Recent neuroimaging research suggests that people have more than 6,000 thoughts every day (Tseng & Poppenk, 2020). Learning how to use our ability to think is a priority in education and is embedded in most of what we do as educators. We teach our students to use logic so they can draw good inferences. We guide them through using scientific reasoning so they can design effective experiments, test hypotheses, and analyze data. We show them how to think critically to make informed decisions and how to think abstractly as their conceptual understanding expands beyond the concrete aspects of their experience. We try to teach them how to effectively use the thousands of thoughts their brains will produce every day.
Learning how to think is a clear focus for educators. Learning how to deal with thinking is not.
If this last sentence sounds odd, as if thinking is a problem, consider this: How much time do you spend thinking about something other than what you are doing? According to a study conducted by Harvard psychologists, our minds wander 47 percent of the time (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010). For almost half of our waking lives, our minds go somewhere that's not related to what we are doing in the moment. So, while many of those 6,000 daily thoughts are popping up, we might be physically present but mentally absent.
Lost in Thought—But Not in a Good Way
Research in neuroscience has found that when our minds wander, a series of brain regions linked with self-referential thinking and rumination get active (Andrews-Hanna et al., 2010; Zhou et al., 2020). This means that when we aren't mentally present and engaged, a significant part of our mental activity is devoted to a playlist called "Me and My Problems."
Another study suggests that spending time just thinking is not that enjoyable (Wilson et al., 2014). In this study, student volunteers took part in periods when they had nothing to do but to think. Participants typically didn't enjoy the experience. If they were offered mundane external activities they could do instead of thinking, they would choose them. Even when researchers offered participants unpleasant options, like giving themselves electric shocks, many preferred that option to spending time alone with their thoughts!
If we want to teach students critical thinking, we need to teach them not only how to think, but also how to deal with the overwhelming volume of thoughts that will visit them every day.
Clearly, thinking, as humans naturally tend to do it, can be overwhelming or even stressful to many people. If we want to teach students critical thinking, we need to teach them not only how to think, but also how to deal with the overwhelming volume of thoughts that will visit them every day. This requires teaching about the use of attention and the cultivation of awareness. To foster effective thinkers, we need to teach students mindfulness—the human faculty that allows us to deal with thoughts without getting lost in them.
Without mindfulness, thoughts can become our inner dictator. If we don't consciously remind ourselves that thoughts are words and images produced by our brains, those words and images become our experience of the world—like water for fish. I once saw a cartoon showing two fish jumping out of their fishbowl; one of them points at the water and tells the other: "That is what I was telling you about."
People are often so immersed in thoughts that there's no separation between them and their thinking. Instead of seeing the world and seeing our thinking, we see the world from our thinking—and we can get quite lost.
Cognitive behavioral therapy teaches about the triangle formed by thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. The three angles of this triangle constantly affect each other. What we do has an impact on how we feel and what we think. Our emotions influence our thinking and actions, and our thoughts influence how we feel and what we do. So if the 6,000 thoughts we have every day influence how we feel and what we do, shouldn't we more intentionally train our attention and cultivate our awareness so we can deal effectively with that thinking?
To complicate things even more, people are now bombarded by thousands of thoughts every day while being hyperstimulated by technology—flooded with information and misinformation, triggered by the tricks of persuasive technology to get us hooked to a screen. Now more than ever, educators must pay attention to attention and awareness. We need to go beyond thinking to be good thinkers and help students be good thinkers.
Mindfulness training implies getting comfortable with non-doing, non-striving, and non-judging.
Picture thinking as a race car and mindfulness as the racetrack. We can improve the engine of the car and add more power to it, but if the racetrack we use wasn't built for racing, the car won't go far, or it will have an accident. Mindfulness makes the "thinking race" safe and effective. Building a racetrack that can handle thinking can be challenging. It requires engaging in practices that seem unlike all the other things we tell our students are important (like "achieving"). Mindfulness training implies getting comfortable with non-doing, non-striving, and non-judging.
So, how can teachers help students go beyond thinking? There are many ways to bring mindfulness into education, but the first step is to train school leaders and teachers.
First, Train the Adults
Educators want to give students the tools they need to be successful in life. When we realize mindfulness is one of those tools, we often want to start teaching it as soon as possible. But mindfulness can only be taught in a meaningful way by adults who apply it to their own lives. And it will be easier for skeptical teachers to understand the importance of this approach when they see school leaders incorporating mindfulness into their leadership.
