Understanding the Significance of Mindfulness in Education

 

It is a known fact that not all stress is unhealthy but there is the healthy part of stress that is so important in life even in childhood.  People of all ages, children and adults alike need to be somewhat challenged in order to develop and grow.

 

This be as it is, the modern education system has seen the healthy stress displaced and its place taken by toxic stress.  All in all, toxic stress happens to be the case when the demands that we happen to face in life happens to be far much over and above the ability that you have to deal with the stressor.  The following are some of the impacts that toxic stress has on the various categories of people involved in education.

 

First is the impact it has on the students.  Toxic stress will actually have an impact on the attention, emotion and mood regulation, sleep and preparedness for learning in quite a number of classrooms.  What makes this all the more worrying a trend is the fact that such cases of prolonged exposure to toxic stress will have quite an impact on the child's mental and physical health going into the future.

 

Toxic stresses as well will have their toll on educators.  As for the Mindfulness practitioner, in most cases the effects of toxic stress will set off in issues such as decreased productivity and creativity in what they do, feelings of anxiety, dissociation, frustrations and these will finally end up in a situation of a total burnout.  As a matter of fact, it is on this that most of the cases and causes of quitting the teaching profession has been attributed.

 

On the parents too, effects have been seen which are as a result of toxic stress.  This has basically led to poor parenting habits where many parents have not quite been as effective at having an emphatic, present centered relationship with their children and instead approach it from a "to do" list style of parenting. Check out this website at http://edition.cnn.com/EDUCATION/archive/ for more info about education.

 

By and large, a number of these problems that we happen to face can be easily sorted by adopting mindfulness and having this in education.  Mindfulness happens to be the ideal solution for the fact that it going to go way beyond the conceptual mind to get to directly tackle the problem.  The need for such kind of an approach is in the fact that the roots of toxic stress actually lie in the nervous system.  MBSR actually develops from the point where we start being as aware of the thoughts that we have, emotions, sensations and the environment around us.