In Leisureguy’s Guide to Gourmet Shaving the Double-Edge Way (the latest edition of the Guide), I discuss how shaving supports mindfulness, which I take to be a focused and non-judgmental awareness of what is happening at the the present moment—being clearly aware of what your various senses are experiencing and what you as a result are feeling, with that awareness unmediated by words or thoughts; being alert and aware and in the moment, paying attention to, and absorbed in, your immediate experience, without thoughts of the past or the future.
It’s a state of mind people often get when they are in a completely natural environment, with no mark of human activity. And it’s a state of mind that seems to offer emotional and psychological benefits (and thus, indirectly, physical benefits).
In Motherboard Emiko Jozuka describes an experiment soon underway to see what effects mindfulness training will have on early teens:
For the last two years, 14-year-old Enaya Ali has been taking part in “mindfulness” training—a technique designed to improve attention and resilience —at her local school in the UK.
“I suffer a lot from anxieties so I’ll have moments where I’ll find it difficult. But I’ll have a mindfulness moment, and when I come back from it, I’m more in control of myself,” Ali told me over the phone.
A new trial, launched yesterday, aims to scientifically test the effectiveness of mindfulness training as a way of bolstering young people’s resilience to mental health disorders later on in life. With multiple research institutions and nearly 6,000 teenagers taking part over a seven-year period, the study is pretty epic. If successful, mindfulness training could be incorporated into UK schools.
For the uninitiated, “mindfulness” is a mental state that allows us to be able to pay attention to how our emotions and thoughts are developing in the present moment. It’s a skill that can be trained, and researchers believe that the technique helps us better navigate our social relationships, and ward off negative thoughts and feelings.
In the £6.4 million (almost $10 million) three-part study launched yesterday, researchers at the University of Oxford, University College London, University of Exeter, and the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, will assess whether introducing this training more widely across schools could prevent teenagers from developing mental health disorders in adulthood. The Wellcome Trust, a global medical and health non-profit, reports that over 75 percent of mental disorders begin before the age of 25 and half by 15.
“Some 50 percent of all mental health problems will emerge by late adolescence, so it’s really a key window where we could potentially do something to change the trajectory of young people’s lives,” Willem Kyuken, the study’s principal investigator and a research clinical psychologist from the University of Oxford, told me. “We could potentially prevent mental health problems, and enhance the possibility for [adolescents] to flourish.”
The trial, involving students from 76 schools, is expected to begin in late 2016. In the first part of the study, thirty-eight schools will train 11-14 year old students in mindfulness over 10 lessons within a school term, as part of the normal curriculum. Thirty-eight other schools will act as a control by teaching regular personal, health, and social education lessons.
In a second, lab-based part of the study, researchers from UCL and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit will examine whether mindfulness training improves the emotional and self-control of nearly 600 participants between the ages of 11 to 16. The third part of the study sees researchers testing the best ways of training teachers to give mindfulness lessons to their students, and evaluating the potential challenges of implementing the training at schools. . .
Filed under: Education, Mental Health, Science, Shaving
