Deterioration of Mental Health of College Students Research Paper Example

A recent study found that the mental health of college students in the U.S. has deteriorated over the last decade (Duffy, Joiner, & Twinge, 2019). In fact, they showed significant increases in rates of depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts amongst individuals of this age group, and a study by Hoyt, Cohen, Dull, Maker Castro, and Yazdani (2021) indicated that “constant stress has become the new normal,” for most young adult college students.

Unfortunately for this group, studies have shown that anxiety can negatively influence many aspects of one’s life including but not limited to one’s academic performance and relationships (Bellinger, 2015; Cox, 2020). Because anxiety has such a wide range of influence on individuals’ lives, researchers have been conducting studies to better understand how it works and what may be contributing to its development. For example, a group of researchers studied the role of screen time on students’ perceived stress, and they found that students who reported spending more time on their screens were also more likely to report experiences of stress (Ge, Xin, Zou, Bai, Liu, & Gao, 2020). 

Additionally, many researchers have also begun studying how to reduce anxiety. In recent studies, it has become widely accepted that a relationship exists between “mindfulness” practices and anxiety. One can define mindfulness as a kind of awareness resulting from focusing on being present in the moment, while acknowledging one’s feelings and thoughts as they arise and accepting them without judgment (MacDonald & Olsen, 2020), and numerous studies on this relationship have shown encouraging results. For example, MacDonald and Olsen wrote, “Mindfulness has been robustly associated with psychological health, predicting greater well-being, and lower levels of anxiety,” (MacDonald & Olsen, 2020). 

Past research has examined the relationship between mindfulness and anxiety from many angles, and it has even helped to identify a few of the relationship’s underlying mechanisms such as self-esteem, attentional control, awareness, acceptance, impulse control, and emotion regulation (Bajaj, 2016; MacDonald, 2020; Cheung, 2019). That said, with much of our lives now centered on technology use and electronic media, Lahtinen and Salmivalli’s research considered whether mindfulness-based programs could be virtual instead of face-to-face (Lahtinen & Salmivalli, 2020), and they found that some of the same benefits from face-to-face programs could also be delivered virtually. In addition to this, one study looked at the immediate effects of listening to a mindfulness meditation recording on an individual’s experience of anxiety (Lorca, 2019), and they found mindfulness to be effective at reducing anxiety. 

In summation, although mindfulness treatments are associated with reductions in anxiety symptoms, questions remain regarding how attempts at adapting the “mindfulness” delivery method affect this relationship. Thus, the purpose of the following two studies is to analyze the relationship between mindfulness and anxiety in college students. More specifically, it aims to examine the immediate effects of watching a ten-minute digital mindfulness-based program on students’ self-reported experience of anxiety. I suspect that students would report lower levels of stress and anxiety as well as higher levels of comfort and confidence after watching the treatment video on mindfulness than after watching the control video about the school bus conversion.