Most students don’t experience the academic term with its numerous assignments and tests as a stressless stroll in the park. Researchers, yogis and others have long touted the benefits of meditation, a practice that in some cases revolutionizes the lives of people suffering severe mental or physical distress. Used in the treatment of chronic illness, traumatic stress disorders and depression, meditation has been proven effective.
All this evidence and her own experience with meditation sparked psychology graduate student Jessica Tipsord’s curiosity in meditation research. If meditation helps cancer patients calm anxieties to the point of inhibiting the growth of cancer cells, Tipsord wondered how it might help the average college student.
Tipsord teamed up with Josh Felver-Gant, a graduate student in the Counseling Psychology department, who has practiced meditation himself for nearly seven years and also wanted to incorporate meditation in his research.
Together, they taught mindfulness meditation to a group of students fall term and are now evaluating its effects. They have also continued their research with a new group of students this term, who last term acted as a control group.
Following Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness meditation curriculum, Felver-Gant guides meditation once a week with students and asks them to meditate daily for nearly an hour during the rest of the week.
Felver-Gant said mindfulness is a specific meditation practice that focuses on paying attention to the present moment without judgment. The practice is nonreligious and breaks with some of the Eastern traditions often associated with meditation.
Withholding judgment helps students learn to better focus on the moment, he said, and eventually learn more effectively in the classroom.
“You can be just as distracted by something you’re excited about as something you’re worried about,” Tipsord said.
One of Tipsord’s specific research questions is whether meditation in healthy people can increase empathy and compassion. Not all of the data have been collected, but Tipsord said that so far, practicum participants report that they feel more empathic and better able to read others’ thoughts and feelings.
Most of the students in the practicum were newcomers to meditation, but Tipsord said they enthusiastically volunteered for the course.
“On the first day, we asked, ‘Why are you here?’” Felver-Gant said. “Almost everyone said they wanted to reduce their stress.”
Health center nurse Jude Kehoe has practiced meditation for 38 years and taught a six-week mindfulness meditation course through the health center every term for the past six years. For $15 a term, students attend an hour-long class once a week and learn the practice of quieting the mind.
Stress management takes center stage in Kehoe’s class because the academic demands of college, Kehoe said, make stress a “major factor” in students’ lives. In addition to an endless list of assignments to worry about, Kehoe said, certain aspects of student life serve as a challenge to the practice of meditation.
“Living in the dorms is a barrier,” she said. “There’s so much noise. But learning in that environment can be beneficial because you know you can sit and be quiet even in chaos.”
University senior Kimberly Millican participated in the fall term meditation practicum and said what she learned left her with a lasting impression.
“Mindfulness has helped me manage stress, anxiety, and find peace with myself,” Millican wrote in an e-mail.
Kehoe’s class strives for similar effects, especially in an effort to calm the rapid-fire thoughts and anxieties that often keep students from concentrating and sleeping.
“(In meditation) you start becoming the observer of yourself, so that chattering mind becomes quieter,” she said. “And the observer part of yourself that is calm and nonjudgmental becomes a greater part of ourselves.”
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