![]() “Modest investments of your time can result in really significant benefits to your overall well-being,” says Hagness. In the meantime, they recommend the Healthy Minds Program app, which offers podcast-style lessons and seated and active meditations.Īnd while the researchers focused on engineering graduate students, they also note that adopting a mindfulness practice can be a positive step for anyone. The researchers say they’d like mindfulness training to be integrated into the graduate student experience in the future. “The answer is that they did, and we had great cohorts throughout the project.” “In the literature, there’s evidence that engineers are less likely to seek treatment for mental health issues-so our team wondered if engineers would engage with this,” says Wendy Crone, a professor of engineering physics and mechanical engineering and a study co-author. Somewhat surprisingly, the researchers also found that engineering graduate students were open to mindfulness training and were highly satisfied not only with it, but also enjoyed the opportunity to connect with other graduate students. “What was beautiful is that we saw a really consistent pattern of results across all of the cohorts we did this study with,” says Pelin Kesebir, an honorary fellow with the Center for Healthy Minds and a study co-author. Mindfulness participants also reported they were better able to manage stress and anxiety, deal positively with setbacks, work more effectively with colleagues, and focus on their research. Over the same period, the control groups (which received training at a later date) noted steady or decreased well-being. In post-training surveys, students reported significantly improved emotional well-being, a more positive outlook, fewer negative emotions, and increased mindfulness. The graduate students also received training in mindfulness meditation and other contemplative practices, cognitive skills and techniques, and each session included time for meditation and cognitive exercises. They explored the six dimensions of emotional style (attention, self-awareness, resilience, outlook, social intuition, and sensitivity to context) and learned strategies for creating and maintaining healthy mental and emotional habits. This “Mindful Engineer” curriculum was based on an existing Center for Healthy Minds training, “Cultivating Well-Being in the Workplace,” and drew on neuroscience-derived concepts described in The Emotional Life of Your Brain, a book co-authored by center founder Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at UW-Madison.Įach weekly session built on the previous weeks’ content students learned about the brain’s neuroplasticity and how it can be trained to change responses to emotions. In the study, engineering graduate student cohorts participated in an hour-long, instructor-led mindfulness training program once a week for eight weeks. ![]() The UW-Madison research included two studies involving a total of 215 participants across six academic semesters at UW-Madison (and the final four semesters concurrently at the University of Virginia). In recent years, corporate giants like Google, Intel, Nike, General Mills, Target and others have included mindfulness in employee development activities to reduce employee stress and burnout, and enhance their focus, creativity, job satisfaction and wellness. ![]() “How do we help our students develop resiliency and a really robust toolbox, both professional and personal, to flourish in an environment where there’s inevitably going to be stress? We’re getting the word out that investing in self-care is important, and it’s normal.”Ĭultivated through practices such as meditation, yoga or prayer, mindfulness centers around being in the present moment in an open, non-judgmental, curious, accepting way. ![]() “Because of the state of graduate student mental health nationally, there’s a tangible need for a concrete intervention like this,” says Susan Hagness, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and one of the study’s co-authors. The research team, which includes UW-Madison engineering and Center for Healthy Minds researchers, published details of the National Science Foundation-funded study on March 22, 2023, in the journal PLOS ONE. Their results showed that regular, sustained mindfulness activities can play an important role in improving engineering graduate student emotional well-being. Normalizing mindfulness practices within the graduate student experience may be the answer, according to a three-year study conducted by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers. ![]() While recent studies and polls indicate the nation is in the midst of a mental health crisis, the situation in academia is even more grim: Within the high-stress, high-pressure, often socially isolated world of advanced education, graduate students experience depression and anxiety at six times the rate of the general population. ![]()
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