Mindfulness-Based Education Helps to Reduce Teachers’ Stress. How?

There is a myth that Mindfulness-based education only helps students to regain efficiency. While teachers learn mindfulness to teach the same to them, they also feel relaxed and more energized than before. A small but growing body of research reveals the impact of mindfulness exercises on teachers’ stress, finding better improvement in physical health, work motivation, teaching self-efficacy, relationship with students, job performance, and decreased occupationally.

What is mindfulness-based education?

Education with mindfulness exercises can not only decrease the academic stress of students but also can diminish the occupational stress of teachers. 

Mindfulness is a practice in which you focus on being acutely aware of what you are feeling and sensing in the present moment, without judgment or interpretation.

Being aware means emphasizing the present moment and concentrating on whatever arises. Simply put, mindfulness is the practice of purposeful awareness.

Mindfulness practice promises several advantages for both teachers and students.

For instance,

There is a growing manifest that mindfulness practice enhances the ability to:

• Improve attention
• increase learning and motivation
• improve well-being and reduce stress
• promote pro-social behavior and appreciate the empathy
• Regulate emotion (it also helps to think more transparently!)
• Complement executive functions (a set of mental operations that include attention, planning, focus, problem-solving and working memory)

Though studies that look mainly at the efficacy of a mindfulness platform in a school setting are still somewhere limited, it is clear that the abilities listed above offer benefits for students’ academic success and increase teachers’ efficiency.

Mindfulness-based education helps in reducing teachers’ stress. 

1. Increases focus on teaching

A high level of focus is necessary while teaching and multitasking. For example, a teacher might find themselves teaching a math lesson to students while soothing an overpowered student and getting the off-track students on track.

According to research, a teacher makes approximately 1500 decisions every day and four decisions per minute during the six hours of school.

Unfortunately, teachers who multitask occasionally lose attention. Mindfulness can help them restore their attention and teach students more enthusiastically.

2. Increases productivity

It might sound familiar to you. You spend your recess breaks fleeing to the bathroom, scarfing down a snack, or communicating with a student. You spend time preparing for the upcoming science lesson. Furthermore, you squeeze the overflow work into evenings, breaks, and weekends. Let us tell you that this is not sustainable.

Mindfulness-based education will help you to increase your productivity by not working harder but smarter.

3. Enhance your memory

Teachers are experts in the subjects they teach. To keep doing the same, they need to keep their memory intact.

Mindfulness-based education can boost their memory while they learn the same to teach to their students. It also develops a memory of the previous experience or episodic memory. Mindfulness exercises help to build attention on a momentarily basis, so the people practicing mindfulness experience less memory loss. Mindfulness can also decrease mind-wandering.

4. Build strong communication skills

Effective communication plays a crucial role in the wellness of students, teachers, and parents. Here are some ways teachers can use mindfulness to build strong communication skills

• Be entirely present.
• Slow down in order to absorb what you’ve heard.
• Listen actively.
• Consider the feelings behind the person’s words and the emotions that have come to you as a listener.
• Instead of reacting impulsively, ponder the way to respond thoughtfully.

The mindfulness platform can teach teachers to accept and be responsive without judgments. It will help to focus on the students and know them more.

5. Achieve greater happiness

Teachers are the supporters of students and support them in facing all life challenges. Teachers are mostly the first responders to the student’s pain. While helping children with their life, teachers might roll their happiness. Research has revealed that teachers and other school staff can go through the stress of vicarious dramatization or compassion fatigue.

In Short

Mindfulness offers a good strategy for uplifting students’ academic and social success and improves teachers’ performance and well-being. Whether it is teachers’ stress or academic stress faced by students, mindfulness can help you get rid of it and be more enthusiastic in life.