Luigi Maselli
Founder Italian Lifestyle Medicine Association, Italy
Title: Effects of school-based mindfulness training on learning skills of secondary school students
Biography
Biography: Luigi Maselli
Abstract
Converging lines of evidence indicate that stress influences learning and memory processes. Hormones and neurotransmitters released during and after stressful events may hamper memory, executive functions and memory retrieval and it depends on the specific memory process or stage that is affected by stress6 and the activity profile of major physiological stress response systems.Unfortunately stressful events are very common in school daily life. School children often encounter stressful events inside, for example: exams, evaluations and deadlines, and outside of their school environment and nearly 70% of primary school children report symptoms of stress such as worries, anxiety or sadness. Situations like these could have a critical impact on students performance and on their cognitive ability. Indeed further evidences show that stress may induce a shift from a flexible, ‘cognitive’ form of learning towards rather rigid, ‘habit’-like behaviour. All these stress-induced changes may explain some of the difficulties of learning and remembering under stress in the classroom. Taking these insights from research into account could bear the introduction of supporting strategies to facilitate processes of education for students and teachers as well. Brief mindfulness meditation and lovingkindness meditation are two aspects of mindfulness practice that have the potential to decrease students' feelings of anxiety and stress, and increase their sense of wellbeing and capacity for compassion for self and for others. School appears to be an appropriate setting for such interventions, since children spend a lot of time there and interventions can be brought directly to groups of children in areas of need as part of a preventive approach at little cost. Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment. Mindfulness practice may teach students “from the inside out” to cultivate self-management of attention and increase self-awareness by focusing on intrapsychic experiences, such as thoughts, emotional states, the breath, and other bodily sensations.