The Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation for the Youth
The sheer spectrum of benefits of meditation for pupils continues to astound me. What I used to regard as esoteric or woo-woo has become mainstream. The advantages are backed up by scientific evidence. I now fully advocate meditation to students, and many of my test success coaching clients do as well.
Meditation has been demonstrated to have a profound effect on the brain, promoting the development of brain structures that control attention, learning, and emotion. All of this results in a plethora of advantages, ranging from greater concentration to improved memory, stress alleviation to improved mental wellness. In this article, we shall discuss the benefits of meditations for students.
Mindfulness vs meditation
Before we get started, a quick sidebar….Is it mindfulness or meditation that I’m referring to? What’s the difference between the two, anyway? Meditation is a multifaceted activity that involves “long contemplation to attain focused concentration.” Simply put, mindfulness is “knowledge of one’s internal condition and surrounds,” and it can take numerous forms.
When you combine the two concepts, you obtain a “ mindfulness meditation.” That’s a technique for developing a mental state of calm concentration by training your attention (as if it were a muscle!).
Most people interpret either word to mean “mindfulness meditation,” and that’s mostly what this essay — and the studies I cite — are about.
Meditation benefits students’ concentration and focus
Mindfulness meditation has a moderate but significant impact on attention-
- Increased concentration
Students who meditate have more control over their concentration and experience less mind wandering. - Improved focus since there are less distractions.
Mindfulness meditation, for example, can help people focus by minimising “mindless reading,” in which they scan the material without fully absorbing the message. - Concentrate for extended periods of time. Mindfulness meditation also enhances performance on tasks that need a long period of sustained concentration.
Meditation has benefits for students’ stress levels
Reduced stress, enhanced well-being, and increased self-esteem are just a few of the emotional advantages of meditation.
1. Reduction in stress levels.
2. One of the main reasons many adults start meditating is to reduce stress.
3. Mindfulness meditation programs help relieve stress in people of all ages, including adults, adolescents, and even preschoolers.
4. Deal with stress more effectively. As a result, overall performance improves.
5. While it’s excellent to reduce stress, it’s rare to be able to completely eradicate it from stressful situations, especially when a significant assignment deadline or major tests are approaching.
6. According to studies, meditation aids in the reduction of exam anxiety.
7. Worrying about the exam, anxieties on test day… As the stakes increase higher, many students experience the jitters. The good news is that students who practice meditation have less anxiety during tests.
8. Increased self-confidence
9. Meditation can also boost students’ self-esteem, which is useful in today’s society where social media seems to be doing everything it can to destroy our self-esteem.
10. More resiliency
According to some studies, meditation can even improve students’ resilience. This because it prepares them better to deal with stressful situations.
11. Social skills have improved.
12. However, multiple studies have demonstrated that mindfulness meditation helps pupils enhance their social abilities. Meditation also appears to make the world a somewhat more trustworthy place: students who meditate trust their peers more.
Greater Empathy and Compassion for All
Firstly, meditation students have more empathy for others and are more willing to help someone in need. Students who meditate, whether they are young children or teens / adolescents, demonstrate a reduction in behavioural difficulties at school. They also have a lower level of hostility toward others.
Improvement in working memory
Working memory, or the amount of knowledge the brain can keep live, online, in the moment at any given time, is an easily measurable cognitive skill (that is closely connected with IQ).
It’s a temporary storage area, similar to RAM on a computer, that decides how many software programmes and browser tabs we may have open at the same time without the computer crashing. Psychologists use activities like the N-back test to assess it (try it here to assess your own working memory!).
There’s a lot of evidence that meditation can help you increase your working memory, which can help you learn and solve problems better.
Improved response inhibition
Another facet of cognitive function is our ability to moderate and, if necessary, block an initial instinct before acting on it. Psychologists love testing for response inhibition, partially because it’s so simple to assess (e.g., the Stroop task, which is a lot of fun if you’ve never done one!).
Meditation enhances response inhibition, which is good news for impulsive students who tend to rush into answers and make mistakes.
Metacognition is how we think about our thoughts, such as how we plan, monitor, and evaluate our learning, or how we think about our moods. It’s a powerful predictor of academic achievement, and there’s evidence that it improves after a meditation practise programme.
Meditation might even alter the very fabric of students’ brain
There’s also evidence that meditation can improve brain structures linked to learning and problem-solving, such as a better developed prefrontal cortex, which handles planning and problem-solving, and a larger density of grey matter in learning and memory-related brain regions.
Improved sleep quality
Sleep is essential for students’ capacity to learn, concentrate, and maintain good physical and mental health (see Matthew Walker’s excellent Why We Sleep). Students who took part in a mindfulness programme had better sleeping habits.
The quality of sleep may also be improved: studies have indicated that those who meditate have more favourable “brain wave” activity when sleeping.
Relieves anxiety
Meditation has been demonstrated in numerous studies to significantly reduce anxiety among pupils at school. Anxiety is frequently associated with worrying about the future, according to psychologists. Meditation may reduce such unwanted future-gazing and so minimise anxiety by training the mind to focus on the present moment.
Meditation can even aid students who are depressed. If worrying about the future triggers anxiety, wondering about the past triggers despair. Meditation, once again, helps the mind stay in the present, avoiding over-thinking about the past and therefore easing depression.
Originally published at https://shouts.site on August 16, 2021.
