The Mindful College Student

The perfect gift for the college-bound student! Based on the popular Mindfulness-Based College (MBC) program at Brown University, this book offers powerful skills to increase academic success and boost mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional health—now and for a lifetime. College is a time of transition. It’s a time for learning and preparing to make your own way in the world. But if you’re like many teens and young adults, the thought of leaving home and being on your own in a new place can also be intimidating—even overwhelming. That’s why you need a solid foundation to help you manage stress, stay focused, and maintain healthy habits—in body, mind, and spirit. Grounded in evidence-based mindfulness, The Mindful College Student will help you cultivate the cognitive and emotional skills you need to increase well-being and reach your highest aspirations. You’ll also learn positive coping strategies for dealing with stress, sadness, and anxiety—including diet, fitness, and sleep habits. Most importantly, you’ll discover three core self-regulation skills to help steer you toward the life you want: self-awareness, attention control, and emotion regulation. Get ready to take on the world with this fun and informative guide, filled with everything you need to face all of the challenges of college life—and beyond!

College is a time for learning and preparing to make your own way in the world. Based on the clinically proven Mindfulness-Based College course at Brown University, this book teaches students essential mindfulness skills to help them flourish during this transition period and throughout their lifetime. The perfect gift for the college-bound student, this book offers mindfulness habits for life and the promise of better mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional health.

This practical resource offers a much-needed introduction to the why, what, and how of supporting college students through mindfulness and stress-releasing strategies. Higher education professionals are in a unique position to support, coach, and teach strategies with students to manage anxiety and emotional distress and improve well-being. Drawing on experience from the disciplines of Mental Health, Counseling, and Student Affairs, the authors provide evidence-based practices and tangible techniques supported by the latest brain-based research and neuroscience. Full of tools that college students can use daily to assist with their relaxation, meditation, focus, and stress management, this book helps higher education professionals who are not trained mental health practitioners to effectively and confidently incorporate activities to support the whole student.

In a time when crossing guards are posted to prevent high schoolers from jumping in front of trains and parents shelling out $100K for packaged college applications, education has become a mad race to grab the Ivy ring. Based on experience in admissions with the Ivy League and other highly competitive universities, emerging scientific evidence on the impact of emotional intelligence and mindfulness, and discussions with admissions officers, students, families, and high school counselors, this book is a guide on how to go through the existing, however brutish, college applications process with less stress and anxiety, and more joy and mindfulness. Equipped with the powerful tools of emotional intelligence and mindfulness, this work acknowledges the reality of what the process is, and challenges young people to reach for a more meaningful ideal for themselves. This book shares a look at the holistic admissions process and offers an alternative one to the current climate of untenable stress. This updated model aims to shift mindsets from treating the admissions process as a ruthless competition with one externally-prescribed definition of success, to a step in a lifelong journey of curiosity and wonder. By building self-awareness, compassion, resilience, it’s possible to navigate the process with greater authenticity, balance, and joy.

College Mindfulness Training is a ground-breaking book that carefully combines selected meditation exercises with guidance explaining the background, scientific context, and practical applications of mindfulness practice. More than just a meditation manual, this book details how and why personal mindfulness practice is essential for the college-aged student. In addition to extensive practical exercises for both beginner and intermediate-level meditation students, the author explores the kinds of institutions and organizations that have arisen out of the popular mindfulness movement and what career options in the field may be available in the future. Throughout the manual, the author provides readers with insights into basic meditation techniques; active and passive meditation techniques; Focused Attention Meditation in both guided and self-guided forms; Open Monitoring Meditation; informal meditation exercises; a brief history of the MBSR program and Koru meditation; a survey of current apps and meditation-supportive technology platforms; and detailed instructions for self-driven practice, and a semester-long outline for teachers. A captivating read, this book covers many of the essentials of mindfulness meditation and self-care of interest to college students, making it an essential tool for those of college age seeking to practice mindfulness meditation as well as college educators seeking a guided system to enhance their students’ emotional well-being and academic performance.

