Frequently, Sally Munoz, a third-grade teacher at Duchesne Academy in Houston, asks her students to pause for a moment of mindfulness. Sometimes she tells them to focus on the way they’re sitting. Other times, they pay attention to their breath. Or maybe to the sounds around them: the whoosh of the air conditioner, someone’s cough, their neighbor’s breathing.
Such meditative techniques — focusing on the here and now, calmly noting feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations — have been scientifically proven to have positive effects on adults’ brains.
Now, a growing body of research indicates that such practices are good for kids and adolescents, too, helping to ward off anxiety, depression and inability to pay attention — afflictions that increasingly start young in this era of mobile phones, social media and high-stakes tests. According to the National Institute for Mental Health, more than 30 percent of adolescents ages 13-18 have dealt with an anxiety disorder and nearly 13 percent have suffered major depression.
“We spend so much time as teachers asking kids to pay attention,” said Munoz, who recently led a kids’ meditation class at the Houston Zen Center. “But often we don’t teach them how to pay attention.”
At DeBakey High School for Health Professions in Houston, researchers are in their third semester of studying the effects that 12 weeks of yoga and mindfulness classes have on ninth-graders. (Many forms of yoga include meditation and mindfulness.)
Kids randomly assigned to the yoga class show significant benefits over the control group, said Kirti Saxena, director of the Pediatric Bipolar Disorders Program at Texas Children’s Hospital and associate professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Baylor College of Medicine.
Teachers notice marked improvements in the yoga students’ posture and ability to focus. And the students say that the class helps them with their everyday lives: that they feel less stressed, that they’re more relaxed, that it’s fun.
Saxena is particularly excited that some DeBakey students are practicing the yoga techniques they’ve learned on their own: “They say they have a new tool to deal with stress, and they like that they can do it at home for no cost. The benefits will be huge if they keep doing that.”
Three years ago, Alessandra Bazzano, a professor at Tulane University’s School of Public Health, led a study at a relatively prosperous public elementary school in New Orleans. Daily yoga and mindfulness classes, she found, improved third graders’ well-being and emotional health. Her team began by testing the kids for anxiety disorders — and found that a whopping 52 percent of them met the criteria. “Even in a school with resources,” she said, “the kids were stressed out.”
Since then, she’s begun similar studies of pre-K and eighth-grade students at other schools, where the need for mindfulness is just as great. “Chronic stress, neighborhood violence and poverty get under the skin,” she said. “We can see that those stressors change structures in the brain. And those same physiological processes can be addressed through mindfulness and yoga.”
Scientists note that much remains unknown about teaching mindfulness and yoga to kids. For instance: What practices are best for addressing particular problems? And is there a best age to start?
But in an era where research grants are scarce, funding is hard to come by. The scientists’ studies won’t lead to a drug that can be patented. And public schools are already hard-pressed to afford old-school basics like Kleenex and librarians.
For both Bazzano and Saxena, the yoga studies are passion projects done on a shoestring.
At DeBakey, the study is a collaboration of DeBakey, Baylor College of Medicine, the Institute for Spirituality and Health, and Texas Children’s Hospital. But everyone involved, including Saxena and head yoga instructor Lex Gillan, is working as a volunteer.
Saxena hopes someday to be able to afford to expand the program to other schools. “If the kids can keep at it — keep practicing outside the classroom, throughout their lives — the benefits are huge.”