CHAPTER 18
Is teaching mindfulness to a child teaching them a new skill they never had, or is it helping them to either maintain or rediscover a skill that was natural to them from birth? Consider looking into the eyes of a six-month-old baby. Do you have a sense that they are really present and looking straight at you, or are they distracted, perhaps by concerns about future career prospects, or where interest rates will be 30 years from now? Consider watching a two-year-old child play. Are they in the moment with what they are doing or are they preoccupied, concerned and burdened about the sheer volume of play they need to get through by the end of the day? No, without even trying, children have a natural disposition to mindfulness. In the normal run of things, we don’t learn how to be mindful as we grow up—we forget.
In Chapter 3 we shared an example of a mother—who was also a health professional—who went to the beach with her daughter with the aim to be mindful and to consciously experience what was going on around her. It wasn’t easy and she spent much of the time wondering if she was really present or not. Then her five-year-old daughter came over and wanted to play. They started playing and had a ball as about an hour went by. Suddenly the mother realised that, without even trying, she had been far more present and mindful while playing with her daughter than she had been all morning doing ‘intense’ mindfulness practice. Like a child, mindfulness is simple, easy, innocent and un-self-conscious.
There are a couple of important lessons here. Firstly, we don’t think our way into mindfulness; in fact, if we’re thinking about whether we’re mindful, then we’re not. Secondly, like the child, the mindful state is not a self-conscious state; in fact, when we’re mindful we lose our usual sense of self-consciousness—we stop thinking about ourselves—and just respond spontaneously to life as it unfolds.
So, mindfulness, for all the reasons outlined in this book, is a life skill and one that we need to help maintain as we age. It’s a skill that the environment and the example of the adults around a child can either foster or obliterate. Mindfulness is a skill that can easily be, and should be, taught and modelled in schools right from the beginning. As far as education is concerned, mindfulness matters. It helps to foster creativity, improves academic and sporting performance and is vital for developing mental health and emotional intelligence in children—the science of mindfulness is starting to change the way we think about education.
Mindfulness can be easily taught to children of any age, but teaching mindfulness requires a different skill set depending on the age of the child, adolescent or young adult, and the context in which they are being taught.
For a young child—say, up to the age of ten—simple, brief and playful is the order of the day, without the need for too much explanation or justification for why it’s being taught. Any explanation needs to be in a language that makes sense to a child of that age. Janet Etty-Leal’s Meditation Capsules: a Mindfulness Program for Children is a great example of the methods and style for introducing mindfulness to young children.[1] Any formal practice doesn’t go for any longer than a few minutes. It can be incorporated with games and other educational or creative activities. One art teacher, for example, likes honing the children’s powers of observation in the process of learning art, such as taking the time to notice with interest the colours, shapes, textures and proportions of things they’re about to draw. In creative writing a little exercise in connecting with their senses in a natural environment can be a great way for a child to begin describing the world around them and their experiences. In such examples children are learning to explore with a depth and richness of perception that modern life is almost always conditioning them to just skim over as we hastily rush from one thing to another.
For older children, say ten to sixteen, we are getting into an age where the reason for practising mindfulness might need to be made a little clearer. We may have noticed how adolescents don’t necessarily do what they are told to do—let’s face it, we didn’t when we were that age—so it is most important for learning mindfulness that it is an invitation to practise; an inquiry, an exploration.
Interest naturally draws attention, so whatever is put in front of a child will foster learning especially if it is creatively put and made relevant to the individual or group. What’s important to them? Then explain it in such a way that the mindfulness is clearly relevant. If the teacher is not interested in the content then the children won’t be either.
A mother asked how she might interest her fourteen-year-old son in mindfulness because he was becoming anxious and hard to live with. Well, the anxiety is one point of connection—helping to unhook his attention from the stream of worrying thoughts—but she was also asked what he was really passionate about. She said football, so we mentioned some of the footballers and other elite athletes who practise mindfulness and why they do it. The mother had wanted to interest her son in inner peace and tranquillity, which is not so attractive for a fourteen-year-old male, but sporting prowess and the ability to perform under pressure was. For others it will be about getting a good night’s sleep, or it may be just the chance to enjoy some rest and relaxation. For older children a little more explanation is helpful, and mindfulness can be practised for a little longer, say up to ten minutes at a time, supplemented with many short pauses.
