College is supposed to be an exploratory time in your life, one where you’re able to invest time and energy into yourself and truly understand who you are and what fulfills you as a person. Something that has helped me immensely on this journey of my own is meditation. From an outside perspective, meditation can seem intimidating or just confusing with all of the different types and intentions you can practice. However, I hope I can ease some of those worries for you and help you begin your college career with a new skill that can help you going forward.

What is Meditation?

Meditation has been practiced for thousands of years and across many different cultures. The Cleveland Clinic defines meditation as “a practice that involves focusing or clearing your mind using a combination of mental and physical techniques”. This may seem like an incredibly broad definition, and that’s because it is. The amount of freedom you have when practicing meditation is a bit of a double-edged sword. As a beginner, this open-ended format can be intimidating and prevent many people from starting their meditation journey. However, this same trait is part of what makes meditation so powerful and applicable to so many lifestyles. Once you’re more comfortable with the practice you can adapt it in so many different ways to work better for you as an individual and what you need on a day-to-day basis. This is why I believe this concept holds so much value for self-exploration, to refine the practice for yourself you must develop a relationship with and listen to your body.

As a college student, I understand the struggle of having a busy schedule, and the last thing you’re thinking about with a full agenda of assignments, exams, and papers is closing your eyes and breathing for a couple of minutes. However, there are so many different benefits to meditation that make a couple of minutes seem like such a small price to pay for what you gain from it. Everyone has different struggles they deal with, especially in a turbulent time such as college, but some issues seem almost universal among college students. Through my research, these shared struggles seem to consist of stress, anxiety/other mental struggles, lack of sleep, time management, and difficulty feeling present in the moment. Lucky for us, meditation is known to help with all of these!

Meditation and Stress Relief

As students, we know that schoolwork and stress are best friends. With endless requirements and due dates to meet it’s so incredibly easy to get tied up in the work itself and forget why we’re doing it in the first place. Especially in the digital age, even when we’re “taking a break” we’re still being constantly overstimulated, adding to this stress. Meditation provides a calming contrast to this nonstop, overwhelming lifestyle we’ve all grown so accustomed to. Through meditation, focusing intently on one thing can help reset your mind and flush out all of the extra noise of your busy lifestyle. The Mayo Clinic states, “Meditation can give you a sense of calm, peace and balance that can benefit your emotional well-being and your overall health. You also can use it to relax and cope with stress by focusing on something that calms you. Meditation can help you learn to stay centered and keep inner peace”. You may be thinking, how can a couple of minutes of meditation combat a whole day of stress? It is proven that the benefits of meditation extend past the formal session and continue throughout your day. The mind is a powerful tool if you can use it to your benefit, and once you are able to become consistent with your meditation practice, these few minutes a day will compound upon itself and continue to grow along with you. I don’t want to flood you with just the scientific research though. I caught up with a fellow college student and avid meditator, Aidan Murphy, to give you some more relatable examples of how meditation may benefit a busy college student. “Meditating definitely helps me a lot on a day to day basis just because I tend to do it most days, especially when I’m feeling stressed. It helps me realize that my thoughts are nothing more than just thoughts and that my brain is always gonna be thinking about something just because that’s what it does.”

Meditation and Anxiety

Another extremely common struggle of college students is anxiety. Stress and anxiety are closely related but anxiety certainly has unique difficulties attached to it as it is an actual medical condition. Anxiety is something that I have struggled with personally, and meditation has helped me immensely. Anxiety is such a slippery slope, it can make you feel out of control and powerless in your own mind. One wrong thought or idea can send you spiraling. Murphy expressed that meditation helped him in this aspect as well, stating, “I like to think of it a lot like a river, the thoughts are always flowing in the river and then you can let the bad ones float away and just keep the good ones.”

“When I’m meditating I just think of it as I don’t identify with my thoughts and I look at them from an outsider’s perspective with no judgment, with no reason, I just analyze them and allow them to come and go as they choose. It helps me a lot because I tend to take stuff much more seriously that doesn’t need to be taken so seriously and I get to choose what I value. So that aspect helps a lot with kind of everything in life”. Scientific evidence also supports the effectiveness of meditation when it comes to managing symptoms of anxiety. One psychiatric study in particular, took a sample of 208 patients over a 8 week period and treated a group of 106 patients with escitalopram (generic Lexapro), one of the most commonly prescribed anxiety medications, and treated the remaining 102 with “mindfulness-based stress reduction” (mindfulness meditation). Saving you all of the scientific verbiage, the data showed that the difference in anxiety levels between the two groups at the end of the study was negligible. This resulted in a conclusion that mindfulness meditation treatment was “noninferior” compared to the effectiveness of escitalopram treatment. I am not by any means saying that this means you should abandon your current anxiety treatment plan and start meditating, but I do believe that in certain individuals the benefits are certainly comparable, and I think that is an amazing feat for a completely free resource that any of us can take part in. This example is strictly to show that the possibilities for meditation are high and adding it to your current treatment could be extremely beneficial.

Mindfulness

When you hear people talk about meditation, you’ve most likely heard something about mindfulness. This has become an increasingly popular topic lately as studies such as the one I just mentioned have come out detailing the benefits. But what does mindfulness really mean? Mindfulness originates from the Tibetan Zen Buddhist practice of meditation, and according to the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience, “Mindfulness is focusing your attention on experiencing the present without judgment from the past or worries about the future. In this state, streams of consciousness thoughts can pass without emotional attachment and burden. Inner thoughts can be observed at a distance with self-awareness and detached perspective”. I could take you through all of the specific neuroscientific ways that mindfulness changes your brain but simply put, it rebalances the activity in different processing centers in your brain and allows you to experience more clarity and feeling in the moment. It goes without saying how valuable this can be, especially for a busy college student who has to be consistent every day. The most important benefit of mindfulness in my opinion is the increased ability to feel present in the moment. Not only does being present allow you to perform at your highest level physically, mentally, and emotionally, but also allows you to get everything out of the moment. This feels good in the moment, but also I find comfort after the fact knowing that I’m not missing out on the moments that are supposed to be some of the most enjoyable in life.