BE MINDFUL

One easy guide on reducing anxiety and coping with examination stress

 

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Be Mindful  is an 8-week proposal to help students handle stress not only during exam period. It can be tailored and presented to the participants on demand: in full or as individual practical workshops focusing on one particular aspect. 

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Presentation with Hanna Murray on Talk Radio Europe here:

 

 

 

 

Mindfulness is already being practiced in most acknowledged Universities in the USA , the United Kingdom or Australia where it has been proven that students can acquire coping mechanisms to deal with stress during exam period, among others. The students who have attended the sessions claim that their self-awareness improves, their ability to pay attention is better, their concentration skills are enhanced, their cognitive flexibility is improved, they develop their own learning strategies, they learn how to plan their work and study, they get better results, they manage to reduce anxiety, they become more resilient. Some programs and interventions [here] currently followed at Universities are:

 

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY 

provides a wide range of daily practice of Mindfulness as well as 8-week MBSR programs and three-month workshops with a focus on concentration skills, how to handle exam anxiety, decision taking, resting and de-stressing plus time management during exam period. 

 

 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY 

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction [MBSR] programs started in 2011 with outstanding results and hundreds of students participating.

 

 

 

HARVARD UNIVERSITY 

offers Mindfulness sessions on a daily basis, a 4-week Mindfulness program, and the official MBSR eight-week program twice a year.

 

 

 

 

STANFORD UNIVERSITY 

organises specially designed 6-week programs for their first year students twice a year; second and third year students can attend Mindfulness workshops which will provide credits to their curricula. Mindfulness sessions are also available.

 

It is interesting to find out that this Three-minute-breathing-space practice taught in the university classroom report fewer episodes of mind wandering and distractibility, and more than half the students used the practice also outside the course.

 

 

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what follows is this «Be Mindful» proposal that I like to share with my Official Language School students to learn some long term strategies that will help them achieve their best performance in final PEC examinations: how to gradually build up their own strengths with the help of an interesting array of tools, how to handle stress before and during exams, how to manage their time, and how to regulate themselves (not to «block out, get up and leave») 

SESSION ONE: FROM DOING TO BEING

SESSION TWO: BEFRIENDING SILENCE

SESSION THREE: ATTENTION REGULATION

SESSION FOUR: EMOTION REGULATION

 SESSION FIVE: TIME MANAGEMENT

SESSION SiX: CULTIVATING RESILIENCE

SESSION SEVEN: LOVING KINDNESS

SESSION EIGHT: CLOSING UP

 

 

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La vida, sin prisa