For older children, who aren’t really children because by sixteen they are becoming young adults, the case for practising mindfulness can be made a little more fully with perhaps more background about the relationship of the mind and body, and the impact of stress on the body, brain and performance. It can even be incorporated into their science or biology studies to help them understand from the inside through experience what they are trying to learn from the outside in the form of information. All of the same things apply here as above in terms of relevance, but by this age one of the big drivers will be academic performance and dealing with exam stress. Students will have noted how much study time they waste because their attention wanders, how much they catastrophise about the future, and how much their memory and performance drops when they are anxious and tense.
There are also likely to be a significant number of students, whether they tell you or not, who are experiencing anxiety and depression, or are having problems with anger management, for whom mindfulness will be very helpful. Another topic of interest at this age is practising impulse control, which is not a particularly attractive option for a sixteen-year-old male who thinks risk-taking behaviour is the order of the day, so it might be best expressed in other language such as ‘being able to stop and think before we do something stupid and/or dangerous that we might regret later’. Mindfulness is a great way to provide that little bit of space, and it doesn’t need to be much, in order to choose whether or not to do something. If there is no awareness then it is stimulus, impulse and unmindful reaction—before we can even say ‘damage control’. Students of this age can practise mindfulness for longer and can be encouraged to punctuate their days with formal mindfulness practice as well as informal, for example starting and finishing a study session with some mindfulness, or practising as they go to sleep.
In the tertiary setting, issues related to mental health, academic performance, wellbeing and development of potential are all to the fore. For it to be integrated into the core curriculum, as it is at Monash University, then mindfulness needs to be connected to or integrated with other content in the course. Preferably the core knowledge should be examinable, although the personal practice will be an individual choice. No one should be compelled to practise mindfulness (although we have perhaps provided a case why it should be put in our water supplies!), but it can be explained and made relevant in such a way that the desire to learn and practise is natural. ‘Preaching to the unconverted’[2] isn’t best when heavy-handed or imposed, rather when inviting inquiry, self-exploration and discovery.
There is a lot of obvious interest in helping a child to become more mindful, but before doing this a very important point needs to be emphasised. A teacher can’t authentically teach mindfulness unless they have explored and experienced the practice of mindfulness themselves.
A mindless teacher is not a pretty sight—ranting, raving and reacting their way through the school day. A more mindful teacher is not so reactive and can model a little more impulse control for their students—which will be good for them personally and also for all those around them. Furthermore, a mindful teacher hears more of what their students are communicating to them, some of which will be in words but much of which will be in postures, gestures and grunts! This opens the door to a more measured, empathic and creative response, remembering that sometimes the best response may be no response.
A mindful teacher also needs to learn to manage the often hyperkinetic and time-pressured environment they are immersed in by learning not to multitask and to deal with priorities one at a time—from most important to least important—not to mention saving the time commonly wasted while marking or preparing for a class by constantly getting distracted by the thought, ‘Why am I doing this job?’
Unfortunately we are building a world that trains inattention in children. Creating stress and anxiety is one part of the problem. Children will unconsciously soak up the anxiety and unhelpful habits of the adults around them. Another problem is all the chemicals that children are exposed to such as food additives and colourings, which have been found to increase problems with hyperactivity and attention.[3]
Another issue concerns the methods and content of children’s play, which has changed to incorporate far greater time spent in front of screens, and a bombardment by faster and faster media. Added to this is the interaction with IT children are undertaking from a much earlier age than in the past. Does this help a developing brain to grow and wire itself in the optimal way? It seems not, as indicated by a growing number of studies. The world’s leading paediatric journal, imaginatively named Pediatrics, has reported on a range of studies clearly indicating that higher than average amounts of screen time (largely television viewing and video games) are associated with a roughly doubled risk of attention problems such as Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).[4] The maximum recommended screen time for children is two hours a day, as we mentioned in Chapter 10, but the average amount of screen time for the modern child is about four hours—and growing.
