Mindfulness course ‘reduced student exam stress’

Students at the University of Cambridge who undertook an eight-week mindfulness course reported experiences of “disembodiment” and reduced exam stress more than a year after the trial, a paper has claimed.

The study, featured in Plos One, monitored 670 students at Cambridge, with half of those remaining in a control group while the other half undertook weekly 75- to 90-minute mindfulness sessions, and followed up with students a year later.

The report finds that the mindfulness programme, alongside typical mental health support, “reduced students’ psychological distress during the examination period, ie, three to six months after randomisation, compared to mental health support alone”.

When researchers followed up a year later, feedback from students found a “continued benefit” from the mindfulness programme in comparison with the standard support.

Julieta Galante, an NIHR postdoctoral fellow in Cambridge’s department of psychiatry, said such programmes could form part of an effective student mental health strategy, but only when administered properly.

“Our study shows that the provision of mindfulness training could be an effective, and cost-effective, component of a wider university student mental health strategy. However, this only applies to group-based, interactive mindfulness courses taught by a qualified mindfulness teacher,” she said.

“Learning mindfulness via a smartphone app is very different to having a teacher and a group, and we don’t know if these apps are at all effective in promoting mental health, with mixed evidence coming from existing studies.”

But Dr Galante was keen to stress that the mindfulness programme did not improve students’ grades. She said: “Mindfulness seems to be good for stress, but the concentration skills do not seem to apply to academic performance, and there surely are other factors at play.”

The report also finds that students on the course experienced “altered states of consciousness” – which it defines as a brief deviation from an individual’s typical consciousness, including entering into “flow states”, ego dissolution, disembodiment, sensory alterations and intense emotions.

Researchers found that people who had received the mindfulness training were twice as likely as those in the control group to experience unity and disembodiment, and found that the more students practised the more likely they were to have an experience of unity, disembodiment or of a blissful state.

Of a subsample of 73 participants, 43 per cent reported unity experiences during meditation, 47 per cent blissful states, 2 per cent disembodiment experiences, and 25 per cent insightfulness experiences.

The university decided to keep the mindfulness programme on after the study, but dropped it in 2023. Dr Galante questioned why policymakers would drop it “after having funded the study that showed [its] benefit and cost-effectiveness”.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com