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Raphael Navarro

Judith. R McCann

ENGL 1302 - 213

10 February 2023

Meditation

Introduction

Meditation has been 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 (Bleasdale et al. 5). 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 (Bleasdale et al. 6). Another research study

the researchers found that the participants demonstrated significantly higher memory function

(Innes el al. 3). The purpose of this study is to test how meditating before and after school

affected the researcher's moods, stress levels and the ability to recollect.

Explaining the experiment

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

meditating before and after school has on the researcher's mental health and stress levels. The

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

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. The researcher would then go on with the rest of the day until the

researcher got out of school. As soon as the researcher would get out of school and get home and

meditate once again. Once the second wave of meditation was done, the researcher would go on

with their day and journal at the end of the day about how the researcher felt throughout the day.
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Results

The researcher originally hypothesized that their mood would have a small increase, but

to the researcher’s surprise, they found in the study that their mood had a significant increase on

the days when they did meditate compared to the days when they did not. On the first two days

of the experiment (Thursday and Friday) the researcher put in their journal that their mood had

been up and down throughout the day. They felt sad in the morning but then the researcher had a

sudden burst of excitement when realizing that Friday was just one day away, but as soon as the

time for the researcher’s government class approached, they felt a dull feeling fall over them. As

they realized that they were about to go home, the researcher’s mood flipped again to a happier

tone.

On the following day, the researcher had the opposite results to Thursday, they were still

very moody with very apparent changes in their mood but they started off the morning in a happy

mood. The researcher stated that the reason for that was that it was finally Friday. The researcher

went on with their day with this mood looming over them but as soon as they left their history

class they got that same dull feeling again.

After the 2-day weekend break, the researcher started on the second part of their

experiment. 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 journaled that on both days that their mood was steadier compared to Thursday and

Friday. The researcher would start their day with a boost of energy which very clearly had an

effect on their mood. The only abnormality that the researcher had was that on Tuesday halfway

through the day, the researcher felt as if they were going to get that sudden wave again but since
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they were able to feel it they were able to try to keep themselves distracted and avoid that sudden

wave of sadness.

Another thing that the researcher also found was they had a higher layer of productivity

on the days that the researcher got up to meditate in the morning than on the days that they did

not. 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

Conclusion

To finish off the study, the researcher was able to conclude with the evidence provided by

the results of the study that their mood was affected on the basis of if the researcher meditated or

not. Another result that the researcher was able to conclude was that the researcher was able to

retain more information on the days that they did mediate compared to the days when they did

not.

Works Cited
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Bleasdale, J. E., Peterson, M. C., & Nidich, S. (2019). Effect of Meditation on Social/Emotional

Well-Being in a High-Performing High School. Professional School Counseling, 23(1).

https://doi.org/10.1177/2156759X20940639

Innes, K E et al. “The effects of meditation on perceived stress and related indices of

psychological status and sympathetic activation in persons with Alzheimer's disease and

their caregivers: a pilot study.” Evidence-based complementary and alternative medicine

: eCAM vol. 2012 (2012): 927509. doi:10.1155/2012/927509