Mindfulness

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the act of bringing the full attention of the mind to the present moment and accepting what is here without judgement. Thích Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, said: 

“Mindfulness is all about paying attention and about the awareness, inquiry, discernment, and wisdom that arise from careful and care-filled attending.”

Some describe the 2 wings of mindfulness as being: awareness + compassion. We bring our curiosity and attention to something in the present moment, and then we soften and bring compassion and care. When practising mindfulness, we often use the senses and feelings in the body to harness the attention of the mind. In some ways the ‘mind’ in ‘mindfulness’ can be confusing because we immediately think of the thinking mind. And it’s exactly this that we want to let go of, in the sense that we don’t want the thinking mind to be in control anymore, it does that all day, every day we experience 12,000 - 80,000 thoughts a day. In fact, a more accurate translation of the word might be “heart-presence.” 

The compassion or care part is just as important as the attention part – if we judge ourselves for having lots of thoughts, or judge the thoughts themselves, or the emotions we’re feeling as good or bad, then we can create more suffering – which is not the purpose of mindfulness. We need to let each thought, each physical sensation, each emotion arise – we greet and recognise it for what it is (e.g. thinking about that difficult conversation, or feeling anxious), allow it to be there, hold it without judgement and with care.

Sitting meditation is just one form of mindfulness, but mindfulness can be practised doing literally anything. And the whole point of mindfulness is that we do bring it to every activity. Thích Nhat Hanh actively encourages the practice of mindfulness when doing those mundane daily tasks like brushing your teeth or washing the dishes. When we bring our full attention, with curiosity and care, to these activities, they become far less mundane and actually fascinating. These are the best times to practise, because they happen every day, it’s a short amount of time and builds up our capacity for mindfulness. 

We’ve probably all experienced times when mindfulness has just happened naturally with no effort, for example when a scene in nature completely captures your full attention, when you’ve been totally engrossed in a piece of work, in ‘flow’, and at times of extreme significance and emotion, both joyful and sad, such as when new baby is born or when a loved one dies. Our attention becomes so focussed on what’s in front of us that we stop noticing time and our thoughts stop intruding on our experience.

Modern mindfulness originated in the world of physical health: Jon Kabat-Zinn, an American professor of medicine, was working at Massachusetts Medical Hospital, where he developed his original 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course to help patients with physical health conditions, particularly pain, whose symptoms were proving intractable for the treatments available. 

In 2019, Cresswell and colleagues conducted a systematic review of much of the research over the last 2 decades into the effects of mindfulness interventions on physical health. They found that many of the randomised control studies showed the power of mindfulness to reduce pain in patients who experienced chronic pain from conditions such as back pain, rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia, as well as improving symptoms for patients with psoriasis, IBS, ulcerative colitis, HIV, cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. The effect of mindfulness-based interventions and therapy on mental health, particularly for reducing anxiety, depression and stress, is even more encouraging (see the American Psychological Association and Khoury et al).

The benefits of mindfulness for children

Measuring the benefits of mindfulness is a relatively new area of study that’s only really existed for the past 20 years. Various researchers around the world have been conducting studies into the benefits of mindfulness on children in school settings. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBI) in schools impact on many aspects of children’s well-being. Research demonstrates positive impact on children’s:

• Physical well-being including blood pressure, heart rate, cortisol, and improvements in sleep;

• Mental health including a reduction in burnout, depression, and stress with emerging evidence for impacts on anxiety, trauma, and eating and sleep disorders;

• Social and emotional skills including positive self-concept, the skills of self-management including emotional recognition and emotional literacy emotion regulation, resilience, motivation, optimism and persistence, and on the relational skills of sociability, caring, empathy, and compassion;

• Learning and cognition including self-regulation, executive function, attention and focus, metacognition, and cognitive flexibility;

• Psycho-social well-being including positive mood, self-efficacy, empathy and connectedness, across all age ranges.

Here is an overview of some the specific results of these research studies:

• In 2018, Dunning and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of 33 independent studies using randomised control trials with 3,666 children and adolescents as participants. The results showed that mindfulness-based interventions (MBI) had significant positive effects on executive function, attention, depression, anxiety, stress and negative behaviours, confirming the efficacy of MBI for improving the mental health and well-being of youth (Dunning et al. 2018);

• In 2014, a systematic review of 24 studies showed that “mindfulness-based interventions in children and youths hold promise, particularly in relation to improving cognitive performance and resilience to stress” (Zenner et al. 2014);

• Another study looking at a specific mindfulness programme taught by classroom teachers to their students showed evidence that mindfulness led to significant improvements in executive functioning skills, an increase in self-control abilities, and significant reductions in aggression, social problems and anxiety beneficial in increasing self-regulatory abilities (Parker et al. 2014);

• In 2015, Butzer and colleagues reported that yoga and mindfulness decrease cortisol concentrations in children which is incredibly useful for stress management (Butzer et al. 2015);

• Mindfulness-based intervention has the “potential to improve children’s self-awareness, attention, self-regulation, and social relationship skills” (Andreu et al. 2021);

• “Youth in underserved, urban communities are at risk for a range of negative outcomes related to stress, including social-emotional difficulties, behaviour problems, and poor academic performance. Mindfulness-based approaches may improve adjustment among chronically stressed and disadvantaged youth by enhancing self-regulatory capacities.” (Mendelson et al. 2010).

