The Most Popular Class I Teach at University
An unexpectedly simple workshop exercise has the most impact on students
An audio version of this post is available HERE
As part of a health psychology module in the undergraduate degree at the university where I teach, we cover positive psychology, mindfulness and acceptance. One of the most powerful workshops we do with students is the experiential practice of meditating on others.
I‘m routinely met with cynicism from students about meditation and in particular this type of loving kindness meditation. They are mainly sports students, predominantly interested in what they can gain for their own performances from the more traditional types of sport psychology like mental toughness, confidence and cultivating a winning mindset. Mental toughness is the ability to persevere in the face of adversity, confidence is the belief in one's own abilities, and a winning mindset is the belief that one can achieve success (don’t worry we teach them about that too!). However, I get more response from students about the following practice than I do from any other exercise that we teach, many of them surprised by the difference it makes to their lives.
To give them some background to the exercise I start off by explaining that pursuing happiness alone and for oneself can often be detrimental to a person’s mental health and well-being. Happiness is an individual state, so when we look for it, it’s only natural to focus on ourselves. Yet a wealth of evidence consistently shows that self-focused attention undermines happiness and can cause depression. In one study by Mauss and colleagues in 2012, it was demonstrated that the greater the value people placed on happiness, the more lonely they felt every day for the next two weeks. In another experiment, they randomly assigned people to value happiness, and found that it backfired: those people reported feeling lonelier and also had a drop in their progesterone levels, a hormonal response linked to loneliness.
The Exercise
We then begin this very simple exercise. I tell the students to close their eyes, take a few deep breaths, and visualise two people they care about. Students should then silently wish for those two people to be happy. That’s all. We do this for just two minutes and say no more about it until the end of the class, after they have completed some other tasks. I set some homework at the end of the class and ask them to perform the exercise again the following day, spending 10 seconds each hour randomly choosing two people and silently wishing for them to be happy. I always tell them to start off with people they know and love and then when they feel able, to move on to people they have neutral feelings about and finally people they dislike.
I get more personal emails about how this task has impacted on them than any other task we do throughout the year, and it’s nearly always the one task students remember when saying their farewells at the end of their time at university. They tend to report that it particularly helps them in tough times when they are suffering and almost can’t bear to focus on anyone but themselves. However, they still manage to do the exercise because 10 seconds is easy to manage.
The students report feeling less stressed, more relaxed, and more connected to others after performing the exercise. This exercise is not going to immediately solve all of your problems but it does start to shift your perspective in a slow and noticeable way. Practised consistently it has a steady and incremental effect on mental health and general happiness.