Benefits
of Mindfulness
The use of mindfulness can be a new thing for our students, because it is not a practice
used in every school. A lot of studies have shown the importance and the
benefits of mindfulness. It is so simple. The commonly way used to get into a
mindful state is sit on a chair, close your eyes and try to focus on your
breath. In this way, other thoughts won´t enter your mind, and you pay
attention in the present moment.
Now,
I am going to talk about the beneficts of practicing mindfulness in class:
- Stress
Reduction: Many studies
show that mindfulness reduces stress. This is because mindfulness increase the
ability to use emotion regulation strategies and this way, we can select the
emotions. It can be very important for the students, because they sometimes are
stressed, for example when they have exams.
- It can
improve student´s grades: some
ressearches proved that the students who were trained in minfulness performed
better in the verbal reasoning and also improved their working memory.
- Mindfulness
lowers depression risk among teens:
Teaching mindfulness could help the students to reduce anxiety or depression,
because it helps to be more relaxed in all kind of situations.
- It helps to
focus the attention:
mindfulness meditation affects students hability to focus attention and ignore
distracting information.
- Mindfulness
makes us smarter and improves our decision-making: with only fiveteen minutes of
mindfulness focused on breathing, you can think clearly, removing other
thoughts from your mind.
- It
increases our hability to feel empathy for others: some studies show that a brief
meditation intervention make the participants more compassionate and empathic.
- Mindfulness
enhances creativity:
this is very important in education, because as teachers, we want our students
to develop creativity. Mindfulness improve the main factors that determine
levels of creativity: convergent thinking and divergent thinking.
As we can see, there are many
benefits of mindfulness for students, but teachers can take advantage of this
too.
Here,
you can see the power of mindfulness and meditation in a funny way.
Enjoy
it!
An interesting post! As you said in your post, many schools don't practice Mindfulness and this is a shame because is important that children know how to manage the anxiety, arguments, frustrations, the anger...Moreover, I think that Mindfulness will be very useful for teachers too, because sometimes teachers lose their patience with the children, they shout to them and as every human they have problems. For this reason, Mindfulness will be a good tool in schools for the children and for the teachers.
ReplyDeleteBeing sincere, I think that mindfulness has helped me to overtake some stressful situations, so I agree with you, Tamara!
ReplyDeleteRegards!
This post is very interesting and mindfulness could be a good way to avoid some stressful situations.
ReplyDeleteSome benefits are:
- Mindfulness improve creativity or attention.
- Mindfulness helps children to regulate their emotions.
- Mindfulness increases empathy.
On the net there are a lot of different activities to practice Mindfulness inside a class.
Thanks, Tamara, I enjoyed reading this and am glad that you are interested in how mindfulness can help young (and not so young!) people. A few links to the studies and research you refer to would have been good. But all in all this is good work, well done! And finally a question - what has most impacted you in the mindfulness practice we have done in the classroom (or even in your daily life)?
ReplyDelete