Schools in England Introduce a New Subject: Mindfulness (opens in new tab)

How do they teach your daughter to translate these principles to practical actions? For example how does your daugher understand "Eat well" to mean in terms of actual food she happens to crave (cookies, ice cream, plants, meat, etc.)? If they are going EAT-Lancet style on her you should probably be concerned.

I would argue that most of those things should come naturally, they should not be homework. Maybe on one day, you need less food, maybe another day your body needs rest. Being proud is beyond everything :D

That's a fair point; while mental health wasn't a class in my country, I've also found that these "extra" classes often suffered from giving them to random teachers. Just because they have some experience (and possibly a minor degree) in pedagogy doesn't mean they can teach every subject. Many here can barely teach their specialty.

Why is that a bad thing? If they can evaluate their thought process at such a young age, I would think that's a win.

That seems like a fairly healthy thing to learn, no?

Sometimes we need to acknowledge that our brain can cause us to do things we don't want to, and not beat ourselves up for it. Obviously that can go too far, and you need to anticipate the consequences of your actions, owning your conscious decisions.

That's because you also talk about your mind in the third person and not aware of it. You are consistently talking to yourself in your mind throughout the entire day. (Try to stop it if you don't believe this is true and exactly this is what you are trying to stop with mindfulness)

Your child clearly understands the situation better. I recommend you take up mindfulness meditation as well.

If we start the "what else" branch, it's almost infinite.

For example, the ways to manipulate people and how to protect oneself (e.g. according to Cialdini's classification, but not necessarily).

How to develop critical thinking in a world where most communication is aimed at influencing you in one way or another.

How to develop elasticity and the skill to adapt to ever-changing circumstances (hint: the world they will be living in will be very different from the one they're taught about at school, I think we all experienced it at some point).

How to understand the conditioning of the society and the culture we're living in (e.g. the roles of the husband/wife, parent/child, family member, colleague, boss) and learn to live with them without getting too serious about them (and save a few bucks on psychotherapy later).

How to save money. Only those few who care about you will teach you how to save money, everyone else wants you to spend your money. Etc. etc.

You might want to peruse some of the research on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy; there's reasonably good evidence that it outperforms conventional CBT for patients with chronic or recurrent depression or chronic pain. There are also some interesting neuroimaging studies that suggest that regular meditators have increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and reduced activity in the amygdala, which are both associated with psychological wellbeing.

Mindfulness is simply the practice of awareness, which encompasses a wide range of activities. The classic example is awareness of the breath - noticing the rhythm of inhalation and exhalation, noticing the sensation of air passing through your trachea, noticing when your attention wanders away from your breath and noticing how your focus returns to it. A technique often used with pain and anxiety patients is body-scan mindfulness - carefully notice the sensations in the soles of the feet, then the ankles, then the calves etc. You might notice and categorise your subjective experience in real time - this is a thought, this is a memory, this is a physical sensation.

Mindfulness has become a bit of a fad and is often poorly taught by inexperienced bandwagon-jumpers, which is unfortunate for a practice that pre-dates Christianity by several hundred years. If it does interest you, I'd suggest just trying it out, because it's sort of impossible to meaningfully communicate the subjective experience of mindfulness. Read Mindfulness for Beginners by John Kabat-Zinn or Mindfulness: A Practical Guide by Mark Williams, set aside fifteen minutes a day to practice and stick with it for a month.

> My current company also recently introduced a Mindfulness workshop only this time it was really a basic meditation workshop which I enjoyed.

I find it extremely weird for companies to offer these things. The only reason they'd do it is to boost their own productivity / margin / whatever. As in "be healthy because we need your ass on that chair and your brain working on our problems".

There is already a thin enough line between personal and professional life.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/31/mindfu...

Sounds like you had a bad workshop the first time round. Mindfulness should be rational, scientific and entirely free of woo or magical thinking.

Mental ill health is a leading cause of death worldwide. It leads to more years lost to disabiity than anything else. It's a significant cause of absence from work.

If the cure was so fucking simple don't you think people would have tried it?

The worst thing about HN is people who do not know what they're talking about chipping in with their facile half-witted suggestions for what they reckon.

But those solutions are often the barrier that people are trying to overcome. Due to things like anxiety, depression, ADHD, autism etc. that may be mild forms which are undiagnosed which hinder your interactions with others and the way you perceive your very identity and inability to perceive how others see you. These are not always overt feelings that you feel per se, they can be subtle, in the background of your mind like a gnawing feeling that convinces you don't deserve those things you listed or the ideal scenario someone has in their head is unattainable. And ofcourse severe cases are much worse.

Mindfulness, and Meditation by association, are the ways to identify the reoccurring thoughts and feelings, learning how to live with (not deal with or cure) them is key.