Experts suggest that the effect of the rapid and ever-changing input of sensory stimulation—associated with much of what children are exposed to—makes it difficult for them to pay attention when they are performing a task, like school work, that does not stimulate the sensory centres in the same way. When the input is rapid-paced, it conditions inattention and impulsivity into the child’s brain. To illustrate, a study found that a fast-paced TV show negatively influenced children’s executive functioning such as self-regulation, impulsivity, processing information and working memory.[5]
TV content matters too, as another study concluded. ‘Viewing of either violent or non-violent entertainment television before age three was significantly associated with subsequent attentional problems, and the magnitude of the association was large.’[6] In an even more recent study, 60 four-year-olds were randomly assigned to three groups to either watch a fast-paced TV cartoon (Spongebob Squarepants) or a more moderately paced educational cartoon, or draw for 9 minutes. They were then given four tasks measuring executive function, including following instructions, tests of memory, ability to delay gratification and impulsivity.[7] Children who watched the fast-paced TV cartoon performed significantly worse on all executive-function tasks compared to the other children—the tasks tested included following instructions, memory, the ability to delay gratification and impulsivity. It wasn’t that the children who did the other tasks gained an advantage that the others didn’t—it was that 9 minutes of the fast-paced TV cartoon made those children perform worse than they did before the cartoon. The producers of such shows justify it as being ‘entertainment’ and point to the fact that it is popular and children like it—like it so much that they get mesmerised by it. It’s great that children are entertained, but it’s a shame when that entertainment dumbs them down. As adults we need to select the input for young children a little more discerningly.
A child’s brain needs interaction with their environment in order to lay down the connections it needs to develop. When a child is playing in a park, throwing a ball, wrestling with the family dog, or building something out of clay, the whole brain and sensory channels are open and active. This stimulates the brain to lay down the connections it will need for later life. When a child is interacting with a screen, the senses aren’t engaged to nearly the same extent—in fact, they are being starved of sensory connection, and this makes it more difficult for the attention to stay where it is put because a screen providing virtual experiences is far less tangible than a real-life experience.
Add to this the tendency to multitask (which is actually just frequent task-switching) and we have the perfect storm, just made for creating the impulsivity, behavioural problems, learning difficulties and mental-health problems that are becoming so common in children today.
The area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex is vital for the development of all of our higher (executive) functions including working memory, also called short-term memory. This involves the brain structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information as it comes in. ADHD is associated with impairment of the functioning of this part of the brain, but practising attention helps to stabilise this area. Improving working memory helps to increase IQ and treat ADHD.[8] Stress, on the other hand, has a negative effect on memory and performance, largely because it hijacks the part of the brain we rely on for high performance. For example, one study found that high anxiety about being able to do mathematical problems led to smaller working memory spans and a pronounced increase in reaction time and errors.[9] ‘Performance pressure harms individuals most qualified to succeed by consuming the working memory capacity that they rely on for their superior performance.’[10] That’s why increasing children’s anxiety isn’t a particularly good way to help them to learn something. When a child’s mind is packed full of anxious thoughts, there isn’t much room for anything useful to get in. Much better to allay their anxiety and engage their attention.
As we have previously mentioned, multitasking is an illusion.[11] We switch attention so quickly between tasks that it appears we are performing multiple tasks at the same time, but the reality is that we are switching back and forth between tasks. Modern children are being drawn into multitasking far more than any generation before because of their exposure to media and IT. The modern myth is that we get more done when we task-switch, and that if we do it a lot we get better at it. The unfortunate truth is that we get less done and we get worse at it. This rapid task-switching is inefficient because we have to reboot data all the time as we go from one task to another and we lose chunks of data all the time. Multitasking leads to distraction, a disorganised memory and poorer performance on analytic reasoning. As Clifford Nass said, ‘We worry that it may be we’re creating people who may not be able to think well, and clearly.’[12]
We hate to be old fuddy-duddies (well, we usually do), but the old ways of doing things may actually be better. For example, reading from hard copy seems to help stabilise our attention. Research by Laura Levine and her team from Connecticut State University found that, ‘The amount of time college students spent instant messaging had an increased effect on their levels of distractibility in performing academic tasks, and that the amount of time they spent reading books reduced their levels of distractibility.’[13] Heavy media multitaskers perform worse, not better, on tests of task-switching ability, due to a reduced ability to sift what is relevant data from what is irrelevant.[14] This is all linked with the ‘attentional blink’ discussed in Chapter 19. Just to reiterate, mindfulness looks to be the remedy for these ailments in that it reduces attentional blink and improves information input and the ability to deal with distractions.[15] Even four sessions of mindfulness training had beneficial effects on mood, the ability to think (executive functioning), verbal fluency and working memory. It also reduced fatigue and anxiety.[16]
There is no memory without attention. Let’s face it, if we’re not paying attention when we put down the car keys we don’t remember where they are. It’s no different for our kids. The advice given by UCLA psychologist and researcher Russel Poldrack, is, ‘The best thing you can do to improve your memory is to pay attention to the things you want to remember ... [Complex] tasks that require more attention, such as learning calculus or reading Shakespeare, will be particularly adversely affected by multitasking.’[17]
Kids may assume that multitasking is good; in fact, that it is the only way to go. If they try not to do it after they have been doing it for some time then it will feel uncomfortable not to do it, and instead to focus attention on one activity at a time. Invite the kids to try an experiment in doing this and report how it feels. The younger a child, the easier it will be for them to develop the ability to focus. A child needs parents and teachers to help them to do this and, for young children, to have adults help them to manage their environment and exposure in such a way as to save them from themselves—or should that be to save the children from the things that we adults have unwisely put in front of them. Simple multitasking—such as walking and chewing gum at the same time—isn’t such a problem. Complex multitasking, however—doing two activities that each demand a bit of mental grunt, such as texting and having a conversation at the same time—is not a good habit to get into.
