Why educate in Mindfulness for children and adolescents

Mindfulness is usually translated as "full attention", and its derivation mindful as "fully attentive".

The fact of promoting knowledge about consciousness and attention and being "mindful" lead to deeper knowledge than what we come to perceive through changing emotions and thoughts.

Awareness and attention are in their essence dynamic, we can enhance them and for this, mental training techniques are taught from a simple and concise pedagogical methodology based on full attention.

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The relationship between Mindfulness and thoughts

The fact of understanding that one is not "his thought" will allow us to stop identifying with thought and stop being possessed by it. Mindfulness understands that thought fragments reality. It is a point of view, the way in which we interpret our own behaviors or those of others. Likewise, it is the significance and intensity that we give to an emotion and even a diagnosis. It is only one perspective among many others possible.

This is easier to understand with the following example. We have the fictional case of Pedro. Pedro is 16 years old and was diagnosed with dyslexia at the age of 8. During school courses, when Pedro did not have that diagnosis, his thoughts told him; "I cannot study like the rest, therefore I am worth less". When Pedro began his treatment he thought; “I am different and I cannot do certain things”. Today, after years of therapy and with the practice of Mindfulness, Pedro knows that his dyslexia does not define him, that he is just a aspect of him to take into account for certain situations, and he also knows that he can and is worth as much as the the rest.

The relationship between Mindfulness and emotions

Along the same lines, we will say that one is not your emotion. A teenager is usually defined as impulsive, aggressive, intense, with extreme values... Well, those aspects don't really define you. It is simply their emotions that are part of that particular evolutionary stage.

Adolescents are more than all that emotional fabric, they are growing people who are building their identity as adults and they need to be heard and understood to really know what is going on in there and to be able to translate their world emotional.

The child and adolescent are in an intellectual learning process that facilitates school. But... And his emotional learning? If our children were educated in this, they would become healthy adults without anxiety symptoms. Anxiety comes when we don't understand ourselves and when we send each other messages of hostility. We can introduce this education to them from a very young age, and Mindfulness can accompany them in this function.

Working our Mindfulness fosters the ability to pay attention, and at the same time allows us to develop the awareness of what is happening at a certain moment, in one's own body, with one's own emotions and thoughts. In this way we will be able to realize what is happening at this particular moment.

The importance of the present moment

Now we must ask ourselves... Why is it important to develop awareness of what is happening here and now?

Well, the answer raises a thought. When one perceives the feeling of one's own body, the performance of the other, the surrounding context and all of this in its pure state without any judgment or evaluation, avoids interpreting reality in a fragmented way, thus emerging a vision of reality itself as a whole.

When one is capable of valuing a whole beyond oneself, what happens is that they will have the power to decide what to do next without issuing a passive response, that is, without reacting in automatic.

Why do we have to work on our mindfulness to avoid these automatic responses? Because the automatic reaction makes us vulnerable to anxiety, stress, depression and emotional reactivity. If Pedro had not understood both his strong points and the weak points that he has in his studies as a result of his dyslexia, by obtaining a 5 as the mark on the dictation exam he would have experienced only negative emotions such as disappointment and frustration, and this could generate anxiety in the face of new exams and other thoughts self-destructive.

All this about the reactions and interpretations that come from thought It is seen both in interpersonal relationships in the family environment and in the school environment, and here is the importance of increasing attention through a training based on Mindfulness. In this way, not only the capacity for attention would be improved, but also the skills of emotional balance would be reinforced.

If we work on our Mindfulness we will understand that reality is something different from the emotion that we have as the answer that each of us give to a specific situation, and therefore the suffering caused by a certain situation begins and ends in ourselves.

Within the family context, among friends, at school and other social contexts, the situations that lead to reaction without the proper approach to the situation itself, producing an imbalance emotional. All this happens daily in all areas. Hence, in Capital Psicólogos the proposal of the Mindfulness workshop was born. We will learn to connect with our body according to our evolutionary stage of development, and there will be different proposals for children, adolescents and adults.

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Benefits provided by Mindfulness in the school environment

We can highlight the benefits of practicing meditation in evolutionary stages such as childhood and adolescence, even if they were extensive to all those people in a situation. of learning, and above all list the benefits to publicize its usefulness in the school environment, since these are less disseminated by the media.

These are the Main psychological benefits of Mindfulness in the school environment:

• Create the optimal predisposition to learn.
• Increases academic performance.
• Enhances attention and concentration.
• Improves participation in the classroom.
• Promotes impulse control.
• Encourage self-reflection.
• Provide tools to reduce stress.
• Reduces anxiety before exams.
• Enhances social and emotional learning.

Once exposed the benefits, we can understand how useful and necessary this practice becomes with the in order to achieve the holistic well-being of oneself in as many areas as the social roles that we perform. From Capital Psychologists we invite you to learn about our proposals for Mindfulness workshops for children, adolescents and adults.