More and more people are waking up to the benefits of mindfulness and an article for Study International recently highlighted how mindfulness can benefit you when you’re studying, whether you’re at university or focusing on a professional course.
As the news provider explained, mindfulness is a state of awareness that allows you to really focus on the present, which has obvious benefits when you are studying and trying to learn. However, mindfulness also has a host of benefits you may not have considered before.
Among them is that it can boost your creativity, with the publication citing one study that discovered a mindfulness practice can enhance your ability to concentrate, as well as promote metacognitive awareness.
One of the main reasons why mindfulness techniques, as well as meditation, can improve creativity is that they encourage divergent thinking, which essentially means your ability to come up with lots of different ideas, an article for Inc.com noted.
“Divergent thinking is important, because many studies demonstrate that the people who come up with the most creative ideas are typically those who come up with the most ideas overall. That is quantity leads to quality,” the publication stated.
The other correlation between mindfulness and creativity that was identified was around the ability to reserve judgement on thoughts, which is useful when it comes to creative thinking as it allows you to explore ideas in greater detail rather than dismissing them out of hand.
In addition to improving creativity, the Study International article also noted that another reason why mindfulness techniques can be beneficial for students is that they can help to reduce stress.
It cited a study conducted at Georgetown University, which invited students to undergo a stress test, followed by an eight-week course in mindfulness meditation at the end of which they repeated the stress test.
This particular piece of research recorded lower levels of the stress hormones in the participants following their eight-week mindfulness meditation course, as well as the participants reporting feeling lower levels of stress during their test.
Meanwhile, an article for Harvard Health Publishing noted that mindfulness can help to improve attention, which has obvious benefits for those in education.
Interestingly, the study cited by the publication found that an eight-week mindfulness course not only had immediate benefits on the attention span of the participants, but that improvements were also reported six months after the course was completed.
During this particular study, researchers recorded changes in brain physiology that corresponded with the improvements in attention span.
The two important physiological changes that were recorded were in a strengthening of participants’ brain pathways that process the information being sent through the senses and an improvement in the brain’s ability to direct its attention to the information that was of interest in that context.
Essentially this meant participants were able to see information more clearly after learning mindfulness techniques and they were better able to focus and ignore distractions, the publication explained.
If you’re interested in online mindfulness therapy, whether you’re a student or not, get in touch to find out how developing a regular mindfulness practice can benefit you.