For a teacher, helping children in the classroom to ration their sensory inputs at any one time will be a useful habit to get into. Having the laptop open when it’s really useful may be fine, but having it open while they are meant to be listening will mean that they don’t listen well. This will be most effective if the same strategies are being practised at home too, so helping parents to understand the importance of attention and how to practise it will help to reinforce rather than undermine efforts at school. Taking time for quiet as a way of breaking up the day—say, beginning and finishing a class with a minute or two of mindfulness—will also help children (and teachers) to be mindful and less reactive during the class. Peaceful music can also be used for this purpose. Children love to stop and be present; it’s a lot closer to them than it is for most adults.
We have discussed this topic at length in other chapters, particularly on emotional intelligence, but this is one of the main reasons children need mindfulness at school. Paying attention to others is a prerequisite for good mental health but also for empathy, compassion and for understanding the impact our words and behaviours have on others. This is being confirmed with studies on children from primary- to secondary-school ages.[18] It helps with impulsivity and managing anger. We know that children and adolescents with issues around anger and hostility have their stress centre (the amygdala) firing off all the time, but we also know that mindfulness quietens this area of the brain. Bullies are generally more anxious and depressed than those they are bullying, but unfortunately they have not yet found a more constructive way of dealing with their emotional distress than making the life of someone else unpleasant. We all want control, and if we don’t know where to find this in ourselves we may try and impose it on others outside ourselves.
Positive psychology and mindfulness training are increasingly being seen around the world as central pillars in the innovative approaches to education. Probably the world leader in this area is Geelong Grammar in Australia, which has spent considerable resources developing and making available a whole new approach called ‘Positive Education’,[19] and has worked with the positive psychology pioneer Martin Seligman.
Karol Miller is an educator with an interest in the levels of performance of students and how to assess them.[20] The levels she identified in ascending order of importance are:
Knowledge isn’t generally the driver of behaviour. We often don’t do what we should do because of inattention, apathy, fear, being too busy, an unsupportive environment, a negative attitude or habit. A teacher can tell a student to do something a thousand times but unless these barriers to translating knowledge into action are seen and examined by the student themselves, and then stepped over, nothing will happen, or it will only happen while the student is being watched. They won’t have any personal ownership over it. A simple example in medical education is teaching medical students to wash their hands after seeing a patient: they know, know how, could show how, but many don’t actually do it—or not as often as they should.
Mindfulness is therefore an important skill in helping us to be more self-aware of our actions and the factors that influence them—for better or for worse—and thus help translate knowledge into action.
You can do a little experiment with your students (or with somebody else’s if you don’t have any)—with those who are old enough to do long multiplication anyway. Present them with the following student’s answer to a mathematics exam question. Ask them to work individually, no talking, and after a minute or two to give the student a mark out of 10.
Now, the student got the question wrong because they didn’t carry a 2 on the first line of the multiplication—meaning that the answer should have been 6187. When a room full of medical students are asked to give a mark there’s a relatively even spread from 0 to 9 out of 10. So much for validity and reliability in assessment! We like to think that mathematics is a reasonably objective and precise discipline, but it seems not. The mark awarded is largely dependent on whether the marker rewarded outcome or process. If it’s all about the outcome then 0/10—because the student got the answer absolutely wrong. If it’s all about the process then nearly all of the steps were well performed and the student clearly knew how to do it so it’s about 9/10. If you reward both then the mark will be somewhere in between, depending on how you weight their relative importance.
