Improving Graduate Student Mental Health with Mindfulness
What can be done about improving the mental health situation in graduate school?
Why Graduate Students?
Graduate students are a tricky part of a puzzle. We are adults, but still growing. We are employees, but still students. We are advised, but still alone. Graduate students are the target of this, because we often go unheard.
Meditation may be the answer. You might find that sitting and listening to a calm recording of Metta (loving kindness meditation) leaves your feeling more complete. Or maybe the 8am yoga class allows you to flow through your tense shoulders and even tenser disposition. However, there is no one right answer. You might have just as much luck encouraging the habit of a 2 hour hike every week or a journaling practice. I ask that you keep the heart of mindfulness in perspective as you seek the elixir that works best for you. This is not an escape, but an awakening. Step away from the noise of your mind and into the lived experience of this very moment.
A big part of my mental health improvement has been thanks to yoga and a mindfulness practice — and research shows this could become common place. This is the second part of a two part story written with a close friend researching “mindfulness in education” at Penn State University, Marisa DeCollibus. We’ve had so many conversations about how we wanted to improve the state of matters, so are trying to formulate our thoughts. This is the second part of a two part story, click here if you’re interested in the background of why this is such a statistically prevalent problem.
A better future for graduate-student mental health
Similar to the First International Conference on the Mental Health & Wellbeing (May 2019 in Brighton, UK), there’s more recent movement in the States. Specifically, there is a 22-month initiative that is a joint venture of the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) in Washington D.C. and the Jed Foundation to gather more comprehensive data mental health at various institutions specifically focused on driving future solutions.
They outline the plan as to “gather survey data from 500+ member institutions of CGS, focus groups for students, and a workshop for students, administrators and mental-health specialists to connect.” I hope they get the metrics right and have fair analyses, as there’s a lot to improve in my colleagues’ day to day lives here. If they follow through with their goal to publish around when this article is posted (January 2020), maybe things will start to improve before I graduate in May 2022. One can hope.
There is a disparity between undergraduate and graduate school mental health support in how they can be run and how they can be effective. Undergraduate support is currently often implemented and linked to the orientation process and onsite medical center, but graduate programs are not accessible to this because of less structured orientation programs, inconsistent healthcare options, and different engagement levels with the students into the campus community.
Some initial paths taken by American universities are that “Boston University mandates two weeks of paid holiday for PhD students on annual stipends” and “Vanderbilt enacted a Mental Health Bill of Rights and Responsibilities that mandates any student who seeks out help will be granted a personal contact and care-provider.” Graduate student specific programs are needed to solve this problem, and they are coming.
Early Promise of Mindfulness Meditation
Mindfulness is often criticized as pseudo-science, but anyone I have met who’s been practicing regularly beyond 3 months swears by it. This includes many graduate students, some of who I pointed to it.
The criticism is valid: “There is a common misperception in public and government domains that compelling clinical evidence exists for the broad and strong efficacy of mindfulness as a therapeutic intervention,” Mind the Hype, results show “a mixture of only moderate, low or no efficacy, depending on the disorder being treated.” I account this to how diverse meditation is.
Ultimately this just means more research is needed. Below I have collected two types of research, 1) purely medical research showing the benefits and 2) new work being done showing benefits in education.
Medical Benefits
The quasi-religious feeling one gets after consistently dropping back in meditation from the chaos of a rushing life is incredibly therapeutic. The medical benefits can help anyone, graduate student or not. While the science is iffy as to if everyone will benefit, it is clear that there is little to lose in trying it.
A role-model of mine as a scientist, Peter Attia, who studies the mechanistic protocols to improve health-span swears by meditation as a tool to improve lifespan (beyond just quality of life) by drastically mitigating daily cortisol levels. Starting as a niche treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, the meditation market has exploded into a value of over $1 billion. Learn more below.
If you are not sure if it is for you, consider some of the other measured effects that any modern human will likely be touched by (at least one of these):
- Psychologist David Creswell, Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon showed a reduction of chronic stress as and a reduction of pain medication intake (potentially as a reduction of interleukin-6), and in his 2017 review touted “a 2003 study showing a correlation between practicing mindfulness and a number of indicators of well-being, such as self-esteem and life satisfaction.”
- In a 2010 study, Harvard researchers showed that adult minds wander 47% of the time — and when they notice this happening, they are hit with a rush of unhappiness. Meditation has been implemented to reduce this effect.
- Mindfulness meditation may trigger neuroplastic alterations in various regions of the brain, including the insula (empathy and emotional understanding), the putamen (learning), portions of the anterior cingulate cortex (basic body regulation such as heart rate and core temperature), the prefrontal cortex (higher order thinking), and the amygdala (emotions).
Bringing it Into the Education System
Section written by Marisa DeCollibus: Given one of my current research interests is mindfulness in educational settings, I will briefly discuss why it may, for some, hold value as a tool in the world of graduate studies. I believe students have a right to be supported in their search for happy and healthy lives.
To start: a 2019 meta-analysis on the effects of mindfulness meditation on college student anxiety reported a dramatic reduction; the study reports an overall large effect size of 0.56 (Bamber & Morpeth) — an effect size is the measure of an effect of a hypothesis, even after showing it is statistically significant with the p value. This analysis comes as just one in a slew of research, growing in popularity since John Kabit-Zinn’s development of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction in 1979.
It seems mindfulness is finding its way into all sectors of the US from Silicon Valley, to the American Prison System, to K-12 education. An example I often think of is Chade-Meng Tan’s “Search Inside Yourself”. Tan, a former Google engineer, based this book off the hybrid emotional intelligence and mindfulness course he taught for Google and in it promises to offer tools on how to be happy, successful and liked. The book itself has a forward by some well known names in the field: Kabat-Zinn and Daniel Goleman (the coiner of the term emotional-intelligence). Generally — when one of the tech companies endorses a course and it gets a following, it is because it works. These companies know how to create productive, happy humans.
My Research at the Penn State Lab for School-based Prevention attempts to address many of the concerns outlined here and in the previous post. This comes through as structured curriculums for social and emotional health, and hopefully, among recommended and tracked meditation routines for students that can be implemented by educators. We are bringing scientific metrics into schools (such as Spire Health Tracker) to figure out the best protocols and improve the education system.
