Allison Barton: Hi my name is Alison Barton and I'm the health
educator at the Moorpark College Student Health
Center. Today's five minute mindfulness training
lesson will be on the STOP technique. By the
end of this training you'll be able to define
mindfulness and mindfulness training. You'll learn
how to do the STOP technique, and then you'll be
able to identify times and places when you might
want to use the STOP technique that might be
helpful to you. What is mindfulness training
anyway? or What is mindfulness anyway? It's feeling
like you're here now, that you're able to focus,
that you have present moment
awareness, and that you have an overall sense of
calm.
So then what is mindfulness training? Mindfulness
Training is being able to practice to pay
attention to one thing so that you can pay
attention to anything. Maybe you're in class
and you notice that your mind wanders a lot.
Mindfulness Training practiced over time will be
able will allow you to be able to pay attention to
that and pull your thoughts back to where you are
now. It also helps you build new neuropathways so
it can help you, any time you practice a technique
it helps you build neural pathways.
Anything you practice does that but it also can
help you with your reactions to things. So if you
practice mindfulness training and it helps you
feel less anxious that will become your default
response for potentially any difficult situation.
The goals of mindfulness training then are calm
awareness, less anxiety, improved academic
performance, or test anxiety improvement, and then
better general health. So those are some of the
goals of mindfulness training. And there are lots
of ways to practice mindfulness training. You see
many different ones here on the screen. There's
breathing, walking, coloring, eating--lots of ways to
learn how to pay attention to here, now. So if one
doesn't work for you another one probably will.
The STOP technique is very quick and you could
practice it multiple times a day if you want to.
But the"STOP" part of this is an acronym: S for
"stop", T for "take a slow deep breath," O for "Observe how
you feel," and then P for "Proceed." So we're going to
try this technique right now. If you're sitting
down make sure that your legs are uncrossed and
that your feet are flat on the floor. It's nice to
have your knees a little lower than hips. If you
can do that. That helps your spine grow tall,
which kind of gives us a dignified seated position,
and it actually gives us confidence to sit
up nice and tall like that. If you're standing
it's helpful to stand with weight equally
distributed side to side and front to back of your
feet. And then everybody let's do just a nice
shoulder roll. Inhale your shoulders forward and
up to your years and then exhale and draw your
shoulder blades toward one another and down the
back. That helps your chest be open and that
contributes to that tall dignified position. So
when you're taking your slow deep breath you want
to make sure that you breathe in and out through
the nose if you can. Sometimes we have
allergies or things like that makes it difficult
to breathe through your nose. But if you can
that's best because it'll slow your breath down.
You want to count to three slowly as you're
inhaling and then maybe four or five or six as
you're exhaling. All right? So let's do that.
We're going to stop what we're doing now. We're going
to take a slow deep breath in through the nose.
And then exhales even more slowly out through the
nose.
And then observe how you feel from your ankles to
your knees, your hips, your belly, your chest, your
shoulders and neck, your head eyes just no notice
how you feel without judging. And then proceed. Go
onto what you were doing before. You
could see how if you were taking a test and you
got to a question that you didn't understand or
didn't remember that when you feel that anxiety
there that this technique can actually help you
move through that one and move on to the next. You
can personalize it. Some people like to take a
breath before and after observing how they feel.
Once you practice this a few times you can
learn ways that help you in the future with your
own practice. So again we talked about using it
for test anxiety, but it's also great for
difficult situations, difficult interactions, and
it's great for just really befriending your body;
understanding how your body reacts to stress and
how it reacts to good times as well. You can find
free mindfulness training on campus when we're
open. But also you can find it online 24/7 so you
can go to the Web address on the screen. You can
also Google "Mindfulness Moorpark College." You
could also go to the Moorpark College Student
Health Center Web page and follow the link there
right to it. Thank you for giving the STOP
technique at try today, and keep practicing!