resources to help your students manage distractions

Aug 18, 2023

What's one problem educators experience every lesson? 

Distraction. 

Here are some resources to help. 

Primarily aimed at students aged 14-17, these resources* include information on what mindfulness is, how to meditate, the benefits and neuroscience of mindfulness, and a meditation (long and short version) to practice with your class.

You don't need to be a mindfulness teacher to deliver this lesson. You just need a willingness to explore mindfulness and its possibilities.

What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.
While mindfulness is something we all naturally possess, it’s more readily available to us when we practice on a daily basis. Whenever you bring awareness to what you’re directly experiencing via your senses, or to your state of mind via your thoughts and emotions, you’re being mindful. And there’s growing research showing that when you train your brain to be mindful, you’re remodeling the physical structure of your brain.

Ultimately, the goal of mindfulness is to wake up to the inner workings of our mental, emotional, and physical processes.

What is meditation?
Meditation is exploring what you are experiencing in the present moment. It’s not a fixed destination. Your head doesn’t become vacuumed free of thought, utterly undistracted. When we meditate we venture into the workings of our minds: our sensations (air blowing on our skin or a harsh smell wafting into the room), our emotions (love this, hate that, crave this, loathe that) and thoughts (wouldn’t it be weird to see an elephant playing a trumpet!).

Mindfulness meditation asks us to suspend judgment and unleash our natural curiosity about the workings of the mind, approaching our experience with warmth and kindness, to ourselves and others.

How do I practice mindfulness and meditation?
Mindfulness is already here, already available to us in every moment, whether through meditations and body scans, or mindful moment practices like taking time to pause and breathe when the smartphone rings instead of rushing to answer it.

You are not your thoughts
In this video piece, Jon Kabat-Zinn, creator of the research-backed stress-reduction program Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), explains how mindfulness lights up parts of our brains that aren’t normally activated when we’re mindlessly running on autopilot. He explains: “Mindfulness is the awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally. And then I sometimes add, in the service of self-understanding and wisdom.”

Learning How to Meditate
At the outset, it helps to set an amount of time you’re going to “practice” for. Otherwise, you may obsess about deciding when to stop. If you’re just beginning, it can help to choose a short time, such as five or ten minutes. Eventually, you can build up to twice as long, then maybe up to 45 minutes or an hour. Use a kitchen timer or the timer on your phone. Many people do a session in the morning and in the evening, or one or the other. If you feel your life is busy and you have little time, doing some is better than doing none. When you get a little space and time, you can do a bit more.

Find a good spot in your home, ideally where there isn’t too much clutter and you can find some quiet. Leave the lights on or sit in natural light. You can even sit outside if you like, but choose a place with little distraction.

This posture practice can be used as the beginning stage of a period of meditation practice or simply as something to do for a minute, maybe to stabilize yourself and find a moment of relaxation before going back into the fray. If you have injuries or other physical difficulties, you can modify this practice to suit your situation.

How to Sit for Mindfulness Meditation
Take your seat. Whatever you’re sitting on—a chair, a meditation cushion, a park bench—find a spot that gives you a stable, solid seat, not perching or hanging back.

Notice what your legs are doing. If on a cushion on the floor, cross your legs comfortably in front of you. (If you already do some kind of seated yoga posture, go ahead.) If on a chair, it’s good if the bottoms of your feet are touching the floor.

Straighten—but don’t stiffen—your upper body. The spine has natural curvature. Let it be there. Your head and shoulders can comfortably rest on top of your vertebrae.

Situate your upper arms parallel to your upper body. Then let your hands drop onto the tops of your legs. With your upper arms at your sides, your hands will land in the right spot. Too far forward will make you hunch. Too far back will make you stiff. You’re tuning the strings of your body—not too tight and not too loose.

Drop your chin a little and let your gaze fall gently downward. You may let your eyelids lower. If you feel the need, you may lower them completely, but it’s not necessary to close your eyes when meditating. You can simply let what appears before your eyes be there without focusing on it. Be there for a few moments. Relax. Bring your attention to your breath or the sensations in your body.

Feel your breath—or some say “follow” it—as it goes out and as it goes in. (Some versions of this practice put more emphasis on the outbreath, and for the inbreath you simply leave a spacious pause.) Either way, draw your attention to the physical sensation of breathing: the air moving through your nose or mouth, the rising and falling of your belly, or your chest. 

Choose your focal point, and with each breath, you can mentally note “breathing in” and “breathing out.”
Inevitably, your attention will leave the breath and wander to other places. Don’t worry. There’s no need to block or eliminate thinking. When you get around to noticing your mind wandering—in a few seconds, a minute, five minutes—just gently return your attention to the breath.

Practice pausing before making any physical adjustments, such as moving your body or scratching an itch. With intention, shift at a moment you choose, allowing space between what you experience and what you choose to do.
You may find your mind wandering constantly—that’s normal, too. Instead of wrestling with or engaging with those thoughts as much, practice observing without needing to react. Just sit and pay attention. As hard as it is to maintain, that’s all there is. Come back over and over again without judgment or expectation.

