Mindfulness in Well-Being, Cognition and Learning: Benefits on Higher Education and Health-Care Professions

Abstract

Mindfulness is a form of meditation that can be defined as one’s ability to be present to the surroundings and environment, and not overreact to what is happening around us. With the recent pandemic still affecting the world, more studies have recently become known describing the suitability of mindfulness to prevent and manage mental health. This fact alone offers grounds for mindfulness practices to be added to any stressful environment, including Institutions of higher education and the workforce. Even more, mindfulness practices have a strong link to brain function, increasing cognitive ability, memory, and emotional regulators. The objective of mindfulness-based practices is to experience cognitive flexibility and attentional focus, essential traits for students and health-care professionals in today’s world. As a College of Pharmacy, training future healthcare workers, we wanted to decide whether mindfulness practices might be of benefit to be included in the curriculum. Herein we performed a selective literature review to determine how mindfulness affect human cognition and learning. We observed that, compared to non-meditators, meditators are more likely to experience less mental, emotional, and physical symptoms associated with stress, burnout, or feelings of hopelessness. Several studies discuss the improvements that mindfulness-based meditation has on cognitive flexibility and attentional functions. We widen our search to reveal the impact that mindfulness-based meditation has in the stress observed in education, students and healthcare professionals. Higher education and health professionals are more likely to experience severe stress and suffer from enervation. We concluded that, in our line of work, those pursuing higher education and health professional degrees would benefit from practicing mindfulness. Incorporating mindfulness-based meditation can help alleviate these symptoms and improve not only the quality of life and learning, but also the patient-doctor interaction.