The importance of training educators first became clear to me back in 2006, when, after spending years studying and practicing mindfulness, I realized we needed these practices in education. I wanted to find ways to teach mindfulness to students at The Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, New York, where I was associate dean of students. So I called the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, where Jon Kabat-Zinn had developed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, to ask for guidance. I wasn't expecting the response I received from one of the center's representatives: "If you want to bring mindfulness to your students, you need to start with the teachers."
I realized then that for any infusion of mindfulness practices into a school to be meaningful, change needs to start with the adults. Like social-emotional skills, mindfulness can only be adopted by students in a sustainable way if teachers practice and model it. And we know students benefit when the adults in their school embody the values and practices that those adults teach.
The John Cooper School, a private preK–12 school in Texas where I am currently wellness director, has incorporated such practices. For the last three years, our weekly all-school assemblies, which involve more than 500 students and faculty, have started with a "three-breath" guided mindfulness activity. We use the first breath to become aware of the sensations of breathing, the second breath to be aware of tension we can let go of, and the third breath to become aware of what values we want to embody in the present moment. This practice, now part of our school culture, has roots in leadership by John Cooper students. Two years ago, a leadership retreat for our student government association included mindfulness practices, like taking three calming breaths to connect with your values. Our student body president later asked if we could start every school assembly with three mindful breaths.
If your school isn't ready to adopt a whole-school approach, you can still do things to move your school community and teachers toward appreciating mindfulness and bringing students its benefits. For example:
- Start a faculty PLC around the study of mindfulness.
- Sign up for a mindfulness training and invite colleagues to join you. Some of the many training programs available include Mindful Schools, Mindfulness in Schools Project (MiSP), and Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE) from the Garrison Institute.
- Start a book club on how mindfulness can help students deal with the nature of thinking. Jon Kabat-Zinn's Wherever You Go, There You Are is usually recommended as an introduction, but there are many other helpful books, such as Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World by J. Mark G. Williams and Danny Penman, and 10% Happier by Dan Harris. Mindful.org publishes a list of the best mindfulness books every year.
Teachers engage in attention-training practices and develop more awareness about their thoughts and emotions, then bring this awareness into how they communicate with students and colleagues.
At my school, we train interested teachers in Search Inside Yourself, a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence and leadership program originally developed at Google. More than two dozen teachers have already completed the program, and the goal is to train all faculty. The feedback on these trainings has been incredibly positive. Participants learn about mindfulness as the basis to developing emotional intelligence and about the neuroscience behind the approach. Teachers engage in attention-training practices and develop more awareness about their thoughts and emotions, then bring this awareness into how they communicate with students and colleagues, and lead in their classrooms. The more they embody mindfulness, the more accessible it becomes to their students, because students see them model it.
Then, Help Students Practice "Awarenessing"
Any educator who has an understanding of mindfulness and has practiced it themselves can take steps to include mindfulness in classroom routines. In a world full of distractions and activity, schools need to intentionally cultivate within students the foundational mindfulness attitudes of non-striving and non-doing. Simply giving students the opportunity to disconnect from external stimulation and be open to the present-moment experience will pay dividends.
But this type of "awarenessing" (as Jon Kabat-Zinn calls it) doesn't happen unless we create opportunities for it. I've found that students welcome such opportunities because they recognize the importance of learning how to disconnect from autopilot. When I worked as a classroom teacher at the American International School-Riyadh (in Saudi Arabia), I started every class with five minutes of mindful breathing.
Teachers at my current school also embrace simple mindfulness practices in their classrooms. A few years ago, a student at John Cooper conducting an independent study project on happiness decided to study the impact one minute of mindful breathing would have on his classmates. He asked his teacher if they could engage in that practice at the beginning of every class, and she agreed. By the end of the semester, students had chosen to increase the time to five minutes at the beginning of every class, and when surveyed, students said they wanted to keep doing it. This teacher has been doing this practice with all her senior students for six years now.
Mindful breathing routines are a way to let students pause and observe, step out of their thinking minds, and get in touch with the awareness that will focus them, including by letting go of unhelpful thoughts. We should talk with students about how "stepping out of thinking" enables someone to think more effectively when they need to.
One More Benefit: Empathy
When thinking is done in the context of mindfulness, it also becomes easier to understand other people's perspectives. In talking about their experiences with mindfulness, students often realize that other people are also bombarded by their own thinking—that most people are like the fish who doesn't see the water. Out of this realization, empathy emerges. I believe that in addition to making us better thinkers, mindfulness can help us create communities where students aren't tyrannized by thinking but guided by compassion.