Where are we now? Where are we going? : preparing our students for an uncertain future / Patricia A. Jennings, Anthony A. DeMauro, and Polina P. Mischenko -- A selective review of mindfulness training programs for children and adolescents in school settings / Rebecca N. Baelen, Michael V. Esposito, and Brian M. Galla -- Turn and listen : strengthening compassion and leadership in the adult community in schools / Pamela Seigle, Chip Wood, and Lisa Sankowski -- Modeling mindfulness : principal leadership and development for personal and organizational growth / Eleanor Drago-Severson and Jessica Blum-DeStefano -- Embodied teacher mindfulness in the classroom : the calm, clear, kind framework / Cynthia Taylor, Patricia A. Jennings, Alexis Harris, Deborah L. Schussler, and Robert W. Roeser -- Cultivating passion for practicing and teaching mindfulness : a multiple-case study of compassionate school project teachers / Polina P. Mischenko and Patricia A. Jennings -- The school counselor : change agent and collaborator for holistic student well-being / Rebecca L. Tadlock-Marlo and Meghan Damler -- Creating mindful and compassionate schools : including parents as partners / J. Douglas Coatsworth, Melissa Ward George, and Aimee Kleisner Walker -- Finding peace in chaos : mindfully prepared public school teachers / Richard C. Brown and Elizabeth Grassi -- Being in school transformation : toward equity and social justice / Velma L. Cobb.

College students and other young adults today experience high levels of stress as they pursue personal, educational, and career goals. These struggles can have serious consequences, and may increase the risk of psychological distress and mental illness among the age group now commonly referred to as "emerging adults." Scientific research has shown that practicing mindfulness can help manage stress and enhance quality of life, but traditional methods of teaching mindfulness and meditation may not be effective for college-age adults. This fully updated second edition of Mindfulness for the Next Generation describes an evidence-based approach for teaching the useful and important skill of mindfulness to emerging adults. The manualized, four-session program outlined here, Koru Mindfulness, is designed to help young adults navigate challenging tasks, and achieve meaningful personal growth. Rogers and Maytan, psychiatrists and developers of Koru Mindfulness, also discuss the unique stressors emerging adults face, identify effective teaching techniques for working with them, and review the now-robust research supporting mindfulness for stress reduction in a scientifically rigorous yet reader-friendly way. Among the features new to this edition are new data on the effectiveness of the curriculum, an introduction to the Koru mindfulness teacher certification program, and adaptations for culturally informed practice, reflecting the international appeal of Koru Mindfulness as well as its growing use outside of college settings, and extensively revised in-session scripts. Mindfulness for the Next Generation is written for therapists, teachers, health professionals, and student service providers.

The author of the best-selling What the Best College Teachers Do is back with more humane, doable, and inspiring help, this time for students who want to get the most out of college—and every other educational enterprise, too. The first thing they should do? Think beyond the transcript. The creative, successful people profiled in this book—college graduates who went on to change the world we live in—aimed higher than straight A’s. They used their four years to cultivate habits of thought that would enable them to grow and adapt throughout their lives. Combining academic research on learning and motivation with insights drawn from interviews with people who have won Nobel Prizes, Emmys, fame, or the admiration of people in their field, Ken Bain identifies the key attitudes that distinguished the best college students from their peers. These individuals started out with the belief that intelligence and ability are expandable, not fixed. This led them to make connections across disciplines, to develop a “meta-cognitive” understanding of their own ways of thinking, and to find ways to negotiate ill-structured problems rather than simply looking for right answers. Intrinsically motivated by their own sense of purpose, they were not demoralized by failure nor overly impressed with conventional notions of success. These movers and shakers didn’t achieve success by making success their goal. For them, it was a byproduct of following their intellectual curiosity, solving useful problems, and taking risks in order to learn and grow.