Being able to think when caught in the maelstrom - how adolescents used mindfulness when facing exams

Research indicates that exam anxiety may decline with mindfulness-based interventions but there is a lack of research on adolescents' accounts of the processes involved. We explored high-school students' descriptions of how they perceived and applied mindfulness in managing anxiety-inducing thoughts related to academic performance following an 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course.

Post-course individual semi-structured interviews with 22 high school students (2 males, mean age 17.8 years) were transcribed verbatim and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis.

The analyses identified six themes: (1) Noticing and attending to the attention-binding "maelstrom" of anxious thoughts and feelings (2) Attending to the breath to cope with the maelstrom, (3) "removing" and "getting rid of" anxious thoughts (4) Being able to "think" (5) awareness of more helpful thoughts, and (6) Agency and control. The findings are discussed in light of the Buddhist notion of "unwholesome thoughts" and the distinction between thought suppression and the use of breathing as a benign distraction. We propose that mindfulness encompasses both a receptive, nonjudgmental awareness and an active, intentional redirection of attention.

Mindfulness training aided participants by enhancing their capacity to disengage from fear-engaging thoughts, thereby maintaining them within their window of tolerance and facilitating cognitive processing.