But hang on - there ARE serious problems in our society, culture and economy that need solving, and wishing them away or cloaking yourself in a blanket of warm feelings isn't going to change them, is it?

There's a lot of evidence that mindfulness based stress reduction works, with somewhat weaker evidence for other applications of mindfulness. There's little evidence for self-help books or your 'just feel better' approach, though.

I would see it the other way around: To me the real issue is that our minds have a tendency to create a lot of unnecessary stress for ourselves and make us focus on goals that are unlikely to produce any lasting happiness, like constantly striving for new achievements.

Meditation, at least some forms of it, are attacking this particular problem at the source and try to help people let go of these mental habits. I get the converse feeling that hobbies / meeting up with friends / putting a lot of effort into work are engaging, but they also feel like pleasant distractions instead of addressing what I see as the real underlying issue. This is highly subjective and depends on on what ones wants to do with one's life, but meditation certainly isn't a surrogate solution to me.

I agree problems need to be tackled at the source, but some self-help books may help you deal with the problem. 12 Rules for Life is one such book.

Making it a subject removes that "choice" you talk about and makes it mandatory.

Mindfullness doesn't aim to eliminate struggle. Children still have to sit exams; they still have chances to enter competition. And mindfulness won't, for example, remove a child from poverty.

What it might do is stop children killing themselves as a result of adversity.

Rates of death by suicide in the UK have been declining recently, but not for young people. We also know that rates of self-harm for young people are increasing, and self harm is a significant predictor of death by suicide.

> Children have no problems with happiness or well-being.

This seems rather naive to me. Unhappiness is far from absent from the lives of many children and young people, and social media is making it worse. See yesterday's yougov survey results that indicate that "18% of young people in UK do not think life is worth living" [1].

This new curriculum subject is about helping children to understand and navigate their own feelings and deal with stresses so that they are less likely to turn into messed-up teenagers and adults. As a parent of school-age children I think this is an entirely good thing.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/05/youth-unhapp...

>The initiative comes months after a survey commissioned by the National Health Service found that one in eight children in England between the ages of 5 and 19 suffered from at least one mental disorder at the time of their assessment in 2017.

>The survey, which was published in November, also indicated a slight increase in mental disorders in five to 15-year-olds, which rose to 11.2 percent in 2017 from 9.7 percent in 1999. Disorders like anxiety and depression were the most common, affecting one in 12 children and early adolescents in 2017, and appeared more often in girls.

Have it ever occurred to you that adults have mental problems because they didn't learn to manage it as children and young adults?

Besides, depression and anxiety is surprisingly common among children.

> Children have no problems with happiness or well-being.

Have you ever met a child IRL?

You were a very lucky child then :)

Edit: Apologies for the sarcastic response, couldn't help it. Children can and do feel unhappy, some more than others. This feels like an amazing step in the right direction because many people (myself included) don't learn early on that feeling sad or overwhelmed is normal and ok. We strive to "feel good" and stress about it, without tools to cope. Most adults either ignore this or go to therapy, but maybe from now on people will be more prepared.

You're gatekeeping metal health problems.

I think your hypothesis here is that the mental health issues, unhappiness and issues with well-being can be fixed completly from the society.

I disagree with it. I prefer to look at them somehow like I see bugs: they cannot be - in general - eliminated completely. They come with the process of people building products.

So I don't think we can solve those completely. This is why I think we should start educating children about how to think about live.

Maybe an inspiration from philosophy stage from Ancient time which originally I think was concerned (at least some of them) with how a life should be lived, what happiness means, what does it mean to be a homo sapiens ...

I think we should approach this as a society and start offering children tools about how to approach this.

> Children have no problems with happiness or well-being

How about children who are repeatedly raped by their parent? Are they happy?

How about children who's parent has died? Are they happy?

What about the children who are grappling with gender indentity or sexuality (and maybe with parents who are not supportive)? Are they happy?

What about children living with disability and who are being bullied because of it? Are they happy?

> Children have no problems with happiness or well-being

I'm happy for your past self, but your experience is not universal. Many people as children and teenagers have problems with these things. Its hard to take action to work on these without having a mental framework to organise your thoughts and communicate about them.

> Why wouldn't adults just solve their mental problems instead of introducing them to children?

Because people live in an artificial world. In the absence of real problems everything is emotionally traumatic, first world problems.

As I sit next to a war on a military deployment I await people to prove me right with the sadness of their downvotes.

I suggest you RTFA before facepalming.

It is as much about being literate in the issues as it is about solving them.

> Children have no problems with happiness or well-being.

Either you had a fairly idyllic life as a child of (more likely) you are looking at the past through rose tinted glasses (many people do this). Kids have problems.