Mindfulness - a preview of our topics in April
Observe your own breath. Listen to yourself. Pause for a moment. Accept things as they are. Don't think about tomorrow. And if your thoughts wander, return to the here and now.
Sounds simple, but it's really quite difficult. Anyone who has ever practised mindfulness knows where distractions lurk: thoughts about the next appointment, unanswered emails, worries about the family, children, health.
Mindfulness has had an unprecedented trend career. Unknown just a few years ago, the term has become an integral part of our modern, stress-ridden world. If you google «mindfulness», the English term for it, you will get 90 million hits. There are mindfulness trainers, mindfulness courses and mindfulness magazines.
The desire to slow down and rediscover self-efficacy has now also reached many families and schools. How do you become a
mindful person? How does mindfulness help combat stress and burnout? And how does mindfulness work in education?
«Girls get upset,
it means they're causing trouble.
Boys then have
have a strong will.»Susie Orbach, psychoanalyst
Paediatricians have been warning for years that they are increasingly confronted with exhausted children and young people. Recent studies prove them right: stress levels have already increased massively among primary and secondary school pupils. In the Juvenir study published by the Jacobs Foundation in 2015, 46 per cent of 15 to 21-year-olds stated that they were frequently or very frequently stressed. Where does the stress come from? Has the pressure at school and home increased? Are young people putting themselves under too much pressure? What role do digital media play?
My colleague Evelin Hartmann and I discuss these and other questions with psychologists Stefanie Rietzler and Fabian Grolimund. As part of our «Talk im Kulturpark» event series on Tuesday, 15 May in Zurich. Our experts will be giving specific tips on how parents can recognise whether their children are stressed, what the causes are and how families can find a way out of the negative spiral of pressure and exhaustion. Registration and further information: www.fritzundfraenzi.ch/events.
What stresses children is also the topic of the first episode of our new six-part series
«What makes children ill», which was created in collaboration with the Institute for Family Research in Freiburg. Children under pressure.
I hope you enjoy reading our April issue. As always, I look forward to receiving mail from you. What is going well, what is missing, what can we do better?
Yours sincerely - Nik Niethammer