There’s nothing wrong with precision and outcome. If you were going to buy a car, you would hope that there was a fair amount of precision in the design and construction of it if you plan for the car to safely take you where you want to go. But are there implications here for the way we teach or learn? Does rewarding the process or outcome have an effect on where our attention goes and our capacity to persevere and learn more quickly? Well, it seems that it does—judging by some of the positive psychology studies on the subsequent learning of children who were praised either for outcome or for effort and process.
As a teacher, if you give a class a relatively easy task you can then observe what effect your response to the students has. If you praise a class for a successful outcome, they will be happy. If you then give them tasks that extend them, and they don’t succeed quickly and therefore aren’t getting the praise they want, most will get frustrated, won’t persevere and will want to go back to the easier task. Making the outcome the main focus of attention isn’t necessarily helpful and it can make a challenge appear as a threat. If, on the other hand, you give a class a relatively easy task and praise the effort the students put in and their capacity to make progress by learning from their mistakes, then students will tend to enjoy learning more. If you then give them a harder task, they are much more likely to enjoy the challenge, to want to learn through experience and to persevere. They are more likely to learn quickly and want to extend themselves. Challenge, in this case, is seen as opportunity and experiment, and mistakes are seen as learning opportunities.
Anxiety about the outcome distracts from focusing on the process and therefore impedes performance. Process takes place in the present moment—outcome is all about the future. A student who becomes very anxious about their upcoming exam results may find themselves unable to focus on the very study they need to do in order to prepare for those exams. Forgetting about the result but focusing on what needs to be done here and now can not only help the student to feel better, but also to achieve better in the long run.
Not unrelated to the above is the concept of ‘mindsets’. Mindsets are a fascinating new area of interest related to learning. Carol Dwek is a psychologist who has done a lot of work in this field.[21] A ‘fixed mindset’ is characterised by thoughts along the lines of ‘I can’t do that’ when confronted with a challenging task. A fixed mindset believes that talents and abilities cannot be improved even with effort. It’s consistent with a notion that we are born with a certain amount of talent and so we wish to avoid challenge in order to avoid the possibility of failure. Challenge provokes fear and avoidance for the person with a fixed mindset because it is a potential threat to self-worth or self-esteem. Challenges are not seen as opportunities for personal growth. Fixed mindsets are not innate, they are acquired. Imagine if we were born with a fixed mindset. The baby would sit on the floor and just say, ‘Mum, how many times have I told you—I can’t walk! Don’t even make me try.’ A preschool child would say, ‘Please, teacher, take those paints away. Look at what I’ve produced—it’s hopeless. I’m no Michelangelo. You’re just causing me stress!’ No, we pick up fixed mindsets as we grow—from who knows where. It’s therefore really important that as parents and teachers we are careful with our language because unconsciously we may be reinforcing a fixed mindset.
A ‘growth mindset’, on the other hand, believes that intelligence, talent and ability can be developed over time if we wish to put in the effort and perseverance required to develop them, whether it’s in relation to sport, academic ability, relationships or any other capacity. For a growth mindset, obstacles give rise to a sense of challenge and opportunity. With such an attitude, a growth mindset doesn’t fear failure but rather sees it as a learning opportunity or as a chance to improve oneself. High achievers all have growth mindsets as they learn to match their efforts to their vision of what’s possible.
Mindsets tend to get taken on board early in life. We soak them up without even knowing it largely by modelling the adults and teachers around us. We can all change our mindset at any age—if we have the awareness to see it operating and make the effort to engrain a different attitude. Like simply crossing our arms a different way, it will feel uncomfortable and unnatural at first but with sustained practice it gets easier and easier. You may like to try this out as an experiment.
Mindfulness can help us to develop a growth mindset in a number of ways. Firstly, it helps us to recognise the telltale signs of a fixed mindset when it arises such as fear, avoidance, mental agitation and inattention. Secondly, it helps us to stand back from our thoughts and see them not as facts but just as thoughts. This gives us more choice about whether to act on them—and so reinforce them—or not to act on them—and so to loosen their grip. Thirdly, mindfulness helps us to focus our attention on the activity we’re trying to learn about by unhooking it from the self-consciousness about outcome, performance and failure. Fourthly, by helping to reduce stress, it liberates the areas of the brain required for learning, which we spoke about earlier in this chapter. Lastly, for parents and teachers, we much choose language and responses that encourage a growth mindset.
