4 reasons why students should practice mindfulness — even when it feels impossible

Chegg
·7 min read
illustration of a faceless person with brown skin tone wearing a purple shirt, sitting in a yoga pose on a mat cross-legged, with their hands on their knees and fingers pointing up and pinching. there's a white cat in their lap and a water bottle next to them.
illustration of a faceless person with brown skin tone wearing a purple shirt, sitting in a yoga pose on a mat cross-legged, with their hands on their knees and fingers pointing up and pinching. there's a white cat in their lap and a water bottle next to them.

In some ways, college seems like a bad time of life to practice mindfulness.

Between studying, classes, making friends, dating and applying for jobs and internships, undergrad is chaotic. Who has the time to invest in a new self-care habit?

However, working on your mindfulness — the state of being fully present and aware of your emotions without reacting to or judging them — can be a life raft in the torrential hurricane of stress and excitement that is college. Beyond improving your mental health now, it can help your academic performance and set you up for a lifetime of dealing with difficult emotions well.

“Mindfulness is valuable for everybody, but especially for college students,” says Rebecca Stone, a psychotherapist and the founder of Brooklyn Somatic Therapy.

In case you’re not convinced yet, let’s dive into the ways mindfulness can help improve your life (plus a few super easy ways to get started with this practice).

Stress won’t be able to drag you down

Mindfulness isn’t as simple as taking a few breaths and suddenly feeling calm. In fact, mindfulness isn’t about dispelling stress at all — it’s about learning to feel difficult emotions like stress or anxiety without letting them take over your life.

“Mindfulness teaches us how to hold two truths at the same time so that we never get overtaken by one feeling,” explains Stone. “That capability is so important for healthy processing.”

This skill of paying attention to multiple emotions is crucial in college when there’s always something you could be burning up with stress about: a deadline, an exam, a big class discussion. It never ends! The days in college when you don’t have anything to worry about will be few and far between. If you can learn to hold two feelings at the same time, stress doesn’t have to prevent you from also feeling joy, happiness and gratification.

“When I can notice [both emotions] at the same time, it helps me not over-identify with one,” says Stone. When you’re being mindful about it, you can feel nervous about a test tomorrow and still have a nice time grabbing dinner with your friends.

Next time you’re in a situation where worry is dragging you away from the moment, try an exercise called a “body scan.” Pick a part of your body: the top of your head, the tips of your fingers, maybe a knee or a shoulder. Focus on that spot while taking a few deep breaths and notice how it feels. Acknowledge pain, tension or discomfort without judging it. Imagine the tension decreasing with each breath. Then, move on to another part of the body and do the same. Some areas might feel great — acknowledge that, too. Continue until you’ve scanned your entire body, which should take a few minutes. Not only can this help dispel some stress, but it will also allow you to practice noticing multiple feelings in your body without trying to change any of them.

You’ll have supercharged focus

Most of us spend hours each and every day thinking about the past or fantasizing about the future — a study by Harvard researchers actually suggested that we spend a whole 47% of our time “lost in thought.” You probably know the feeling: You’re trying to complete an assignment and your brain seems to want to focus on anything but that.

Practicing mindfulness can help you witness this kind of mental wandering and plug back in. A 2010 review of 23 different studies found that people who practice mindfulness for even just a few months perform better on tests that require them to shut out distraction. It also shows that long-term meditators are markedly better at maintaining focus, especially for long periods.

Let’s say you’re writing an essay, but you keep thinking about something someone said at a party last night. With a strong mindfulness practice, you’ll have an easier time letting go of those thoughts and focusing on the present task at hand. Before you know it, you’ll have retrieved hours of time that you’d have otherwise spent daydreaming and obsessing, getting your work done more efficiently and having more time for the fun stuff (or for practicing more mindfulness!).

Next time your brain is zipping around when you need it to hone in, try this mindfulness exercise for focus. Pick something in your room to look at, like a photograph or a candle. Imagine your focus as a flashlight shining on that target, so everything else goes dark. Quiet any inner voice that wants to analyze your target, and just try to observe it fully. Your mind will inevitably wander and that’s okay — mindfulness is the process of bringing it back. Do this for a few minutes before getting back to your work and seeing if your mind is a little less tempted by all the delicious thoughts about other things.

You’ll combat depression and anxiety

Increasingly, mindfulness is being touted as a meaningful intervention for depression and anxiety. Many different studies have found a link between mindfulness training and decreased symptoms of these mental health disorders.

The way mindfulness works to quell depression is similar to how it works with stress. You shouldn’t walk in expecting mindfulness to completely cure your depression, but rather to help you detach from it enough for more positive emotions to have space to flourish, suggests Stuart Eisendrath, former director of the University of California, San Francisco Depression Center, in his book When Antidepressants Aren’t Enough: Harnessing the Power of Mindfulness to Alleviate Depression.

Next time you find yourself in a depressive or anxious thought spiral, try out a mindfulness exercise to help label your emotions. Start with a few deep breaths. Then, ask yourself: What am I feeling? What emotions are in my body right now? Label each emotion that comes up, without criticism or judgment, and try saying it aloud in a neutral voice: “Worry, sadness, loneliness, anger, shame.” Then, choose a relaxing word to focus on while you take a few more rounds of deep breaths.

It’s important to note that, while mindfulness is a great tool and it can be a part of a treatment plan, it’s not a replacement for therapy or medication. Anyone struggling seriously with depression or anxiety should see a licensed counselor to talk through what approach makes sense for them.

You’ll train your brain for healthy mental habits for years to come

College students are primed for what’s called “synaptic plasticity,” meaning your brains are more easily shaped than an adult’s. An 18-year-olds’ brain is in a “golden period” for learning new things, says Dr. Frances E. Jensen, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, in a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

That means that practicing mindfulness during ages 18-24 can, as Stone explains, “set our brains and nervous systems up for optimal regulation. It’s really a kind of training.”

It’s kind of like how learning a language as a child takes almost no effort, while verb conjugations in your college Spanish classes feel impossible. It’s a whole lot easier to learn positive mental health practices like mindfulness now than it will be in 10 years — so why not do it? You’ll be making your present life better and helping future you out big time.

The great news is starting to regularly practice mindfulness isn’t that hard, and it doesn’t have to take that much time out of your already busy schedule. There are so many different methods for practicing mindfulness, like meditation, journaling, physical movement and breathwork. It’s worth taking the time to experiment and find what fits into your days.

Best of all, mindfulness can also be done without any structured activity. It can look like pausing when you sit down in class or at your desk, focusing on your breath and quieting your mind, and committing to being in the present moment.

View the original article at Chegg Life and signup for the Chegg Life Newsletter

Related...