A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
A recent story in the Atlantic examined solitude and found choosing to be alone can boost health, if it happens in the right context. “Solitude can be restorative,” Brent Crane wrote. “Yet, because the study of solitude as a positive force is new, it’s hard to speak in precise scientific terms about it: We don’t [...]
Depression is a devastating disorder. Once you have had an episode of depression your susceptibility to having further periods of depression increases. Resilient Youth’s research on 160,000 young people shows the rates of students who are at risk of depression increases across the years of school. Years Girls Boys [...]
1. Know the difference between focused awareness and mindful awareness Firstly, we emphasize that mindfulness is more than just calm and concentration. If mindfulness training is to be distinguishable from relaxation or attention training, children need to learn about the mind and develop certain qualities of awareness—like openness, curiosity and care. After stilling the mind using [...]
How do you describe happiness? Is it being bubbly all the time or having a constant smile on your face? When researchers look at happiness they look at two different things: a person’s emotional state – do they feel like they are experiencing more positive emotions than negative emotions? – and how they look at [...]
When you don’t give its human anything to do, brain areas related to processing emotions, recalling memory, and thinking about what’s to come become quietly active. These self-referential streams of thought are so pervasive that in a formative paper Marcus Raichle, a Washington University neurologist who helped found the field, declared it to be the [...]
Getty Images Mindfulness sounds pretty great. Who could be against teaching people to be more present in the moment, to try to worry less about the past and future? But in the Sunday New York Times, Ruth Whippman, author of America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is Creating a Nation of [...]
Pixabay Images Meditation is just one strand of new “positive education” methods starting to build momentum and gravitas in schools. The key idea is to teach good practices such as mindfulness and gratitude that will promote resilience and, it is thought, help children lead healthier psychological lives. Until recently, these might have been [...]
Flickr Images Burnout occurs when a person has experienced prolonged and excessive stress. It builds up over time, and the individual may find themselves: Feeling overwhelmed Physically and emotionally exhausted Isolating self from others Forgetting why you do your job, de-motivated Questioning themselves Experiencing an increase in illness/aches and pains Having an increasingly [...]
Credit: Lucy Nicholson/REUTERS There’s a little too much wishful thinking about mindfulness, and it is skewing how researchers report their studies of the technique. Researchers at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, analysed 124 published trials of mindfulness as a mental-health treatment, and found that scientists reported positive findings 60% more often than is [...]
shutterstock Suddenly mindfulness meditation has become mainstream, making its way into schools, corporations, prisons, and government agencies including the U.S. military. Millions of people are receiving tangible benefits from their mindfulness practice: less stress, better concentration, perhaps a little more empathy. Needless to say, this is an important development to be welcomed — [...]
