Uni stress and mindfulness

I have been leading Student Mindfulness sessions at University of Glasgow. Students can feel under immense pressure during their time at university. Specific pinch points can happen at certain points in the journey - settling in when just arrived and the hope of making friends and feeling settled, stress around exam times and essay deadlines, leaving university and transitioning on - making decisions about what’s next on the horizon. Other pressures can be family expectations for students to do well and the enormity for many students in learning more about who they are and how they want to live. With all these decisions and thoughts racing around a practice which calms the mind can be hugely beneficial for students. In one session when teaching mindfulness to an international student he shared after meditation his insight that he could see the more he fed his anxious thoughts the more he could feel the stress building. He so clearly saw the relationship in his mind between an anxious thought arising, following this thought, adding more thoughts and the feeling of stress becoming greater. This gave him a window of opportunity to, a choice in that moment to continue to feed the thoughts with more do something different. If you are a student yourself or you have any students in your life it is really encouraging to read research around the impact of mindfulness practice on their lives. ‘Students who practise mindfulness typically report significantly lower levels of stress after completing an 8-week mindfulness programme.’ (Sáez-Navarrete et al., 2023; Dawson et al., 2020). A powerful impact of mindfulness practice is our capacity to be less hard on ourselves in times of difficulty ‘Students often say they're kinder to themselves after learning mindfulness, becoming less caught up in perfectionism and self-criticism’ (Dawson et al., 2020). So if mindfulness can help our students feel less stressed and more compassionate to themselves I think this is something worth exploring for our education institutions.