A Review on Research on Meditation and Journaling Self-Help Techniques on College Students
I am interested in furthering the research on the utilization of self-help techniques on college students. More specifically, the effects of daily meditation and journaling. Self-help psychology is a relatively new psychological coping technique which emphasizes self-guided improvement. Self-help requires the use of conscious control for one to overcome a difficult situation or conflict. Unlike other psychological measures which incorporate therapies, self-help is achieved individually. There are many different self-help resources such as books, articles, and professionals which are all great tools to help you succeed. There are countless benefits and recoveries self-help can provide. Specifically, self-help can help one decrease stress and improve their overall mood.
There are a number of different self-help skills and techniques one can develop in order to increase their happiness. Meditation and journaling are one of the leading self-help techniques. Meditation is when an individual obtains a meditative or calm state by consciously focusing on a single reference, such as their breath. Meditations is a way to practice mindfulness. Mindfulness, is a “non-judgmental awareness in the present moment”. Meditation is a great stress relieving technique which has been proven to treat symptoms of conditions such as depression, chronic pain, and sleeping problems. Journaling is a form of self-help as well. Writing positive affirmations and experiences on a daily basis is a strategy known to release stress and negative emotions. Journaling can also help you improve your mental health and control your feelings. Personally, I know the value these self-help techniques have for me as a college student. college student’s reported anxiety has nearly doubled over the last 15 years and 21.9% have complained of this anxiety effecting their learning experience (American College of Health Association). I want to focus my research on college students and the benefits of meditation and journaling throughout schooling. I am interested in determining if incorporating these two self-help skills into your everyday life correlates to a decrease in stress.
Mindfulness Education and Journaling
Srividya’s study examines the role of mindfulness in improving stress coping in a university setting (Srividya, 2017). Specifically, this study used a mixed message approach with both journaling and a pre/post-test experiment to determine how mindfulness-based classroom lecture improves everyday resilience. Prior to preforming his study, Srividya found that mindfulness techniques lead to less stress and therefore positive emotional wellbeing. The independent conceptual variable is mindfulness skills and the dependent conceptual variable is stress level. Using first year college students, Srividya assigned students to a 14-week semester-long one credit class on mindfulness education. This class met once a week for 40 minutes, taught by two instructors who offered various tools and resources on mindfulness and positive wellbeing, including positive psychology lectures, meditation, and breathing exercises. Specifically, every class began with a 10-minute breathing and meditation “break”. In addition to the in class lectures, the freshman students were asked to keep a journal of their feelings before and after practicing mindfulness, such as meditating or listening to a mindfulness podcast, when outside of the classroom.
The study was a two-group pre-test post-test experimental design. The treatment group was 19 freshman students enrolled in the mindfulness-based classroom lecture and the control group was 18 students enrolled in a regular communications course. Each group was given an 10-item ‘Perceived Stress Scale’ to determine everyday stress levels (Cohen & Williamson, 1988). They also both received the ‘Coping Inventory for Stressful Situations (CISS)’ to determine coping mechanisms (Endler & Parker, 1990). Using a series of factorial multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA), it was concluded that post-test stress levels for the treatment group were significantly lower than pre-test stress levels and higher for the post-test control group (Srividya, 2017). Ultimately, students who were enrolled in the mindful class curriculum had drastically lower perceived stress levels, suggesting that the incorporation of mindfulness tools can decrease negative emotions.
In addition to the two-group pre/post-test experiment, examinations of the qualitative journal entries provided insight on how the emotional moods of the participants shifted throughout the course. Before the mindfulness practices, participant’s notes being stress, tired, and overwhelmed. With the help of mindfulness techniques, the journal entries language changed significantly, students noted feeling calm, aware, and rested after practicing mindfulness techniques.
The journal entries suggested that practicing meditation and other mindfulness techniques has immense benefits. Students can feel more relaxed and ultimately less overwhelmed by test anxiety and school work. The hypothesis was confirmed that regularly incorporating mindfulness techniques can regulate teenage emotion as well as cultivate positive responses and well-being (Srividya, 2017).
I felt that the study could have incorporated more age groups instead of solei including freshman. This study could have benefited from including a variety of students from the freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior class. Particularly because the stress levels may vary between age groups assuming that the senior course load might be greater and juggled with an outside job perhaps. However, this study supports my original hypothesis that mindfulness and self-help techniques, such as meditation leads to a decrease in overall stress level. I will use the journaling experiment, in which there was an evident increase in mood post-meditative journaling, specifically to enhance and support my research.
Meta-Analysis of Meditation and Anxiety Studies
The second review on research on self-help techniques directly addresses the effects of mindfulness meditation on university students. This study emphasizes the importance of mindfulness meditation in reducing anxiety. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs)are practices in which one consciously clears their mind through meditation. A meta-analysis study is a statistical analysis of the results of multiple scientific studies. This is a meta-analysis study determining the effect of mindfulness-based interventions on college students (Bamber, Morpeth, 2018). It questions whether the effects of MBIs were greater depending on number of sessions, length of time, participants age, gender, and the design characteristics (i.e. randomized vs. self-selected), and if the use of MBIs leads to a decrease in stress.
