Why Mindfulness education for children and adolescents?

Why introduce the practice of Mindfulness in school and educational contexts?

Mindfulness is usually translated as "mindfulness", and its derivation is mindful as "fully attentive".

Fostering knowledge about awareness and attention and being "mindful" lead to deeper awareness than what we come to perceive through shifting emotions and thoughts.

Awareness and attention are in their essence dynamic.We can enhance them and for this purpose we teach the techniques of mental training from a simple and concise pedagogical methodology based on mindfulness.

The relationship between Mindfulness and thoughts

The fact of understanding that one is not "his thought" will allow us to stop identifying ourselves with thought and stop being possessed by it. Mindfulness understands that thought fragments reality.. It is a point of view, the way we interpret our own behaviors or those of others. It is also the significance and intensity we give to an emotion or even a diagnosis. It is only one perspective among many possible ones.

This is easier to understand with the following example. We have the fictitious case of Pedro. Pedro is 16 years old and was diagnosed with dyslexia at the age of 8. During the school years, when Pedro did not have this diagnosis, his thoughts told him; "I cannot study like the rest, therefore I am worth less". When Pedro started his treatment he thought; "I am different and I can't do certain things". Today, after years of therapy and with the practice of Mindfulness, Pedro knows that his dyslexia does not define him, that it is only an aspect of him to take into account for certain situations, and he also knows that he can and is worth as much as others.

The relationship between Mindfulness and emotions

In the same line, we will say that one is not one's emotion. An adolescent is often defined as impulsive, aggressive, intense, with extreme values? Well, these aspects do not really define him. They are simply their emotions that are part of that particular evolutionary stage.

Adolescents are more than all that emotional framework, they are growing people who are building their identity as adults and need to be listened to and understood to really know what is going on in there and to be able to translate their emotional world.

The child and the adolescent are in a process of intellectual learning that is facilitated by the school. But... What about their emotional learning? If our children were educated in this, they would become healthy adults devoid of anxiety symptoms. Anxiety comes when we do not understand ourselves and when we send each other messages of hostility. We can introduce them to this education from an early age, and Mindfulness can accompany them in this function.

Working our Mindfulness fosters the ability to pay attention, and at the same time allows us to develop awareness of what is happening at a given moment, in our own body, with our own emotions and thoughts. In this way we will be able to become aware of what is happening in this particular moment.

The importance of the present moment

Now we must ask ourselves... Why is it important to develop awareness of what is happening here and now?

Well, the answer is thought provoking. When one perceives the feeling of one's own body, the actions of the other, the surrounding context and all of this in its pure state without any judgment or evaluation, one avoids interpreting reality in a fragmented way, one avoids interpreting reality in a fragmented way.Thus, a vision of reality itself as a whole emerges.

When one is able to value a whole beyond oneself, what happens is that one will have the power to decide what to do next without issuing a passive response, i.e. without reacting automatically.

Why do we have to work on our mindfulness to avoid these automatic responses? Because the automatic reaction makes us vulnerable to anxiety, stress, depression and emotional reactivity.. If Peter had not understood both his strengths and weaknesses in his studies as a result of his dyslexia, he would have experienced only negative emotions such as disappointment and frustration when he got a 5 on the dictation test, and this could lead to test anxiety and other self-destructive thoughts.

All this about reactions and interpretations coming from thinking is seen both in the interpersonal relationships in the family and in the school environment.This is why it is so important to increase attention through Mindfulness-based training. In this way, not only the attention capacity would be improved but also the skills of emotional balance would be strengthened.

If we work on our Mindfulness we will understand that reality is something different from the emotion that we have as the response to our emotions. that each one of us gives to a particular situation, and therefore the suffering caused by a given situation begins and ends in ourselves.

Within the family context, among friends, at school and other social contexts, situations arise that lead to reaction without the proper approach to the situation itself, producing an emotional imbalance. All this happens on a daily basis in all areas. That is why Capital Psicólogos proposes the Mindfulness workshop. We will learn to connect with our body according to our evolutionary stage of development, and there will be different proposals for children, adolescents and adults.

Benefits of Mindfulness in the school environment

We can highlight the benefits of practicing meditation in evolutionary stages such as childhood and adolescence, even if they were extensive to all those people in a learning situation, and especially list the benefits to publicize its usefulness in the school environment, as these are less publicized by the media. and above all to enumerate the benefits to make known its usefulness in the school environment, since these are less disseminated by the media.

These are the main psychological benefits of Mindfulness in the school environment:

• It creates the optimal predisposition to learn.
• Increases academic performance.
• Enhances attention and concentration.
• Improves participation in the classroom.
• Promotes impulse control.
• Promotes self-reflection.
• Facilitates tools to reduce stress.
• Reduces test anxiety.
• Enriches social and emotional learning.

Once the benefits have been exposed, we can understand how useful and necessary this practice becomes in order to achieve holistic wellbeing of oneself in as many areas as the social roles we play. From Capital Psicólogos we invite you to know our proposals for Mindfulness workshops for children, adolescents and adults.