Exercising Mindfulness for the Students of The NorthCap University
In past few years, mindfulness has gained momentum as an invaluable tool for enhancing positivity, well-being and improving performance of students. With innumerable benefits, schools and universities are integrating mindfulness activities as an important part of learning. Focus is laid on the happiness quotient of students. The NorthCap University, a leading University of Haryana, understand the significance and challenges of incorporating mindfulness and positivity in students lives. We at NCU, offer a unique open elective course, ‘Innovative and Positive Thinking,’ for the benefit of the students.
Mindfulness: Its Meaning
Mindfulness is a practice, where one is conscious about one’s thoughts, feelings and sensations without any judgement. Promoting mental clarity and emotional balance is the basis of mindfulness and it involves many techniques like meditation, focussed breathing, body scans, thought training etc.
Benefits of Mindfulness
Studies have shown that mindfulness plays an important role in the holistic and positive development of students. It offers myriad benefits as enumerated below:
- Improving Focus and Concentration: In today’s technologically advanced world, students find it hard to focus and concentrate on their studies because of many distractions. There are different ways by which human mind can be trained to avoid digression. The mind of the students can be conditioned so that they can easily absorb and retain the required information.
- Managing Stress: In todays fast-paced competitive world, students have to undergo a lot of pressure to meet societal expectations, academic performance and pressure from peers and parents often leads to anxiety and stress. Mindfulness techniques provide relief to them by calming their mind and also guide them to cope up with a situation to avoid nervous breakdown.
- Gaining Emotional Intelligence: Mindfulness aids students in their transition from adolescence to adulthood. During this phase, students act impulsively and have emotional outbursts. By applying mindfulness techniques, they can learn how to be emotionally strong and can respond to situations thoughtfully. This can further lead to good interpersonal skills, positive environment and enable students to develop an impressive personality. This has long term effect because being emotionally strong they can be successful in their professional and personal front.
- Better Grades: When we combine the above-mentioned benefits of mindfulness, we get focussed, stress-free and emotionally intelligent students., who contribute to an enriching learning environment. The outcome of all these is scoring good grades, enhanced memory and better creativity and problem-solving skills. Students develop out of the box thinking capacity and hence have a wider horizon with a positive outlook towards life
- Positive Thinking: Mindfulness leads to positive thinking, a sustainable factor for life. Positive thinking leads to a healthy and calm mind. A calm person can conquer the world. We, at NCU, are committed to provide a positive environment to our students.
As already mentioned above, we, at NCU, offer a unique open elective course, ‘Innovative and Positive Thinking,’ for the benefit of the students. In this course, the students learn different techniques of mindfulness and overcome pressure and fear through case studies and also learn the techniques to train and develop their mind. Along with this, The NorthCap University has established a Thought Lab to train young minds to practice mindfulness. It’s a novel concept and our students have benefitted a lot from it. Positive feedback has been received from the students and they have shown improvement in grades and their attitude towards life.
Mindfulness also fosters connection among students as they start competing and taking competitions in a healthy way. It helps them to get rid of isolation, feelings of jealousy and disconnection. Exercises practiced by students make them learn about empathy and connectedness leading to well-connected community and thriving in a conducive environment. Mindfulness initiatives taken by The NorthCap University, imparting education at par with global standards, thus, promotes a culture of support, guidance and understanding for its students. In fact, it is an important part of student welfare activity.
There are many challenges an institution can face while including mindfulness in its curriculum like resistance to change by students, resource constraints, scepticism but offering a flexible and inclusive approach can help to overcome the challenges. Once its potential is fully realised, students and educational institutions can reap the benefits of mindfulness which are beneficial both for the students and society at large.
Authored By
Dr Payal Khurana
Assistant Professor
Department of Centre for Language Learning
The NorthCap University