5 Mindfulness Apps for Students: How To Improve your FOCUS and CLARITY

Challenges Facing Students Today

Dedicating your attention for long periods of time has become increasingly difficult. Unlike most people, students face the challenge of attention deficit, amongst exam pressure, performance competition and anxieties about their futures. Not to mention the pressure of being away from home and meeting new people. I for one know the anxiety of struggling to concentrate with a deadline looming. Mindfulness Apps for students have become increasingly popular over time, as a quick and easy way to assist you to calm the mind and enter into the ‘study zone’.

What are the Benefits of Mindfulness for Students?

I have found that practicing mindfulness helps in 3 main areas:

• academic performance
• mental health
• emotional & social intelligence.

Here are some more details below:

1. Mental Health
   
   • Mindfulness has been shown to be a proven method for coping with stress and anxiety. Studies have shown mindfulness meditation is able to help reduce feelings of stress, but also to be able to cope better with stress and perform well under pressure. Sleep always evades me when I feel stressed out by deadlines ad a big workload. It was shown that students who participated in a mindfulness programme, improved their sleeping patterns. This could help with performance too.
     
   • So many of our negative thoughts are the consequence of a wandering and rambling mind. Mindfulness focuses the mind and helps to reduce negative emotions and promote positive ones. A focused mind is a happier mind.
     
   • Stress and anxiety are developed through internal and external pressures which include self-doubt, self-criticism, parental influence, workload and more. We all experience these pressures that feel overwhelming and unmanageable. I mean who would not feel that way if there was nowhere to get any reprieve. Allowing yourself to acknowledge these present and very real stressors but being able to perform without dwelling on them is the key that mindfulness equips us with.
     
2. Emotional & Social Intelligence
   
   • Mindfulness is linked to improved social skills and researchers have found that these practices help develop empathy and compassion. Learning basic mindfulness can help improve awareness of your own emotions and other peoples too.
     
   • A key trait of this practice is focusing on yourself, and everything around you, without judgement. Obsessing over perfect grades and applying the emotional pressure of not meeting the mark we set ourselves can be really damaging to our confidence and can negatively affect motivation.  I know I am guilty of this. Being able to manage the fall out after this disappointment and utilise it to benefit from this learning process is a huge benefit of mindfulness.
     
   • Going into university there’s that pressure to be performing academically and socially. All this can feel like too much in a whole new environment. Mindfulness practices such as those found on Mindfulness Apps for students can increase emotional resilience and tackle social pressures and feelings of low self-esteem.
     
3. Academic Performance
   
   • There is only so much attention and focus we can dedicate to an assignment before we lose our concentration and motivation. Mindfulness practice equips us students to be better able to control our attention and reduces the mind-wandering. Increased capacity for awareness helps us to respond rather than react to stressors and perform in an exam.
     
   • A tip in mindfulness practice is to remove distractions that reduce our cognitive performance and concentration. With this, we will be able to see improvement in task performance that require longer periods of concentration.
     
   • This practice equips students with strategies and tools to better manage the stress they feel and refocus their attention on the task at hand to achieve better results on exams and assignments.

Best Mindfulness Apps for Students

Mindfulness does not always look like daily seated meditation. Getting a start and trying some mindfulness practices can seem daunting with the number of sources available. So, I have compiled some of the best beginner Mindfulness Apps for students and other tools for you to try:

• Headspace is a leading free app in mindfulness meditation with a free 7 day trial OR an amazing student plan of £7.99 for the year with specific and targeted tools for the student experience.
  
• Calm is an award-winning free meditation app with a free 7-day trial that makes it easier to learn mindfulness meditation. Their goal is to help improve your health and happiness and can focus on specific issues.
  
• Insight Timer has a massive library of free guided meditations from thousands of teachers on topics stretching from sleep and academics to relationships and creativity.
  
• Health Minds Program takes a more science-based approach, focusing on neuroscience to help you develop the skills for a healthy mind. It aims to equip you with tools for everyday life to build wellbeing.
  
• Simple Habit offers stress relief audio meditations for the busy person, with audios lasting as short as 5 minutes. This could be great for pre-exam stress or the anticipation for a long assignment that’s due too soon!

Integrating Mindfulness

So, now that you have read through that all and arrived here you can see the copious benefits of mindfulness for students to help manage personal and academic issues. Living and practicing mindfulness will prove to create a great change in your life and you’ll see its effects in your performance. Create the space and time for it and adopt it as a tool for your happiness and success.

Mindfulness Apps for students are a great way of getting into the practice but there are loads of alternative ways to learn too. For some introductory exercises to mindfulness why not check out the Benefits of Mindfulness Get Started section.