Does gymnastics have the same mental health benefits as yoga or meditation?

Alba, Y9, looks at how gymnastics may help relieve academic stress and help you excel in other subjects.

When we think of calming meditation, most of us will probably jump to mindfulness. In our stressful and busy lives, meditation and mindfulness are becoming increasingly popular. However, is there a right or wrong way to meditate, and can some sports such as gymnastics be classified as a sort of meditation? In fact, gymnastics is a form of focused movement meditation, and that ultimately it is beneficial to your mental health and as such has a potential positive impact on academic results.

What is focused meditation?

Focused meditation is when you concentrate on your five senses. Many people start by focusing on their breath. It sounds easy, but it is surprisingly difficult to think about just one thing, without your mind wondering and getting distracted.

However, being able to focus is a key attribute for success in life, and it’s a skill that we ideally need. Having considered on one of the senses like your breathing, a wider number of senses can be thought about.

But how does gymnastics compare to this?

Before moving, a gymnast must get into the right frame of mind to execute the move with skill. They must be focussed on themselves, and what they are about to do, and not be distracted. In a routine, you always think about the skill you are currently doing, and not what’s coming next. You are therefore being mindful and focussed on yourself in the present time. This can benefit your academic studies, because, just like mindfulness, it clears your brain so you can learn the next day with an open and more relaxed and focussed mind.

What is movement meditation?

Movement meditation helps connect your mind to your body through actions. The most common practice of this is yoga. Again, your focus is the mind. People who do not like sitting still may prefer this method, and it’s ideal when you are feeling energetic.

How does this happen in Gymnastics?

Tumbling in gymnastics is generating power and executing a sequence of flips and moves. This requires you to be aware of what your body’s doing and think about using muscles you may not otherwise use. As such, the movement becomes the focus, allowing all other thoughts to be shut out, focusing on the present and immediate.

Why should you try gymnastics, and why should it be considered a form of meditation?

Some studies[1] show that mindfulness is great, but if you struggle to do it, it can make you potentially more anxious. They also show that movement meditation like yoga can be more effective for people in stressful situations, or for people who are used to more active lifestyles. It explains why one of the reasons scientists like mindfulness – it is a cognitive method.

Personally, I prefer gymnastics to mindfulness, because I find it hard to keep still when sitting and just thinking about your breath. I enjoy the element of fear/excitement of trying a new skill. After doing gymnastics I feel a lot calmer and ready to study and learn.

I would argue that, although not a standard form of meditation, gymnastics offers benefits for stress relief and utilises skills and techniques such as focus which can help you excel in other subjects. We should have a wider view on what is meditation, and what can help us through the stresses of life.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-it/201604/incredible-alternative-mindfulness-you-never-heard

Year 1 test out rockets

It was great to see how well year 1 worked on their first visit to the STEAM room. The were testing, measuring and asking questions about launching rockets as part of their Space topic. Very impressive to see all of the different ways of measuring that they came up with, and to hear all of their ideas and questions. We will look forward to seeing you again soon!

Fantastic news from The Physiological Society’s Mission to Mars competition

Just before the summer term ended the then year 2s had a fabulous session about space exploration and the difficulties that human bodies might encounter on Mars. Mrs Garczynski and Dr Seeta ran a fabulous session for the girls where they found out about the potential problems on Mars, thought creatively about ways to solve those problems and designed space suits to help cope with the demands. The girls came up with some really good ideas and their space suit designs looked terrific.

On Saturday Arabella and Lucia, and their families, were invited to attend The Physiological Society’s annual President’s Lecture, held at the Royal Institution. They had an amazing time taking part in a range of hands on activities as well as listening to a talk given by former NASA astronaut and physiologist James Pawelczyk all about the human limits of space exploration. Both of the girls had been shortlisted in the 5-7 age range of the competition and Arabella’s design was chosen as the overall winner. Very many congratulations go to Arabella and to Lucia. Also very many congratulations to Ewan who was also shortlisted in the 5-7 age category and attends Burlington Infants School which is one of the schools we have been working with in our Primary Science Quality Mark hub this year. What a wonderful opportunity to spend the afternoon with an astronaut!

Which tree is this leaf from?

