Sedentary lifestyle, erratic eating habits like excessive consumption of fast food and stress at the workplace are rapidly taking a toll on the lives of Indian youth. And, when it comes to the IT city Bengaluru, this stress is the leading cause of suicide with one student taking his/her life everyday in Karnataka. In order to address these grave issues of today’s times, IIHMR University held a two-day major management development conference on ‘Managing stress and work-life balance for working professionals’ at IIHMR campus here.

The major objective of the conference was to help participants recognize stress, understand its nature and learn to manage it in an effective way to improve the overall performance of individual and organizations. The event focused on work-life balance concepts, understanding and determinants of well-being, understanding the nature of stress, managing the body to cope with stress: role of posture, breathing and yoga, managing time, managing the mind: meditation and mindfulness and working towards work-life balance.
 
Few special lectures-cum-discussions were conducted by experts including Dr Pankaj Gupta, President, IIHMR University, Jaipur; Soumitra Kumar Das, Global HR Leader and CEO; Vijai Pandey, Head of Assessments, The Psychometric World and Dr Usha Manjunath,  Director, IIHMR Bangalore besides hands-on peace session on breathing, yoga, meditation and Yoga Nidra.
 
Dr Pankaj Gupta said, “Stress has become an integral part of our personal and professional lives. This has significantly influenced our performance at work as well as our quality of life at home. Most of the time we are driven by ‘I’ factor but we need to work on a collective level and that can be achieved by looking at spiritual connotations of our lives. Mindfulness is all about being here and now and accepting yourself the way you’re and you’re not".
 
The first day of the event came to an end with Director Dr Usha Manjunath expressing her gratitude to all the speakers and panellists.
 
“Work-life balance not only affects the individual but also affects the organization. Therefore, today solving work-life balance conflict is the concern for all growing organizations and can be taken as part of organizational development. Through this event, we explored some of the ways of building a healthier work-life balance by adopting a healthy lifestyle,” Director IIHMR Bangalore, Dr Usha Manjunath added.