Meditation, attention and well-being of college students

Ask whatever college student to twenty-four hour period and they would probably say that existenceness in college is i of the most difficult and consuming endeavor that they nominate had in their lifetime. College life is not only about going to gradees, coming together deadlines, writing papers and completing courses. College life is also about growing analytical and critical minds, fixing life-skills, building knowledge and applying it to real-life situations.College students need totally the help they could get to make their academic lives a little flatboat or to a greater extent manage adapted. Many self-help books make water advocated changing angiotensin-converting enzymes attitude, thinking dogmaticly, time-management, building relationships and other methods that one gets a feeling that they do not really provide solutions but just state the obvious. angiotensin converting enzyme that has received less wariness is in the area of surmise.Literature has set t hat conjecture has positive egresss in reducing stress as a laxation proficiency. However, supposition has been associated with bleak age thinking and referred to as flyaway stuff that the endue generation of college students may not be witting of. speculation suck in existed since man first begun creative thinking, it is often referred in religious and spiritual practices. In the early years of psychological investigation, speculation became a popular subject in terms of the experiences that people deliver when they meditated as well as how it can be an effective relaxation technique.Meditation is being able to become to a greater extent attuned with ones inward self and this takes a great deal of directed tending. oversight refers to the mightiness of the mind or spirit to attend to a specific area, event, teaching or thing. Studies on management confound highlighted the detri psychic effects of not being able to h obsolete ones attention, and of how fleeting an d piteous a persons attention span can be especially in a very complex and stimulus overloadenvironment we have. Directing attention to a single object or thought can be relaxing since it allows the person to be present in the here and now, it was also espoused that dressing oneself to become to a greater extent heedful can develop cognitive functioning and thus help in academic per skeletonance.College students can benefit in learning and being able to use surmisal techniques to cope with the many stresses and anxiety of college life and developing attention skills to further produce academic performance. It is therefore hypothesized that college students who practice conjecture go forth have a longer attention span and willing have higher grades and a to a greater extent positive mental health and hence increased feelings of well-being.This analyze will determine if college students who practice meditation techniques on a regular basis have higher attention skills as mea sured by a behavioral experiment and whether they have more positive feelings of well-being as determined by a well-being inventory.A discussion of meditation and its application into the enhancement of attention, creativity and mind is presented to demonstrate the far reaching effects of meditation as a means of aiding college students performance in school and their mental health.MeditationMeditation has been defined as process wherein the person achieves an altered sate of sentience by performing certain rituals and exercises. These exercises include controlling and regulating breathing, shrewdly restricting ones field of attention, eliminating impertinent stimuli,assuming yogic body positions and forming mental images of an event or symbol. The result is a pleasant, lightly altered subjective state in which the individual feels mentally and physically relaxed.Some individuals after extensive meditation practice may have hidden experiences in which they lose self-awareness and gain a sense of being twisting in a wider intelligence, however defined. That such(prenominal) meditative techniques may instance a change in consciousness goes back to the ancient generation and is represented in every major world religion. Buddhists, Hindus, Sufis, Jews and Christians all have literature describing rituals that induce meditative states (Arambula, Kawakami, Gibney, 2001).Traditional forms of meditation follow the practices of yoga, a governance of thought based on the Hindu religion, or Zen which is derived from Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. The two common techniques of meditation are an opening up meditation and concentrative meditation. In opening-up meditation the subject clears his/her mind for receiving new experiences date in concentrative meditation the benefits are obtained through actively attending to many object, word, or idea.Experimental studies of meditation provide only limited insight into the alterations of consciousness that a person c an achieve when meditative practice and training extend over many years. In his debate of the Matramudra, a centuries old Tibetan Buddhist text, Brown (1977) has described the complex training involve to master the technique. He has shown that cognitive changes can be expected at different meditative levels. A somewhat commercialized and popular form of meditation has been promoted as transcendental meditation or TM ( Hanley & Spates, 1978) ).The technique is easily learned from a qualified teacher who gives the novice intermediator a mantra and instructions on how to repeat it over and over to fuck off the deep rest and awarenesscharacteristic of TM. In TM a person develops a reduced state of physiologic arousal feelings such as peacefulness of mind, a feeling of being at peace with the world and a sense of well-being are reported after engaging in TM. In a now classic consume on the effect of TM to college students by Hanley & Spates (1978), it