The Experiential Experience of a Lifetime

I really can't complain -- or, at least, I won't. It's the Sunday night before Finals week and I'm studying so much that my brain actually wants to go to sleep without my permission. I might let it. And this just might be the shortest blog entry ever. I think I'll find some statistics regarding insanity's correlation to Finals week at colleges and universities...be right back...

Okay, so when I plugged in the search query "college students stress intervention" the following categories of articles came up: Coping behaviors (13), Post-traumatic Stress (12), Alcohol (11), and Meditation (8), with various subcategories coming up when I filtered for the Meditation category. Within the meditation category, I found an article by Sharon Sears (I like her research) on "I Think Therefore I Om: Cognitive Distortions and Coping Style as Mediators for the Effects of Mindfulness Meditation on Anxiety, Positive and Negative Affect, and Hope." Yeah. That *was* a mouthful.

So, since I'm a student of psychology, I'll wrap up the details of her research in a tidy little package so my readers can easily digest the information: Out of three types of meditation (brief focused on loving kindness, brief focused on one's own attention, and longer duration focused on both loving kindness and one's own attention), the lengthy meditation served to "significantly reduce anxiety and negative affect and increase hope." (Sears, 2006)

This is interesting to me on two levels: First, it takes a well-designed research experiment with enough subjects to deliver a sound result in order to get a *significant* result; second, it impresses me that a college student would study the topic of meditation and its correlation with stress. The reason for my shock and awe is that the general public, and many college students as well, think of meditation as an accessory to life, an option. I have felt for some time now that meditation should be practiced by anyone who wants to benefit from its stress-reducing properties and/or become more mindful of what one is doing in the present.

I, for one, like either of the two results. I think that the practice of mindfulness allows one to fully experience living his or her life "in the moment," and thereby reduces the need to review experiences (as we do: "Aw, I shouldn't have done/said that.") later on in the day. At the very least, mindfulness allows us to stop watching the clock, or at least, be mindful while we're doing it. ;-)