Mindfulness is a state of being highly focused, and can be helpful to those who practice doing so, according to Dr. Anne Soltysiak, professor of Psychology at Sinclair Community College.
“So often, your mind is moving a million miles a minute. You’re focused on internal thoughts rather than where you are and what you’re doing right here and now,” she said. “Mindfulness training helps to improve focus and improve your ability to be aware of internal and external things at any given point in time.”
Health benefits involved with mindfulness include the stress response system, which can improve your immune system, and improve focusing abilities.
“If you reduce stress and improve focus, those effects are good for learning,” she said. “Because learning is impaired by the fact that you can’t focus, learning is impaired by being stressed out, and of course all of that has good health effects, especially if you engage in some sort of exercise-mindfulness.”
Combining things such as biking, tai chi and aerobic exercises with mindfulness can change an individual’s outlook, and by doing so, it’s possible to change your life, according to Soltysiak.
“If you can practice any mind-quieting meditative exercise, you can basically train your mind not get into that rumination pattern,” she said. “When you ruminate, it’s named after animals who chew on their cud — it’s like chewing on a thought to the point of it overwhelming your awareness, and your thought process. It doesn’t do you any good, and it tends to increase anxiety.”
She said in order to practice mindfulness an individual can start by meditating 10 to 15 minutes per day. By doing so, a person can see improvements within two weeks of starting.
“Even right away, you’ll see changes in calming down your physiology, but in a couple of weeks it’ll lead to significant changes in your ability to maintain attention,” she said. “If you can focus on breathing and bringing yourself down to a less-stressed level, it’s going to improve your chances of sleep and improve the quality of your sleep.”
In order to sleep better, she suggests calming your mind and exercising.
“We are not evolved as a species to sit in desks all day, or sit on a couch all day, we evolved to move around all day looking for food,” she said. “We don’t do that, and that’s why we have problems sleeping, that’s why we have backaches and knee-aches — that’s why we don’t feel healthy a lot of the time, because bodies need to move to stay healthy.”
For students going into finals week, Soltysiak suggests avoiding pulling all-nighters and cramming.
“Without sleep, you can’t store information, your brain does not consolidate well when you are sleep-deprived,” she said. “It impacts you cognitively when you’re sleep-deprived. Sleep is crucial to the learning process.”