6,000 Kids Are Taking Part in a Huge Trial to See if Mindfulness Works

For the last two years, 14-year-old Enaya Ali has been taking part in "mindfulness" training—a technique designed to improve attention and resilience —at her local school in the UK.

"I suffer a lot from anxieties so I'll have moments where I'll find it difficult. But I'll have a mindfulness moment, and when I come back from it, I'm more in control of myself," Ali told me over the phone.

A new trial, launched yesterday, aims to scientifically test the effectiveness of mindfulness training as a way of bolstering young people's resilience to mental health disorders later on in life. With multiple research institutions and nearly 6,000 teenagers taking part over a seven-year period, the study is pretty epic. If successful, mindfulness training could be incorporated into UK schools.

For the uninitiated, "mindfulness" is a mental state that allows us to be able to pay attention to how our emotions and thoughts are developing in the present moment. It's a skill that can be trained, and researchers believe that the technique helps us better navigate our social relationships, and ward off negative thoughts and feelings.

In the £6.4 million (almost $10 million) three-part study launched yesterday, researchers at the University of Oxford, University College London, University of Exeter, and the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, will assess whether introducing this training more widely across schools could prevent teenagers from developing mental health disorders in adulthood. The Wellcome Trust, a global medical and health non-profit, reports that over 75 percent of mental disorders begin before the age of 25 and half by 15.

"Some 50 percent of all mental health problems will emerge by late adolescence, so it's really a key window where we could potentially do something to change the trajectory of young people's lives," Willem Kuyken, the study's principal investigator and a research clinical psychologist from the University of Oxford, told me. "We could potentially prevent mental health problems, and enhance the possibility for [adolescents] to flourish."

The trial, involving students from 76 schools, is expected to begin in late 2016. In the first part of the study, thirty-eight schools will train 11-14 year old students in mindfulness over 10 lessons within a school term, as part of the normal curriculum. Thirty-eight other schools will act as a control by teaching regular personal, health, and social education lessons.

In a second, lab-based part of the study, researchers from UCL and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit will examine whether mindfulness training improves the emotional and self-control of nearly 600 participants between the ages of 11 to 16. The third part of the study sees researchers testing the best ways of training teachers to give mindfulness lessons to their students, and evaluating the potential challenges of implementing the training at schools.

"In some sense, the enthusiasm is ahead of the evidence, so what this programme of work will do is answer some pretty fundamental questions with some robust scientific methods," said Kuyken. "We will ask, 'Is this actually effective? What are the best ways of getting this into schools? Does this change the trajectory of young people's lives in the way that we think it does?'"

The researchers took the cue for this larger project based on two previously successful pilot studies, which began in November 2014. Kuyken explained that over the next six months, they intended to transfer the best practices to schools recruited for the new trial.

"One of the things that is interesting about teachers teaching mindfulness to their kids is that it's a little bit like music teachers," said Kuyken. "The analogy is that to be able to teach a musical instrument to someone else, you really need to be able to play that instrument yourself. It's the same with mindfulness; the teachers themselves learn mindfulness so that they can teach it to their children."

Teacher Paula Kearney and student Enaya Ali. Image: Wellcome Trust

Paula Kearney, a mindfulness practitioner and geography teacher at the UCL Academy in Swiss Cottage, London, who teaches mindfulness to her students, has witnessed the benefits of teaching the technique, and incorporating it in her classes.

"I was a very anxious young person myself and I really think that it has a huge impact in reducing anxiety and stress in young people," Kearney told me. "By using mindfulness in my lessons, I see a huge reduction in hyperactivity and stress."

Mindfulness training is not just targeted at adolescents who might be prone to mental health issues later in life, but is rather designed to enhance everyone's skill sets.

"What we're saying is that we think that attention is a really key part of the development of resilience and that mindfulness training works for everybody because we all need attention," said Kuyken. "So it's not stigmatising or isolating kids who are at risk. You're saying, 'Actually, all of you could potentially benefit from this.'"

For Ali, who has GCSE exams coming up next year, the mindfulness training that she has been receiving has helped her manage her anxiety. She told me about a technique that allowed her to "think about her senses and the present moment," and to just let her thoughts be, rather than pushing them away.

"Since GCSEs are coming up next year I'll have more homework and stress can develop. So using [mindfulness], even before an exam, kind of eases all the stress," she said. "I would recommend this to others as, especially at our age, stress plays a big part, and we need a way to control it. Not everyone may find mindfulness the easiest way, but it does control your emotions, or anger."