And there are also huge benefits when teachers practise mindfulness, which of course, has a positive knock-on effect for the children they teach:

• MBIs can help reduce teacher mental health problems, including burnout, depression and stress and anxiety; 

• Teachers who engage in MBIs are generally more effective in the classroom, being better able to focus on concepts and processes rather than on content and behaviour management and to stay on task and resist distraction; 

• Teachers who engage in MBIs generally relate more effectively to student behaviour, with more empathy and presence, and create calmer and more focused classroom environments. 

• Thích Nhat Hanh & Katherine Weare explain:

“Mindfulness can help us learn the embodied skills that can support us to stay solid, relaxed, open-minded, calm, and reflective so that we do not take challenges personally and can better manage our own emotional stress. Our steadiness can help a pupil calm down, stand back, and reflect on the meaning of his or her behavior, allowing him or her to make more positive choices in moving forward. If our students learn mindfulness too, and everyone shares the same practices and manages their own behavior mindfully, our task is easier: but even without such conditions, mindfulness helps the teacher stay solid.”

In the UK, there has been some high profile attention paid towards mindfulness and its benefits for children. In 2019, the then Education Secretary Damian Hinds announced the launch of a study in 370 schools into the effects of a mindfulness program on mental health led by the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families and UCL, due to finish in Autumn 2024. And The Mindfulness Initiative was founded in 2013 to support British politicians in forming the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Mindfulness to bridge the gap between contemplative practice and public policy. They fund research and aim to bring about social change. In 2021, they released an evidence-based guide called ‘Implementing Mindfulness in Schools’. The authors, Katherine Weare and Adrian Bethune state:

“…[T]he growing evidence base of empirical research is making clear that mindfulness is a foundational capacity which can support many aspects of mental and physical well-being in teachers and school students simultaneously. It appears to work by strengthening some of the core mechanisms which underpin human flourishing, including the ability to focus the attention, to step back from the thinking process, and to develop the capacity for exercising emotion regulation and self-regulation.”

Mindfulness and the brain

Mindfulness meditation can actually ‘rewire’ the brain. It increases the density and complexity of connections in areas in the brain associated with attention, emotional awareness, self awareness, introspection, kindness, compassion, and clear thinking. It decreases activity in areas of the brain involved in stress, anxiety, hostility, hyper-vigilance, and impulsivity.

Each time we have a thought, the practice is to unhook from that thought and come back to the breath or whatever anchor keeps you in the present moment, rather than getting lost in the story around the thought. Over time and repeated practice, this happens more easily and faster i.e. we spend less time getting caught up in the thoughts. It’s like repeatedly walking through an untrodden path in a forest, clearing away the bushes and over time, making a new path. By practising mindfulness we begin to actually change our brains by increasing neural pathways and connections. This process is called neuroplasticity.

This change means that when we are doing other things such as working and learning – we have a greater ability to bring our full attention to the task at hand rather than being constantly distracted by the up to 80,000 of thoughts running through our minds.

The image below shows a common model of the brain known as the ‘Triune Brain.’ While this is slightly simplistic, it provides a helpful model for understanding the different parts of our brain. It defines 3 parts of the brain that refer to the stages of evolution when these parts developed. The lizard or reptilian brain is evolutionarily the oldest and which we share with reptiles, followed by the mammalian, which we share with all other mammals, and then the part of the brain that only exists in primates and humans, but is more developed in humans.

Lots of situations can put us into autopilot, or fight/flight (see more on the nervous system below) governed by the reptilian part of our brain that handles all of our automatic bodily functions such as heart rate, breathing and blood pressure. However, practising mindfulness gives us more control over how quickly the lower part of our brain takes over. It’s the prefrontal cortex that’s engaged when we practise mindfulness. 

Dan Siegel and Tina Bryson provide a very useful model of the brain to explain how presence and mindfulness can slow down or prevent the switch to autopilot. They present a model of the brain split into 2 parts - with the reptilian and mammalian brain as the ‘downstairs’ brain, and the human brain as the ‘upstairs’ brain.