This study analyzed past study results to determine if there is an overall positive impact of MBIs. studied previous research of MBIs with college students and the outcome measure of anxiety. Also, studies with undergraduate and graduate students, all gender, ages and majors, and both clinical and nonclinical anxiety diagnosed student were included. In their data, studies with two-group comparisons (MBI vs. control) and one group comparisons were included. Importantly, this study only included research done with specific core mindfulness constructs in order to ensure that the study focused on popular mindfulness techniques.
Electronic databases were used to search for these previously preformed studies. Using a codebook, data and variables of each study were extracted and recorded. Also, the outcome data for anxiety and stress were coded and calculated. Initially, 405 articles were found in the initial electronic database search. However, once criteria was met, the codebook only included 25 studies and therefore those 25 were included in this meta-analysis. All of the studies findings were compared and averages were determined.
This meta-analysis is novel and concludes that MBIs are effective for decreasing college student’s anxiety. An average of the studies determined the following. When compared with control groups, mindfulness based interventions has significantly decreased college student’s anxieties. Pre-test/post-test studies supported this finding as well. It was also determined that mindfulness strategy can reduce stress in both clinically diagnosed with anxiety students and nondiagnosed samples. Overall, mindfulness-based interventions reduced anxiety in college students has a large (0.56) significant effect compared with controls (Bamber et al., 2018). The meta-analysis proved the hypothesis.
An interesting finding was that undergraduate students perceived to be more stressed than graduate students. This could be due to the fact that graduate students might have better stress coping techniques which come with maturity. The study failed to address the specific reason for this. Further research could help determine the significance between ages and the effectiveness of specific mindfulness strategies with stress reduction. However, concluding that there is a significant effect of MBIs in reducing anxiety in college students yields to my prediction that meditation and other mindfulness strategies can significantly decrease stress in the university population. The strength of this meta-analysis greatly supports my research because multiple studies have determined the usefulness of mindfulness techniques in college student’s mental health.
Meditation, Yoga, and Heart-Rate Variability
The final review on research on self-help techniques addresses the use of both meditation and yoga as a mindfulness-based stress reduction intervention. Mindfulness-based stress reduction can help with stress as well as increase heart-rate variability (cardiovascular fitness) (Hunt, Al-Braiki, Dailey, Russell, Simon, 2017). Higher heart-rate variability in participants is related to better stress coping skills. Also, higher HVR can eventually reduce stress. Incorporating yoga and meditation can increase your hear-rate variability. This study compares yoga and meditation training. 60 undergraduate participates were randomly assigned to a meditation and mindfulness training group, a yoga practicing group, both a meditation and yoga group, a placebo control group with study breaks, and a no-treatment control group. 74% of the participants were female and all of the participants were over the age of 18.
The study lasted for four weeks. During the procedure, the meditation group was instructed on positive mindfulness techniques including breathing, and body and stress awareness. The yoga group was taught standard yoga poses. The mindfulness training and yoga group practiced yoga poses while incorporating meditation practices. Lastly, the study break group was given a dog, snacks, and peers to socialize with. The meditation, yoga, meditation and yoga, study break group, and control group was given a mood inventory test post-session. Later, each participant attached to the emWave Pro device, which measures heart rate, and then asked asked to complete the WAIS-IV IQ test (Wechsler 2008). During this test, the participants were told to use their previously learned mindfulness techniques to remain calm. Following the WAIS-IV, participants took the State Anxiety Inventory for Adults (STAI ; Spielberger et al. 1970), the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Watson et al. 1988) and the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-II; Beck et al. 1996).
The study concluded that all four treatment groups showed a decrease in perceived anxiety when compared to the no-treatment control group. The yoga group and the meditation with yoga group showed the highest heart-rate variability. The meditation group showed an increase of heart-rate variability during the IQ test which shows that they were least stressed than the other groups. Meditation alone can significantly decrease stress. Although this study found that yoga can be a slightly better therapy than just meditation alone, this study proved that both meditation and yoga self-help techniques lead to stress reduction. Incorporating these findings into my research can further strengthen my claim that self-help techniques are indeed long-term and beneficial.
Conclusion
The articles used for my review on research on meditation and journaling self-help techniques on college students all confirmed that incorporating mindfulness strategies can increase positivity in your daily life. As determined, incorporating self-help skills into your everyday life was proven to have various benefits. Meditation and journaling in college students is proven to decrease stress. I will study meditating and journaling as my two independent variables. Stress in students will be my dependent variable and I will determine that by using a self-report survey. I hypothesize that meditating can directly decrease a college student’s perceived stress level. Furthermore, I hypothesize that journaling will also decrease stress levels. With the help of the past research I just described, I am justifying my claim. For 10 minutes daily, I will assign one group of undergraduate students to meditate and another group to positively self-reflect through journaling. I will also have a control group. At the conclusion of 14 days (two-week span), I will have all three groups take the same self-report survey to determine their stress levels.