Learning to step back

When someone pushes my buttons my instinct is to push back. That may feel right in the moment, but it doesn't lead to good outcomes -- it leads to yelling and posturing and anger and, well, nothing beneficial.

One of the benefits of meditation is that it helps me find the space between the push and the push back, to let the energy dissipate instead of escalating it.

A new study shows I'm not alone.

In a working paper published by the US National Bureau of Economic Research this month, researchers found that teaching Chicago high-schoolers meditation techniques designed to help them find that gap significantly lowered crime and dropout rates for participants and boosted school attendance.

According to an article on Quartz,

The study analyzed the effects of a Chicago-based program by the organization Youth Guidance called Becoming a Man (BAM). The researchers invited 1,473 Chicago teens, chosen at random from 18 public schools, to participate in BAM programming and compared them to a control group of similar students who were not invited.

The goal of the program, explains coauthor Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago and the director of its Crime Lab, was to encourage less violent behavior by slowing their automatic response.

We develop automatic responses, or habitual reactions, to save time. The Quartz article notes that  while American teenagers from privileged backgrounds learn to automatically comply with authority figures, handing over their smartphone to a mugger, or quieting down when a teacher says so, low-income teenagers may learn that submitting to authorities only invites more aggression. 

Much of the training focused on learning to work with anger by using breathing exercises and meditation techniques, such as exhaling while counting slowly to four.  A year after the program, those who participated in the BAM program were 44 percent less likely to commit violent crimes, and performed significantly better on an academic performance index that combines academic measurements including GPA, attendance rates, and dropout rates, the study found.

Learning to find the space between the stimulus and the reaction lets us decide whether the habitual response is the best one in a given situation.  It doesn't have to be a long pause, but it can be the pause that refreshes and resets the situation rather than the one that sends it tumbling into chaos.

More reason to teach mindfulness in schools

A study in the journal Psychological Science says that students who

had mindfulness training did better on the English portion of the GRE (graduate school entance exams) than those who didn't have it.

Forty-eight undergraduates were randomly assigned to either a mindfulness class or a nutrition class. Both classes met for 45 minutes, four times a week, for two weeks. During the mindfulness class, participants sat on cushions in a circle; they were asked to pay focused attention to some aspect of sensory experience, like the sounds of their own breathing. They practiced distinguishing between the simple thoughts that naturally arise in our minds (I have a test tomorrow) and the thoughts that become “elaborated” with emotion (I’m really worried that I won’t do well, and if I fail it, I’ll have to take the class over, and then I won’t graduate on time). The undergrads enrolled in the mindfulness class were taught how to reframe these more emotional concerns as mere “mental projections,” and how to allow their minds to rest naturally, rather than trying to suppress or get rid of their thoughts.

The results were clear: Participants who received mindfulness training showed improved accuracy on the GRE and higher working memory capacity, compared to those who received instruction in nutrition. Analyses indicated that the improvement could be explained, at least in part, by reduced mind wandering during the task.
The researchers estimated that mindfulness training resulted in the equivalent of a 16 percentile-point boost on the GRE, on average.

Study author Jonathan Schooler of the University of California theorizes that mindfulness may work by "dampening activation of the “default network,” a collection of regions in the brain that tend to become more active when our minds are at rest than when we’re focused on a mentally challenging task. Previous studies have found reduced activation on brain scans of meditators.

Schooler says this could have broad implications for learning: A number of recent studies have indicated that IQ can be increased through targeted interventions like this one, he says.

“The present demonstration that mindfulness training improves cognitive function and minimizes mind wandering suggests that enhanced attentional focus may be key to unlocking skills that were, until recently, viewed as immutable.”