Taken from The Whole-Brain Child by Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson

To support children to understand this, they use their hand model of the brain:

The fingers represent the cortex and they cover over the thumb representing limbic areas of the brain, including the amygdala (our internal danger alarm system) and the hippocampus. The lower part of the palm represents the brain stem, or reptilian brain. They explain that when the cortex is engaged i.e. the fingers are covering the thumb, the prefrontal cortex which is the rational, thinking, conscious part of the brain, can help calm the limbic brain which governs our big emotions like anger and fear. When a stressful situation arises such as a child knocking down another child’s tower, or a teacher shouting, we can ‘flip our lid.’ This means our fingers pop up (as in the left hand side of the above image) and our ‘downstairs’ brain takes over. This means big emotions can dominate. However, if we’re able to take a deep breath and engage our ‘upstairs’ brain, we’re more likely to be able to stay calm, even in the face of stressful situations. The more that children, and adults, practise mindfulness, the more able they’ll be to take that deep breath and engage their prefrontal cortex to make the right choices.

Mindfulness and the nervous system

Our nervous systems haven’t evolved that much since we were hunter gatherers 70,000 years ago, which evolutionarily speaking, isn’t that long. So when we experience the everyday stresses of modern life e.g. traffic, work deadlines, relationship issues, even running late for something – our breathing is often shallow and this is enough of an indicator to turn on our sympathetic nervous system and put us into fight or flight mode. The hypothalamus floods the system with adrenaline and cortisol and, among other things, these hormones increase our heart rate and speed up our breathing – the faster breath brings more oxygen to the blood and the increased heart rate pumps that oxygenated blood to our major muscles in the arms and legs in preparation for fight or flight. 

Now this was essential in times when we may have encountered a sabre toothed tiger and needed to run to save our lives. But back then, this wouldn’t have happened very often. And when it did, we would physically shake after the event (as animals often do after experiencing stress or trauma – see more on this in our article on trauma here) and we would return to a relaxed state with deep breathing. However, when our physiological response to stress is overactive, as it is for most of us living in modern society, it becomes harder and harder for our body to come out of the fight/flight response. This means all that lovely oxygenated blood is being diverted from the major organs in our torso nearly all of the time. This explains why there are such high rates of digestive, reproductive and autoimmune diseases.

All we need to do to switch into the parasympathetic nervous system, is to take a deep breath engaging our diaphragm. There is a cranial nerve called the vagus nerve that runs from the brainstem down through the heart, diaphragm and all our major organs. So when we take a deep breath, the vagus nerve sends a message to the brain that our life is not in danger. This then activates or maintains the parasympathetic nervous system.

Another important thing to note, in fight/flight the neural networks for empathy are switched off – which makes sense in a life or death situation where one needs to be totally self-focused – but in everyday life, this is not useful. Others become ‘unreal’, so it becomes easier to treat them badly and is often the deeper cause of antisocial behaviour. As the Dalai Lama once said, “If every 8 year old in the world is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation.”

Mindfulness and the breath

One of the main anchors for mindfulness practice is the breath. As well as helping us to stay in the present moment, it also has this magical ability to support our nervous system, as described above. Diaphragmatic breathing is the key to engaging the vagus nerve and letting the brain and nervous system know that we’re not in danger and can relax.

The diaphragm is a huge dome-shaped muscle that sits between the chest and abdomen like a parachute. It attaches in the front to the bottom of the breast bone, throughout the sides  on the inner surfaces of the cartilage of the 7th to 12th ribs, and at the back, all the way down the front of the spine from the 1st to the 4th lumbar vertebrae. There are openings in the diaphragm to allow the passage of blood vessels, nerves and the oesophagus to connect the organs above and below the diaphragm. The pericardium (the sac of connective tissue surrounding the heart) is connected to the diaphragm.

When relaxed the diaphragm is in this dome shape, when contracted it flattens. It flattens on the inhale, displacing the soft contents of the abdomen – the organs are massaged, rolled around, squeezed and bathed in new blood and oxygen – this is why the belly expands on the inhale (‘belly breathing’). We’re not actually breathing into our belly but it looks that way. This is how we naturally breathe -  anyone who has watched a baby breathe will notice how their belly rises and falls with the breath. The change to shallow chest breathing is happening increasingly earlier in childhood. 

As the diaphragm flattens, more space is created in the chest cavity, decreasing the pressure in the chest below the atmospheric pressure outside the body. This causes air to be drawn in through the nostrils to the lungs. To fully exhale, the diaphragm must return to its relaxed dome shape, pushing the lungs back up, reducing the space, increasing the pressure and thereby forcing air back out of the body. Try putting your hands on your belly now – can you feel the expansion on the inbreath?