When you’re ready, gently lift your gaze (if your eyes are closed, open them). Take a moment and notice any sounds in the environment. Notice how your body feels right now. Notice your thoughts and emotions. Pausing for a moment, decide how you’d like to continue on with your day.

That’s it. That’s the practice. It’s often been said that it’s very simple, but it’s not necessarily easy. The work is to just keep doing it. Results will accrue.

How Much Should I Meditate?
Meditation is no more complicated than what we’ve described above. It is that simple … and that challenging. It’s also powerful and worth it. The key is to commit to sit every day, even if it’s for five minutes. Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg says: “One of my meditation teachers said that the most important moment in your meditation practice is the moment you sit down to do it. Because right then you’re saying to yourself that you believe in change, you believe in caring for yourself, and you’re making it real. You’re not just holding some value like mindfulness or compassion in the abstract, but really making it real.”



Recent research detailed in the book Peak Mind by neuroscientist Amishi Jha discovered that 12 minutes of meditation, 5 days a week, can protect and strengthen your ability to pay attention.

Why would I want to get better at paying attention?

Because you are what you pay attention to, and you are what you do with what you pay attention to. 

What you pay attention to is your reality.

Neuroscientist. Amishi Jha writes: paying attention to things is a bit like pointing a flashlight or searchlight. The light of your attention takes up all your focus. It’s all you see. It makes up the moments of your life. It makes up your life's experience.

Many of the lived moments of the 21st Century come with challenges to your attention. Smartphones, the internet, social media, electronic gadgets. These are all recent, new challenges to human attention. Add to that the more familiar challenges of family, friends, peer pressure, and your own thoughts, and you soon realise just how much our attention is being snatched away from us. In fact, it could be argued the most important skill we need to learn in the 21st century is the skill of being able to make better choices about where we place our attention.

Jha continues, "we can think of mindfulness as a cognitive training tool – or a cognitive workout - to help you make better choices about where your place your attention, how to strengthen your attention, and how to work with thoughts that take up our attention".

Some Neuroscience about paying attention
One of the key areas of the brain associated with the capacity to pay attention is the Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) The cortex is the surface of the brain, and prefrontal refers to the area just behind the forehead.

The PFC is one of the last parts of the brain to form in humans and is also one of the most complex. More than any other part of the brain the PFC distinguishes humans from other animals. It is one of the key brain regions involved in what is called executive functioning.

The PFC is like the control panel of the brain.

The prefrontal cortex and key executive functions

Research shows that practising mindfulness activates many of the same brain areas as those that are active when we are engaged in executive functioning.

The prefrontal cortex gets switched off when we are anxious or stressed. It gets overridden by more primitive brain areas such as the limbic system (the ‘emotional brain’) and even deeper structures commonly referred to as the reptilian brain.

Left unchecked, over the longer term the stress response can impair not only executive function but also biological functions such as appetite and sleep, physical illness, acceleration of the ageing process, mental disturbance and behavioural problems. This long-term wear and tear is known as ‘high allostatic stress’

Allostatic load refers to the cumulative burden of chronic stress and life events. It involves the interaction of different physiological systems at varying degrees of activity. When environmental challenges exceed the individual ability to cope, then allostatic overload ensues.

Awareness of Distractions meditation - to strengthen executive function
Now that you’ve been given information about mindfulness, the benefits of a meditation practice and some of the neuroscience, let’s do a meditation practice to experience ourselves how to better manage distractions.

Try this practice. Just find a time and place where you won’t be distracted, and we’ll begin.

After the meditation … try to recollect what type of thought distracted you from moment to moment during the meditation.

Here are some categories of distractions you might experience:

Hand out the above table after the meditation. Invite students to tick the categories of distraction that arose during the practice.

These categories can help you start noticing more clearly the kinds of things that distract you when you are trying to pay attention. 

It’s empowering to start noticing distractions that hijack your attention knowing you can bring this mindful awareness to your studies.

For instance, you might be given a subject-based written exercise. You know you are going to have to bring your full focus to the task. However, you also know the mind can be distracted. It’s not a personal thing. It’s not you. It’s the nature of the mind’s design. You don’t need to give yourself a hard time. What you can do instead is bring an attitude of interested curiosity to what distracts you, notice it, write it down, then redirect your attention to the task once more. 

The mindful piece ... fully acknowledging and accepting distractions without giving yourself a hard time.
Fully acknowledging and accepting distractions – in this case by writing them down – helps you to more easily and fully let go of the distraction, rather than getting caught up in it.

Remember, distraction is normal. 

Normalising difficulties is one of the most important things that comes out of practicing mindfulness. Most of us think everyone else is fine – that distraction, self-criticism and procrastination happen only to us – so it’s a relief to know distraction affects everyone (including your teachers!) in similar ways.

* Resources 

https://www.mindful.org/meditation/mindfulness-getting-started/

https://www.mindful.org/mindfulness-how-to-do-it/

Hassed and Chambers, Mindful Learning: Reduce stress and improve brain performance for effective learning p.53

Images: unsplash.com

Lesly Juarez, Brett Jordan, Madison Laverne, Levi XU