As World Mental Health Day approaches, a company focussed on improving mental health outcomes has successfully trialled the use of a mindfulness app in schools.
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Smiling Mind created the app, which is an easily accessible, cost effective program for schools to address mental health in the classroom.
The program teaches educators how to integrate mindfulness into everyday lessons. In the trial it ran in Victorian classrooms a minimum of three times a week over eight weeks and almost 2000 students took part.
Teachers would hold a short discussion on a weekly theme, for example on the relationship between thoughts and emotions, followed by five to 10 minutes of meditation.
The results showed improvement in concentration, engagement in the classroom and emotional well being. It also showed that children who took part felt safer at school and there was less incidence of bullying.
“[The children] said they were more aware and able to control their emotions, which is an interesting one for kids to be able to actually say that that’s what’s happening,” Smiling Minds chief executive officer Dr Addie Wooten said.
“They felt emotionally better and their psychological distress decreased, thats things like anxiety and stress.”
The trial also resulted in the same sorts of positive outcomes in teachers.
“Our understanding of how mindfulness works in this way is that it actually trains the brain to become less reactive to emotional things or to stressful events,” Dr Wooten said.
“There’s an amazing amount of scientific research now that’s actually looked at brain structures and how meditated brains actually change in their structure and function.”
Dr Wooten thinks meditation is a great way to take a proactive approach to mental health.
“Like we go to the gym and exercise for our physical body, we think that mindfulness is a tool that we can use in the same way for our mental health … we’re really trying to start a positive conversation around mental health,” she said.
“It’s not that meditation stops stress or gets rid of emotional distress, but it actually helps the person cope with those stressors.”
Dr Wooten hopes the mindfulness app will be making its way into Tasmanian classrooms soon, and would like to see it introduced into the national curriculum by 2020.