The diaphragm doesn’t just move up and down though, it also broadens and fans outwards in a horizontal plane. We use the intercostal muscles between our ribs to expand the ribs outwards in all directions to further flatten the diaphragm on the inhale and create more space for the lungs and the breath. Can you put your hands on the sides of your ribs and focus on moving them outwards with your breath? The lungs are actually largest at the back, feel how far down your ribs go. Try breathing into this space. The lower lungs have a higher density of blood capillaries meaning that the greatest diffusion of oxygen and carbon dioxide happens here and therefore, chest breathing results in less efficient oxygen exchange.

However, most people do not breathe deeply on a regular basis. Many people experience a chronic tightening of the abdomen and pelvic floor, which doesn’t allow the diaphragm to fully flatten downwards. This leads most people to use the secondary respiratory muscles around the upper chest, neck and shoulders (upper trapezius, scalenes, sternocliedomastoid, levator scapulae and pectoralis minor). But these are far less efficient and much more tiring. Our ability to inhale is greatly reduced, and when we can’t inhale completely, we tend to exhale quickly and thus not completely in order to grab another inhalation in the hope of getting more air. A cycle is set up whereby the harder we try to breathe the less air we get.

The heart is also massaged when we breathe deeply, because of the attachment of the pericardium to the diaphragm. Evidence shows that people prone to heart attacks breathe predominantly in their chests, and that a programme of diaphragmatic breathing can reduce chances of heart attack patients suffering a second one (Farhi 1996).

For all these reasons, we practise mindfulness every day at Wildwood Nature School. The teachers receive regular mindfulness training as well as a weekly yoga and mindfulness class. They teach the children about all of the elements described above - the breath, the nervous system, the brain - so that children can not only practise mindfulness, but also deeply understand the reasons why it’s so beneficial. We use the MindUP curriculum to support our teaching of mindfulness.

References:

American Psychological Association (2019) Mindfulness meditation: A research-proven way to reduce stress. Website accessed 3.08.23 [https://www.apa.org/topics/mindfulness/meditation]

Andreu C.I., Araya-Veliz C. & Garcia-Rubio C. (2021) ‘Benefits of a mindfulness-based intervention at school from the perspective of at-risk children’ Mindfulness. 

Butzer B., Day D., Potts A., Ryan C., Coulombe S., Davies B., Weidknecht K., Ebert M., Flynn L. & Khalsa S.B.S. (2015) ‘Effects of a classroom-based yoga intervention on cortisol and behaviour in second- and third-grade students: A pilot study. Journal of Evidence Based Complementary Alternative Medicine 20(1). 

Creswell J.D., Lindsay E.K., Villalba D.K., Chin B. (2019) ‘Mindfulness Training and Physical Health: Mechanisms and Outcomes.’ Psychosom Med. Apr;81(3):224-232.

Dudeja J.P. (2017) ‘Scientific Analysis of Mantra-Based Meditation and Its Beneficial Effects: An Overview.’ International Journal of Advanced Scientific Technologies in Engineering and Management Sciences 3(6).

Dunning D.L., Griffiths K., Kuyken W., Crane C., Foulkes L., Parker J. & Dalgleish T. (2018) ‘Research review: The effects of mindfulness-based interventions on cognition and mental health in children and adolescents -  a meta-analysis of randomized control trials.’ The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

Farhi, D. (1996) The Breathing Book. Good health and vitality through essential breath work. St Martin’s Griffin: New York. 

Hanh, T.N. & Weare, K. (2017) Happy Teachers Change the World. Berkeley: Parallax Press.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (2006) Mindfulness for beginners - reclaiming the present moment and your life. Boulder: Sounds True.

Khoury B., Lecomte T., Fortin G., Masse M., Therien P., Bouchard V., Chapleau M., Paquin K., Hofmann S.G. (2013) ‘Mindfulness-based therapy: A comprehensive meta-analysis.’ Clinical Psychology Review, 33(6):763-771.

Parker A.E., Kupersmidt J.B., Mathis E.T., Scull T.M., Sims, C. (2014) ‘The impact of mindfulness education on elementary school students: Evaluation of the Master Mind program.’  Advances in School Mental Health Promotion 7(3).

Mendelson T., Greenberg M.T., Dariotis J.K., Gould L.F., Rhoades B.L., Leaf P.J. (2010) ‘Feasibility and preliminary outcomes of a school-based mindfulness intervention for urban youth.’ Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology38(7).

Siegel, D. J. & Bryson, T. P. (2012) The Whole-Brain Child: 12 proven strategies to nurture your child’s developing mind. London: Robinson.

Weare, K. & Bethune, A. (2021) The Mindfulness Initiative. Implementing mindfulness in schools: An evidence-based guide. Accessed 19.05.21 [https://www.themindfulnessinitiative.org/implementing-mindfulness-in-schools-an-evidence-based-guide]

Zenner C., Herrnleben-Kurz S., Walach H. (2014) ‘Mindfulness-based interventions in schools – a systematic review and meta-analysis.’ Frontiers in Psychology 5.