Mindfulness Mondays

Mindfulness Mondays have just started recently, and I want to encourage everyone who feels that they would benefit from this to participate, and to also look into the club. It’s a very great program to help young teens with stress, and define ways to cope with it, including mindfulness. While also doing little things that will decrease your stress or at least help with it. Sometimes when you’re young, you can feel hopeless, and not know what to do when you get faced with stress whether that be in or outside of school. Mostly I notice with young teens that it’s in school. Whether it be with hard classes, with friends, being social, or just the pressure put on us. This is a way for our school to help us to create good habits.

 As Harborfields said on the 2020-2021 Board Goals. One of their goals is to build upon our social, emotional, and mental wellness initiatives to ensure a caring and motivational learning environment for all students in alignment with the new mission statement for the district. These Mindfulness Monday’s would be following the schedule that each period will have 2 or maybe 3 to 5 minute segments between now and the end of the school year. So what I'm just interested in is does mindfulness really work? Does your anxiety with school and normal things increase with all the new ways of life all online? These are questions we can ask ourselves when thinking of Mindfulness Mondays and whether or not you think it could help you. If you answered yes to these questions, then this program is for you, and you would definitely benefit from it. 

Mindfulness can help with mental illness, or with just things like  concentration, stress and anxiety. It creates a state of calmness and peacefulness in the mind and body, which correlates to stress, and helps a lot to relax the worries or thoughts that may come in. Although there’s no perfect way of doing mindfulness, it’s not the same for each person. It's different for everyone. 

Ms. Cornell, a teacher at HF explained that she has tried mindfulness, and it has helped her a lot. “Yes I have, it helped me feel more relaxed. Definitely. Especially this year, there's been a lot of changes. So it would help manage your thoughts, feelings, and anxiety to make you feel less nervous.” You can have your own techniques to it, to help you personally. 

That’s why I'm encouraging this program and why HF is doing it and creating different ways to help their students. Three Simple Mindfulness Practices You Can Use Every Day shows us many different ways that you can find to help you relax, meditate, and practice mindfulness. While emphasizing that, “Mindfulness creates space to let new information in and to allow us to see how it relates to what we already know.”

People may practice things like relaxing, watching Netflix, YouTube or TikTok. Playing sports, hanging out with friends, and family, exercising by doing sports or going to the gym are also ways that may help you. Some other things that people may do to mediate stress can consist of going to movies, writing, and reading. In this article I found, called How to Practice Mindfulness shows you how to do mindfulness properly. One way to practice Mindfulness would be to notice your body. “You can sit in a chair with your feet on the floor, you can sit loosely cross-legged, in lotus posture, you can kneel—all are fine. Just make sure you are stable and in a position you can stay in for a while.” and only focus on that.

 I noticed the importance it put in really finding things to relax and to distract yourself from the stress we all face. Grace Esposito, a Junior at HF stated her perspective on this by saying, “No I have ever tried mindfulness, but I've done meditation and yoga. It helped to a degree with stress but not the anxiety I had. On a scale of 1-10 my anxiety is an 8, but I would say it helped with stress a lot.” 

It’s important to take time for yourself, that can be either hobbies or just things you like to do that aren't always necessarily school work. I think with everything transferring to all online, having virtual school can be more difficult. Some teens have to do a hybrid schedule. Even if they would like to be partially in school, it is still a challenge. A lot of kids depend on being with their friends, or socializing in school as an escape from the harsh realities. These harsh realities include  the schoolwork they have or the pressure that’s put on them. Due to the times we're living in now, this article, 10 Simple Ways to Practice Mindfulness In Our Daily Life, gave some really great insight on what to do when stuck inside your home, and explained that “Mindfulness is the ability to stay in the present moment and to focus your thoughts on what is happening in the here and now.” Of course it’s different for each person but personally, from a different perspective, maybe mindfulness could help a lot of students and just create another outlet to escape the daily struggles we face. 

Have you ever tried mindfulness? That’s another question you could ask yourself. For me personally I have tried it, and it helps me a lot. Olivia Karl, a freshman at HF gave her perspective on this by saying, “No I have never tried mindfulness before, but as a young teen I hangout with my friends and family while also listening to music to cope with stress and anxiety.” I tend to get a lot of anxiety with things like school or my outside responsibilities including dance. So I definitely benefit from this, and hopefully me sharing my point of view will encourage all of you to participate in this. I’ve done yoga a lot and I think that they both correlate in a way that can really help you if you do it the right way. Definitely I have my little things that I do to relieve my stress, I love to dance, hangout with family and friends, and to write. But I think overall people would definitely benefit from this mindfulness. 

Do you think this would work to help prevent stress in teens? This is an interesting question but there’s so many ways that it could help, and whether it helps you or not there are great techniques and good habits that come along with it. Practicing meditation may be something you like to do to put your mind at rest and relax. Mia Mirable an 11th grade HF student gave her opinion on this by saying, “Yes I have tried mindfulness, it helped a little but I like to stick with my favorite way of calming down which is playing piano or guitar, and just listening to music.” Even if you don’t struggle with stress, you always want to create good habits for yourself. So having little things you do that makes you kind of escape from daily stressors is really important. 

Statistically, has mindfulness helped people specifically in teens? When looking statistically into this, I see that mindfulness has helped a lot of teens. It has improved sleep habits, improved their attention spans, reduced levels of anxiety, lowered the chance of substance abuse which is really important especially with young kids. It has also helped to regulate emotions, and lessen mood swings. Nowadays, a lot of kids turn to bad things or to friends for help, which is not always a good thing because they’re not adults and they wouldn’t know how to help. Maybe short term they could help you, but long term they don't know how to guide you and that's why you need an adult present for that. Anna Gosselin an 11th grade student at HF explained that, “Yes! I practice mindfulness! I try to clear my head when I get stressed by listening to music and I also have tried meditation. it’s a great way to relax and de-stress!” This article called Getting Started with Mindfulness shows us how to practice mindfulness, and how to do it correctly while emphasizing that“Mindfulness helps us put some space between ourselves and our reactions, breaking down our conditioned responses.”

Also it's commonly known that young teens turn to abusing things like substance or alcohol abuse. Which would definitely not help them at all, and that’s when these programs come into play. Stressing the importance of  putting out organizations and things that anyone can sign up for, like the mindfulness club for example. Or the promotion of  Mindfulness Mondays on the announcements every day. Whether you can participate in it or not, is an optional thing, but it's open to everyone which is such a great thing. 

I again just really want to encourage everyone to participate in mindfulness Mondays, and join the mindfulness club at Harborfields High School. It will help you a lot more than you know, and there are so many things that we struggle with that mindfulness can really help with. Especially with the times that we’re living in right now, it’s a really great way to participate in the school and definitely help better our lives with less stress. While looking at the board of education goals, the school is trying to help regulate the stress in students, and helping them explore health coping mechanisms including mindfulness. But I really encourage you all to participate in both, so you really can get more involved in this because it is so effective. Mindfulness really helps with the daily stressors/struggles that I know all of us are struggling with right now.