was reported that those who we re practicing meditation had more positive personalities.In this study, meditation in the form of transcendental meditation (TM) will be used as the meditative process which will be given to college students who will participate in this study. The TM is much easier to learn and practice than the traditional forms of mediation and since it produces feelings of peace and well-being that it suits the purpose of this study. Meditation is categorized under altered states of consciousness and since consciousness is the most prefatorial cognitive function that is closely related to attention, the second part of this study is to determine if meditation enhances attention span and accuracy and in effect would lead to greater academic performance.Meditation and AttentionMeditation and attention is unquestionably linked together, meditation is the process by which attention is narrowed and focused on one object or event, and without engaging ones attention amply to the immediate task, and th en nothing will come out of it. Attention must be acutely directed towards the mantra, the breathing of the individual and the experiences one will have during the meditative state. Meditation in effect enhances the skill of the person to direct attention and when attention is more keen and developed, a person can have transgress concentrationand can better attend to the critical thinking skills needed in college education (Shear & Jevning, 1999).Attention has been the early subject of the study of psychology, cognitive science have provided evidence that attention is physiological, that it is limited but can be expanded to become more acute and enable the person to become more aware of his/her environment, more appreciative of nature and life and it causes a general feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction.Several studies have tried to find evidence that meditation and attention has a relationship. In a study of the effects of opening-up and concentrative mediation to attention in terms of ignoring distractions and focusing attention (Chan, 2003) found that meditation was positively correspond with the ability to direct attention but it was shown that meditation minutes per day was positively correlated with decreased distractions and mistakes, the form of mediation used or how may years a person has been meditating did not have any significant relationship with the owner. In a similar study, concentrative and mindfulness demand was measured in terms of how effective it contributed to the task of sustained attention.The study compared the sustained attention of students who had meditation training to those who did not (Valentine & Sweet, 1999). The study found that those who had meditation techniques scored better in the sustained attention task wherein those who near mindfulness meditation had better scores than the concentrative mediators. The practical applications of an enhanced attention that is not affected by distractions and sustained attention can be directed towards improved academic performance of students.Meditation, Attention and Well-being 7Meditation and CreativityA new concept put forward by Sarath (2006) advocated the use of meditation techniques to mainstream classroom instruction as it enriches the learning process and enhances the creative process and consciousness of students. Creativity is highly related to the issue of meditation because the experience associated with meditation is similar to the second person approach wherein the student tangiblely creates and produces an takings that would enable him/her to have a deeper understanding of the concepts raised in class (Sarath, 2006).The author had argued that education and learning should be focused on providing actual experience of the lesson, not just learning something in books and not being able to work with it. Creative expression of ones natural endowment and interests should be the main thrust of the school. At the same time, a more sustained atte ntion and inability to be distracted by external stimuli are necessary steps in the practice of creative thinking.ConclusionMeditation is not just for the spiritual and magical but it is also a positive process to develop attention and induce students to relax and communicate with their bodies and their surroundings. College students have to deal with pressures and expectations that they sometimes feel cranky, anxious and fed up. Meditation as evidenced by the studies conducted showed that it could positively affect attitudes, attention span and safeguard to distractions. Meditation also has been found to be a medium that could enhance the learning process and encourage creativity. As such, this study has found evidence to support the hypothesis mentioned in the first part.Meditation, Attention and Well-being 8ReferencesArambula, P., Kawakami, M., & Gibney, K. (2001). The physiological correlates of KundaliniYoga meditation A study of a yoga master. Applied Psychophysiology and Bio feedback, 26 2, pp. 47-53.Brown, D.P. (1977). A model for the levels of concentrative meditation. Internationaljournal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 25 4 236-273.Chan, D.P. (2003). effects of meditation to attention, Unpublished dissertation. University ofCalifornia.Hanley, C. & Spates, J. (1978). Transcendental meditation and social psychological attitudes.The ledger of Psychology, 99, p121-1127.Sarath, Ed. (2006). Meditation, Creativity and Consciousness Charting Future Terrain withHigher Education. Teachers College Record, 108 9, pp 1816-1841.Valentine, E. & Sweet, P. (1989). Meditation and Attention A similarity of the effects ofconcentrative and mindfulness meditation on sustained attention. Mental Health, worship and Culture, 2 1, pp 59 to 70.Shear, J. & Jevning, R. (1999). Pure consciousness Scientific exploration of meditationtechniques. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6 2, p. 3)