John Biggs was an educator who investigated student approaches to learning and studying.[22] He looked at the literature on predictors of student performance at university and defined what personal characteristics within the students were associated with how they learned. He was interested in the motivations and strategies of students relevant to their performance, and came up with three learning styles.
Approach | Motive | Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Surface | Surface Motive (SM) is instrumental: the main purpose is to meet the requirements minimally: to achieve a balance between working too hard and failing. (Main aim is to avoid failure.) | Surface Strategy (SS) is reproductive: the aim is to gain the bare essentials and reproduce them through rote learning. |
| Achieving | Achieving Motive (AM) is based on competition and ego-enhancement: the aim is to gain the highest grades, whether or not the material is interesting. (Usefulness for profession is not of concern, only for marks.) | Achieving Strategy (AS) is based on organising one’s time and working; to behave as a ‘model’ student. |
| Deep | Deep Motive (DM) is intrinsic: study is done to satisfy interest and maximise competence in particular academic subjects. (This approach is called mastery in other theories.) | Deep strategy (DS) is meaningful: students read widely and relate with previous relevant knowledge. There is an interest in the interconnectedness of subjects. |
Deep learners are driven by interest and enjoyment and therefore find the process relatively effortless compared to those who are driven by other motives. The interest draws the attention, and where the attention goes interest follows, and where interest goes enjoyment follows. Einstein, the archetypal deep learner, wasn’t driven by stress so much as fascination. Now that’s a sustainable strategy for lifelong learning. Deep learners have the most flexible and creative minds because they are most engaged with the content for its own sake rather than for the sake of something else, such as avoiding failure or enhancing one’s ego. Studies suggest that First or Second Class Honours students all used deep approaches whereas Third Class Honours students tended to use surface approaches.[23] Deep learners like to see things in context and note the interconnectedness between different topics—that is, they are more holistic in their approach and their knowledge isn’t artificially siloed. The particulars are interesting here in so far as they point to big principles.
There are other interesting relationships as far as learning style is concerned. For example, for students whose motivation was achievement or failure avoidance (surface), there is a positive correlation between anxiety and performance on exams. Students who adopted mastery goals (deep) didn’t show a correlation between anxiety and performance; that is, they didn’t have to be anxious to do well. Furthermore, cheating and learning approach seem to be related. ‘Understanding a student’s academic orientation might be useful in predicting academic dishonesty ... Cheating and plagiarism were more common among students who desired good grades or simply wanted to gain a degree. Students who placed more emphasis on learning had less plagiarism ... Universities might be better off putting resources into developing [an emphasis on learning] in the students rather than just saying “we told you not to cheat”.’[24]
So there’s a good question for a teacher to ask themselves—what motivates my teaching? What strategies am I going to foster in my students? Am I really interested in the topic I am teaching? We might be thinking we’re teaching students about a subject but, without us or them really knowing it, we may be teaching them far more about how to, or how not to, learn.
One of the authors was being interviewed by a PhD student about the factors that fostered lifelong learning. The reply was, ‘The first thing is that the teacher should love their subject.’ The PhD student turned off the recorder and said, off the record, that teachers virtually never acknowledged that. Well, maybe we should acknowledge that every time we take a class. If not, perhaps we should question why we’re there in the first place.
Well, we’ve tried to make the case for mindfulness within the educational environment in a relatively short chapter—this could be the subject of a book in itself. The bottom line is that mindfulness is such an important life skill that it’s a core part of education from the very beginning. It’s such a valuable generic skill that has so many particular applications relevant to learning, growing up and developing our potential, that it needs to be creatively woven into the educational experience at every level—relevant to time, place, people and context.
Not so helpful
• Make students anxious while learning.
• Create a preoccupation about the outcome rather than focusing on the process.
• Foster surface learning.
• As a teacher or parent, be uninterested in what you are teaching.
• Spend lots of time in front of screens and less time immersed in real-life experiences.
Helpful
• Train attention in your students.
• Start a class with some time for mindfulness.
• Be interested in what you are teaching.
• Encourage a growth mindset.
• Praise effort more than outcome.
• Treat mistakes as opportunities to learn rather than failure.