors sought to explore ways entrepreneurs deal with the exhaustion that comes with the work.

In a study of 105 entrepreneurs from around the U.S., the researchers asked participants about their exhaustion levels; whether they engaged in mindfulness practices and if so, how often and for how long; and how many hours they slept each night.

Read Complete Article