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Raphael Navarro

Judith. R McCann

ENGL 1302 - 213

08 February 2023

Meditation

Introduction

Meditation has between around for thousands of years and has been used as a medicine to

treat a plethora of mental diseases. With that being said, many people have brought up the idea of

meditation before and after school to try to improve productivity and mood throughout the day.

Multiple research studies have been conducted on this topic and they have shown that meditation

does in fact reduce stress and improve productivity throughout the day. For example, Bleasdale

et al set out to see if meditation would be able to help students reduce the stress that could then

lead to mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety. Researchers in the study found that

students had a significant reduction in perceived stress…with an adjusted mean range of -6.01

(in-text citation goes here). The researchers came to the conclusion that students who

participated in the TM experience within the QT program reported a greater reduction in stress

and anxiety than their peers…students practicing meditation reported significant reductions in

perceived stress, overall mood disturbance, anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue and overall

improved self-esteem. The purpose of this study is to see how meditating before and after school

affected the researcher's moods and stress levels.

Explaining the experiment

The researcher conducted a 4-day research experiment to determine the effects that

meditating before and after school has on the reasearcher mental health and stress levels. The
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study was conducted in 2 parts, Thursday and Friday, with a break on Saturday and Sunday and a

continuation on Monday and Tuesday. On the first two days, the researcher went on with their

daily schedule without meditating and at the end of the day, the researcher would journal how

they felt through the day. When Monday and Tuesday came around, the researcher had to wake

up at 6:00 AM rather than the researcher's usual wake-up time of 6:30 AM. Once the researcher

was awake they would mediate for 25 minutes before going on with their regular schedule. Then

once they would get back from school, they would meditate for another 25 minutes before once

again continuing with their normal schedule. At the end of every day, the researcher would

journal how their day went and what their mood was like throughout the day with the meditation.

Procedure

The procedure done by the researcher in this experiment was very simple. The researcher

did not have to go out of their way in order to have apparent results. The researcher started by

jotting down their experiment on the first two days of the experiment. On those first two days,

the researcher just went on with their daily routine as usual without adding the new variables for

the experiment. Once the two days were over, the researcher had a two-day break over the

weekend to refresh their pallet. Once the break was over, the researcher would start their new

routine. On the following two days, the researcher would wake up 30 minutes before their usual

wake-up time, from 6:30 AM to 6:00 AM. The researcher would wake up and start meditating

for 30 minutes. On Monday the researcher started meditating at 6:04 AM and finished meditating

at 6:34 AM, on Tuesday the researcher started meditating at 6:06 AM and finished meditating at

6:36 AM. On both days the researcher felt a sudden burst of energy after the meditation. The

researcher would then go on with the rest of their day until the researcher got out of school

Improvements in Mood
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The researcher found in the study that their mood had a significant increase on the days

when they did meditate. They also found that they had a higher layer of productivity on the days

that the researcher got up to meditate in the morning. The researcher had initially hypothesized

that they would be more tired due to waking up at an earlier time but surprisingly found that they

felt more energetic as a result of meditating in the morning.

The productivity level on Thursday and Friday was not high. In fact, the researcher had

little to no energy or motivation so everything was done with no intention of it wanting to be

done. Having no motivation affects more than just productivity. Not wanting to do something on

one day can affect you on another day in many ways such as, you having to push back other

things in order to get it done, falling into a spiral of procrastination, or getting a bad grade on an

assignment