NYC Schools Are Introducing Mindful Breathing. That's Awesome. Here's Why.
Next fall, New York City public schools will institute mindful breathing into their curriculum. It’s an effort to help kids with their mental health. I think this is awesome. There are of course some detractors who don’t seem to grasp the benefits or intentions of mindfulness. Some of that is surely due to our current landscape, where everything has to go through a political filter. However, I do think there are a lot of well-intentioned, non-politically-motivated people out there who think mindfulness is a crock of shit. I want to do just a brief primer on what mindfulness is and why I think it’s a great idea to introduce mindful breathing to kids in school.
Some of the criticisms of introducing mindful breathing are that it will take time away from things like math, science, and reading. Tim Hoefer, President and CEO of the Empire Center for Public Policy, flaunts his ignorance by flippantly remarking, “Kids learn to breathe whether they’re in a classroom or not.” But mindful breathing is about focus and attention—skills we are not taught in school, despite the fact they affect literally every action in our lives. Hoefer couldn’t be bothered, for example, to focus on figuring out what mindful breathing was before penning an op-ed for the NY Post.
Also, we’re talking about a program that is 2-5 minutes a day. I think we can squeeze it in.
Mindfulness is a tool that helps to enrich every aspect of our lives by asking us to pay attention to what is happening in the present moment. Our minds are wired to wander and spend a lot of energy thinking about the past and future while ignoring the present. In our modern world, there are distractions all over the place. The Surgeon General issued an advisory about the effects of social media on adolescents. There is research supporting the hypothesis that attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is being overdiagnosed.
If you are reading this, there is a good chance you were once a child. You remember how hard it could be to focus on things. Minutes feel like hours, hours feel like days. Maybe you still feel that way sometimes. These are all things mindfulness can help with. For children, the benefits would continue into adulthood. The easier it is for a student to focus, the better they’ll be able to learn vocabulary and grammar. It will make grasping mathematics a little easier. When you are able to bring your attention back to what’s happening right now, it even becomes easier to deal with non-academic things, like social anxiety.
“Mindfulness” may be a buzzy term, but it is not new. Mindfulness derives from the Pali word sati, which is often translated as “mindfulness” or the more elegant phrase, “to remember to observe.” This is the simplest explanation: it’s about paying attention or focusing on the present moment. My favorite definition of mindfulness is: “awareness of present experience, with acceptance,” which I picked up from Dr. Ronald Siegel, professor of psychology at Harvard who also wrote a book called The Mindfulness Solution.
There are many different kinds of mindfulness practice, but the most basic and foundational is probably breath awareness. During this practice, I try to focus on my breathing, which means being curious about it. There are two traditional “areas” to focus: the breath coming in and out of the nose, and the rise and fall of the stomach. But those are just suggestions. Any point of interest will do. How does it feel? How does it sound? How fast or slow is it? Sometimes I see how many breath cycles I can count before my mind wanders off course. Really anything about the breath. As other thoughts enter my mind, I acknowledge them, and then try to bring my focus back to the breathing. For most people1, the breath is always there and fairly regularly, so it serves as a good anchor or point of focus. The idea is to train the mind to come back to what is happening right now.
Why is this important? Because humans have evolved to seek pleasure and avoid pain. One of the strategies that has served human beings well over the course of our evolution is constantly evaluating threats, which requires us to think about bad things from the past and try to avoid them in the future. However, this is not a great way to live in modern society. It leads to a lot of anxiety and worrying about things that may never happen. Spending too much time thinking about the future or the past also allows our lives to fly by without feeling like we were ever really living.
An increased ability to focus on what is happening right now can strengthen our relationships with other people by making us better listeners. It can help us with problem solving by attenuating what can be done now rather than wasting time stressing about the future or regretting the past. It can help us focus, and focus enriches lived experiences.
One thing mindfulness does not do is “clear the mind.” It’s impossible to have an empty mind. There are always going to be thoughts and emotions flowing through our minds and bodies. What mindfulness practice does instead is to increase affect tolerance, which is our ability to simply be with emotions and feelings. This is the acceptance part of mindfulness practice. It’s important to recognize that emotions and thoughts are not bad, they just happen naturally. What’s more important is how we react to them.
So for example, sometimes when I’m meditating, I feel restless or annoyed or mad about something going on elsewhere in my life. Rather than try to suppress that feeling or to be ashamed of it, I try to just sit with it and get comfortable being uncomfortable. The better I can recognize and accept my emotions, feelings and thoughts without immediately reacting to them, the more effective of a person I can be. I like to call this increasing the gap. The longer the interval between when I feel or think something and when I act on that feeling or thought, the more I can contemplate the right course of action.
The reason it is called mindfulness practice is because it’s a life-long pursuit. You can always be a little more present. A professor once said that you can pick out a relatively new practitioner because they are inclined to say they are “good” at it, whereas a literal Zen master might say they have barely scratched the surface.
I’m sure there are questions about science. Well, thanks to the brain’s neuroplasticity, you can acquire new skills and habits. The more you practice being in the present moment, the easier it becomes. For example, you might start to be more aware when you're not really listening to what someone is saying to you, or you’ll notice how you aren’t really paying attention to the book you are reading.
There’s a lot more I could say and would like to say about how mindfulness helps develop self-compassion, which is necessary for compassion toward others. But that is a topic unto itself. What I want to draw attention to here is that the skills mindful breathing helps to develop—focus, thinking before you act, not worrying too much—these are skills we should absolutely want children to develop. Maybe you remember those BASF commercials from the 90s where they’d say over and over again, “BASF doesn’t make the products you buy…BASF Makes the products you buy better.” Well, it’s a similar thing with mindfulness. Mindfulness won’t do your math homework for you… but mindfulness will make your math homework better.
The reason I say “most people” here might strike readers as odd. The reason is because there are people who struggle with breathing for a variety of health reasons—too many to list here. So while the breath is great anchor for most people, some might want to focus on something else like the sounds in their environment or a specific object in their line of site. Again, mindfulness isn’t just about breathing, it’s about attention to the present moment.