Improve Nursing Student Psychological Well-Being with Yoga
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“How can mindfulness help nurses? Greater awareness and less distraction in the clinical setting can improve your assessment skills and your performance of complex technical procedures that may reduce the risk of clinical errors. Mindfulness can enhance your communication with patients and other healthcare team members by bringing a greater awareness to how and what others are communicating. Listening and speaking with greater attention can lead to more effective communication and better clinical outcomes, particularly in crisis situations. Moreover, . . . mindfulness training can help nurses cope more effectively with stress and reduce the risk of professional burnout.” – Lois Howland
Stress is epidemic in the western workplace with almost two thirds of workers reporting high levels of stress at work. In high stress occupations, like healthcare, burnout is all too prevalent. It is estimated that over 45% of healthcare workers experience burnout. Currently, over a third of healthcare workers report that they are looking for a new job. Burnout is the fatigue, cynicism, emotional exhaustion, sleep disruption, and professional inefficacy that comes with work-related stress. It not only affects the healthcare providers personally, but also the patients, as it produces a loss of empathy and compassion. Burnout it is a threat to the healthcare providers and their patients. In fact, it is a threat to the entire healthcare system as it contributes to the shortage of doctors and nurses.
Preventing burnout has to be a priority. But, it is beyond the ability of the individual to change the environment to reduce stress and prevent burnout, so it is important that methods be found to reduce the individual’s responses to stress; to make the individual more resilient when high levels of stress occur. Contemplative practices have been shown to reduce the psychological and physiological responses to stress. Indeed, mindfulness has been shown to be helpful in treating and preventing burnout, increasing resilience, and improving sleep. It has also been shown that the combination of yoga, aerobic exercise and meditation is effective in improving the mental health of stressed employees.
Developing mindfulness early in healthcare careers could work to prevent later burnout. So, it makes sense to investigate the combination of mindfulness training and exercise that occurs in yoga training for nursing students to promote mental health and lower the likelihood of future burnout. In today’s Research News article “Effect of Yoga on Psychological Functioning of Nursing Students: A Randomized Wait List Control Trial.” See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5483709/, Mathad and colleagues recruited 1st to 3rd year nursing students and randomly assigned them to be on a wait-list control or receive 8 weeks of yoga instruction and practice. The yoga practice was conducted daily and included breathing exercises, stretching, postures and meditation. The students were measured before and after training for mindfulness, resilience, self-compassion, satisfaction with life, empathy, and perceived stress.
They found that compared to baseline and the wait-list controls, the yoga training produced significant increases in mindfulness and self-compassion and a trend toward decreased perceived stress. Hence, yoga practice produced improvements in the psychological well-being of the nursing students. It remains to be determined if the students maintain the yoga practice and if the improvements persist into the future of their education and their practice as nurses. A longitudinal follow-up would be very helpful in this regard. In addition, future research should contain an active control condition, perhaps aerobic exercise, to determine if yoga practice per se was responsible for the observed benefits.
So, improve nursing student psychological well-being with yoga.
“The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will . An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions for bringing it about.” — William James
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
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Study Summary
Mathad, M. D., Pradhan, B., & Sasidharan, R. K. (2017). Effect of Yoga on Psychological Functioning of Nursing Students: A Randomized Wait List Control Trial. Journal of Clinical and Diagnostic Research : JCDR, 11(5), KC01–KC05. http://doi.org/10.7860/JCDR/2017/26517.9833
Abstract
Introduction
Nursing students experience considerable amount of stress to meet their professional demands. Yoga is an effective practice to reduce stress and improve psychological well being. However, improvement in psychological well being aids in stress management.
Aim
To evaluate the effectiveness of eight week yoga intervention on psychological functioning of nursing students.
Materials and Methods
This was a randomised Wait List Control (WLC) trial, we recruited total 100 students from Kempegowda Institute of Nursing, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India and randomized them into two groups (yoga=50 and WLC=50 students). The following instruments were used to collect the data, Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory (FMI), Self-Compassion Scale- Short Form (SCS-SF), Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC), Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS), Jefferson Scale of Empathy HPS-Version (JSE-HPS), and Perceived Stress Scale (PSS). Data was analysed using Repeated Measures Analysis of Variance (RM-ANOVA) followed by post-hoc Bonferroni correction for all psychological variables.
Results
The results of our study report that eight week yoga intervention was significantly effective in improving self compassion and mindfulness among nursing students in experimental group than compared to WLC group. Even though there were improvements in resilience, satisfaction in life and perceived stress, results were not statistically significant.
Conclusion
Overall, results of the present study have demonstrated impact of eight week yoga intervention on the psychological functioning of nursing students. Yoga intervention can be inculcated in the nursing education to meet demands of the profession.