Meditation, attention and well-being of college students

Ask any college student today and they would probably enjoin that being in college is one of the most difficult and consuming endeavor that they exhaust had in their lifetime. College life is not only about going to partes, concussion deadlines, writing papers and completing courses. College life is also about developing analytical and critical minds, acquisition life-skills, twist knowledge and applying it to real-life situations.College students need all the suffice they could get to make their academic lives a little lighter or more man senesce open. Many self-help books pack advocated changing ones attitude, thinking positively, time-management, building relationships and other methods that one gets a feeling that they do not really provide solutions but just state the obvious. One that has received less cargon is in the area of surmisal.Literature has found that meditation has positive set up in reducing stress as a relaxation technique. However, meditation has been as sociated with new age thinking and referred to as spooky stuff that the present generation of college students may not be aware of. Meditation substantiate existed since man first begun yeasty thinking, it is often referred in religious and spiritual applys. In the early years of psychological investigation, meditation became a universal subject in terms of the sustains that stack have when they meditated as well as how it can be an effective relaxation technique.Meditation is being able to become more attuned with ones internal self and this takes a great deal of directed solicitude. Attention refers to the ability of the mind or consciousness to attend to a specific area, event, information or thing. Studies on care have highlighted the detrimental effects of not being able to hold ones solicitude, and of how fleeting and short a souls attention span can be especially in a very daedal and stimulus overloadedenvironment we have. Directing attention to a single object or thought can be relaxing since it allows the soul to be present in the here and now, it was also espo make use ofd that information oneself to become more attentive can develop cognitive functioning and thus help in academic performance.College students can benefit in learning and being able to use meditation techniques to cope with the many stresses and anxiety of college life and developing attention skills to further enhance academic performance. It is therefore hypothesized that college students who practice meditation will have a longer attention span and will have higher grades and a more positive mental wellness and hence increased feelings of upbeat.This study will determine if college students who practice meditation techniques on a regular basis have higher attention skills as measured by a behavioral experiment and whether they have more positive feelings of well-being as determined by a well-being inventory.A intelligence of meditation and its application into the en hancement of attention, creativity and consciousness 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 get tos an altered sate of consciousness by performing certain rituals and exercises. These exercises allow controlling and regulating breathing, sharply restricting ones field of attention, eliminating external stimuli,assuming yogic body positions and forming mental images of an event or symbol. The precede is a pleasant, mildly altered subjective state in which the individual feels mentally and physically relaxed.Some individuals after extensive meditation practice may have mystical experiences in which they lose self-awareness and gain a sense of being involved in a wider consciousness, however defined. That such thoughtful techniques may construct a change in consciousness goes back to the ancient times an d is represented in every major world religion. Buddhists, Hindus, Sufis, Jews and Christians all have literary works describing rituals that induce meditative states (Arambula, Kawakami, Gibney, 2001).Traditional forms of meditation follow the practices of yoga, a system of thought based on the Hindu religion, or Zen which is derived from Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. The both 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 while in concentrative meditation the benefits are obtained through actively attending to some object, word, or idea.Experimental studies of meditation provide only limited insight into the alterations of consciousness that a person can achieve when meditative practice and training extend over many years. In his study of the Matramudra, a centuries old Tibetan Buddhist text, Brown (1977) has described the complex training required 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 produce the deep rest and awarenesscharacteristic of TM. In TM a person develops a reduced state of physiological arousal feelings such as peace 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 study on the effect of TM to college students by Hanley & Spates (1978), it was reported that those who were 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 wi ll fibericipate 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 basic 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 fully to the fast task, and then 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 ability of the person to direct attention and when attention is more keen and developed, a person can have better concentrationand can better attend to the critical thinking skills needed in college education (Shear & Jevning, 1999).Attention has been the earliest subject of the study of psychology, cognitive cognizance 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 gibe with the ability to direct attention but it was shown that meditation minutes per day was positively correlate d 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 motivation was measured in terms of how effective it contributed to the task of preserve 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 practiced 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 benefit 7Meditation and CreativityA new concept put forward by Sarath (2006) advocated the use of meditation techniques to mainst ream 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 actually creates and produces an output 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 talent and interests should be the main thrust of the school. At the same time, a more sustained attention 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 magic 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, loathsome and fed up. Meditation as evidenced by the studies conducted showed that it could positively affect attitudes, attention span and resistance 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 Biofeedback, 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). cause of meditation to attention, Unpublished dis sertation. University ofCalifornia.Hanley, C. & Spates, J. (1978). Transcendental meditation and social psychological attitudes.The Journal 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 comparison of the effects ofconcentrative and mindfulness meditation on sustained attention. Mental Health, Religion 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)