Slowly take a raisin and examine every wrinkle and fold of its surface. Feel its texture with your fingers. Inhale its scent. Squeeze it and hear how it sounds. Raise it to your lips, place it in your mouth, explore it with your tongue. Prepare to chew. As you bite into it, notice the bursts of taste and how these change, and be aware of when you feel ready to swallow. Finally, feel the raisin travel into your body.
This is a common introductory exercise in mindfulness – a practice derived from Buddhist meditation that involves paying attention to the present moment, free of distracting thoughts about the past or future – and this term about 200 students from the University of Cambridge will be slowly eating raisins as part of a course laid on by researchers at the university to measure how far mindfulness can help combat stress.
The university’s counselling service is offering the eight-week courses, which involve meditation, group exercises and discussion, theory and homework (including mindful toothbrushing) to healthy students as part of the Mindful Student Study, a three-year pilot sparked by concern at the increasing numbers of students across the country accessing mental health services.
A Higher Education Funding Council for England report published in September found the number of students declaring a mental health problem had increased from just under 8,000 in 2008-09 to nearly 18,000 in 2012-13, and predicted the trend would continue. In a National Union of Students survey of more than 1,000 students published last month, eight out of 10 respondents said they had experienced mental health issues.
Universities have also noticed an increase in the number of those pleading special circumstances in exams because of stress, or failing to take exams at all, says Julieta Galante, a research associate in the department of psychiatry at Cambridge who is involved in the Mindful Student Study. The study will measure stress levels of students who have taken the mindfulness courses, and a control set who have not – through regular questionnaires, as well as their use of mental health services, their grades and, for a subset of students, the state of their immune systems.
“There seems to be a difficulty in dealing with the usual stresses of student life,” says Galante. She says one reason for increased use of mental health services could be that accessing them carries less stigma than it once did, but “a lot of it is sheer anxiety”.
Cambridge is not the only university to think mindfulness could help. Last month Aberystwyth announced plans to become “the UK’s first mindful university”. It has been liaising with student support on using mindfulness to promote general health rather than just as a response to ill health, and has also run taster sessions for administrative staff on using it to improve their work-life balance. It is now hoping to train mindfulness ambassadors in departments to run their own lunchtime and taster sessions for students and staff.
Meanwhile, Anthony Seldon, the vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, says he wants Buckingham to be “Britain’s first positive-health university, with mindfulness very much part of it”. The university is to make mindfulness sessions for staff and students more available, and encourage its use by student welfare bodies. It will focus in particular on medical students. particularly on medicine, using it to help reduce stress among students in its medical school. “I’m absolutely convinced that for students, postgraduates, academic staff and support staff this is a natural, healthy, risk-free way of finding greater concentration and ensuring better mental health, and the ability to resist the problems of depression and anxiety and phobias and addictions,” he says.
Mindfulness has long played an important role in universities in the US and in Australia, where it has been part of the core curriculum for medical students at Monash University since 1989. In the UK, Exeter University has run postgraduate training courses in mindfulness for a decade, as well as being involved in research and clinical practice in the area, and well-established courses also exist at Warwick, Edinburgh, Bangor and Oxford.
But Steven Stanley, a lecturer in social psychology at Cardiff University, says it has recently taken off not only because of interest in the idea of student wellbeing and concern at increasing mental health problems reported by students and staff, but through a desire to boost attainment. “That’s part of the wider reason why managers and vice-principals get interested,” he says. “There’s some limited evidence that mindfulness might help you as a student get through your programme, and perhaps perform better in terms of grades.”
He says this poses a potential danger. “Most of the distresses and challenges happening in universities are to do with broader institutional goals and objectives rather than an innate problem with students’ mental health,” he says. “It becomes a sticking plaster that prevents us seeing the roots of the problems.”
Over the past five years, mindfulness has been spreading rapidly through schools, where more than 1,700 people have attended courses run by the Mindfulness in Schools Project, a not-for-profit organisation set up in 2009 to introduce mindfulness curriculums and training to young people and their teachers. MiSP estimates that it has reached 18,000 pupils through people trained on these courses, and this year a £6.4m, seven-year Wellcome Trust research programme will measure how far it affects learning and wellbeing.
Seldon says it is more difficult to introduce in universities because there is less of a captive audience – no daily assemblies, for example – and more of a tradition of autonomy, which means any attempt to impose it could spark opposition. “All we can do is encourage and make available information about it for those people who want to avail themselves of opportunities and ensure they can readily do so,” he says. This means the ways universities have introduced mindfulness have been diverse, with some using it in specific programmes such as medicine, teaching or social work to enhance professional practice and wellbeing, some offering traditional eight-week courses or shorter taster workshops for all staff and students, and others relying on student societies to organise sessions.
One advantage, says Seldon, is that it is cheap. “It doesn’t require one to go anywhere, have any money, any prior belief: just a mental discipline to stop and breathe and let go.”
Jeremy Christey, chair of the university and colleges division of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and director of the Students Against Depression website, would like to see mindfulness applied through institutions as widely as possible. “What we can see from very hard data is if people practise mindfulness regularly it can help them achieve focus and calm. That’s a particularly useful life skill so university is a good time to learn it.” He argues that it helps students build resilience and study more effectively.
But Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, says it is infantilising. “Mindfulness is a way of suggesting to students we expect you to be too messed up unless you go through this ritual,” he says. “There is this commodified, ritualistic aspect to it which is going to be there until the next new fad comes along.” He says the explosion in reports of stress in students is too dramatic to be a purely medical phenomenon rather than a social construct. While people once accepted having butterflies in their stomach before an exam, “the least pressure is now interpreted as an unwanted intrusion and too much to bear”.
At Cambridge, Galante insists it is not all about exams, and she isn’t sure her research will show mindfulness improving exam performance. “People here are perfectionist,” she says. “So it might be they do worse because they are more relaxed.” But if this means they are able to enjoy themselves more that is not necessarily a bad thing, she says. “That’s probably a more successful skill for life than being able to learn a lot, but not being able to face life unless perfectly prepared.”
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