Year 1 pupils have been busy in science using keys and magnifying glasses to find out more about leaves. They were very good at using keys to identify a large range of different leaves but found that the identification keys that we used had got some of the sizes of the leaves wrong! We used rulers to find out how wide the leaves actually were and drew some great scientific diagrams of the leaves. The girls now intend to look around for more leaves as they all seem to be very, very different…

Years 5, 6, 7 and 8 visit the Big Bang Fair 2019 in Birmingham

On Friday 15th March a group of year 5, 6, 7 and 8 pupils travelled to Birmingham to attend the Big Bang Fair. The Big Bang UK Young Scientists and Engineers Fair is the largest celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths for young people in the UK. The various shows, stalls, exhibits and workshops certainly did bring science and engineering to life. We watched a show on Deadly Diseases, took part in the Shell Salt Water Car Challenge, carried out riveting with the RAF next to a Red Arrow, raced robots round a maze and held cockroaches. That is just a flavour of the very varied activities! You can see more information about the event here.

STEAM Explore Lectures coming up soon!

Don’t miss the exciting Explore lectures coming soon – all with a STEAM theme! Explore Lectures are suitable for those in years 9-13 and start at 4.30pm, with refreshments available from 4.15pm, in our purpose-built Rutherford Centre. Lectures generally last 40-45 minutes with an opportunity for questions at the end.

National Physical Laboratory visits Junior School

Andrew Hanson, a physicist from the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, visited the junior school last week to talk to us about temperature, solids, liquids and gases. He brought with him lots of liquid nitrogen and inspired and intrigued girls in years 3, 4, 5 and 6 with his demonstrations. The girls had many questions to ask and loved all of the physics that Andrew told us about. Outside in the playground at the end of the assembly Andrew made sure that we wouldn’t forget his assembly for a very long time! Thank you Andrew – you were amazing.

If you would like to find out more about physics look out for family events at NPL, including the Water Rocket Challenge, that families are very welcome to take part in.

Trying not to PEE on your paragraphs…

Holly Beckwith, Teacher of History and Politics at WHS, explains how the History and English departments are using a small-scale action research project to try and rethink the way in which analytical writing is taught at Key Stage 3.

The age-old question for history teachers: how do we get our pupils to produce effective written analysis? It is a question we regularly grapple with as a department. Constructing and sustaining arguments is at the centre of what we do as Historians and analytical writing is thus at the core of our teaching of the discipline. But it has not always been an easy task for history practitioners to get pupils to achieve this, even over a whole key stage.

Through published discourse, history teachers have explored the ways in which we can teach pupils to produce argued causal explanations in writing (Laffin, 2000; Hammond, 2002; Chapman, 2003; Counsell, 2004; Pate and Evans, 2007; Fordham, 2007).  Extended writing has been seen as an important pedagogical tool in developing pupils’ causal reasoning as it necessitates thinking about the organisation, arrangement and relative importance of causes.

In 2003, History teacher Mary Bakalis theorised pupils’ difficulty with writing as a difficulty with history. She posited that writing is both a form of thinking and a tool for thinking and, therefore, that historical understanding is shaped and expressed by writing. Rather than viewing writing as a skill that one acquires through history, Bakalis saw writing as part of the process of historical reasoning and thinking. Through an analysis of her own Year 7 pupils’ essays, she noticed that pupils had often failed to see the relevance of a fact in relation to a question. She realised that pupils thought that history was merely an activity of stating facts rather than using facts to construct an argument.

As a solution to similar observations in pupils’ writing, history teachers have used various forms of scaffolding to help pupils construct arguments. This includes the well-known PEE tool, which was advocated by genre theorists and cross-curricular literary initiatives as put forward by, for example, Wray and Lewis (1994), and has since been used widely in History and English departments nationwide, including ours at Wimbledon High.  The concept of PEE (point, evidence, explanation) is simple and therefore a helpful tool for teaching paragraph structure. It gives pupils security in knowing how to organise their knowledge on a page.

Figure 1: PEE – Point, Evidence, Explanation

But while PEE in theory offers a sound approach to structuring extended writing in history, it has been criticised for unintentionally removing important steps in historical thinking. Fordham, for example, noticed that the use of such devices in his practice meant that there was too much ‘emphasis on structured exposition [which] had rendered the deeper historical thinking inaccessible’ (Fordham, 2007.) Pate and Evans similarly argued that ‘historical writing is about more than structure and style; the construction of history is about the individual’s reaction to the past’ (Pate and Evans, 2007).  Therefore, too much emphasis on the construction of the essay rather than the nuances of an argument or an engagement with other arguments, as Fordham argues, can create superficial success. Further problems were identified by Foster and Gadd (2013), who theorised that generic writing frame approaches such as the PEE tool was having a detrimental effect on pupils’ understanding and deployment of historical evidence in their history writing.

After reflecting on this research conducted by History teachers as a department, we started to consider that encouraging our pupils to use structural devices to help pupils’ historical writing may not be very purposeful if divorced from getting pupils to see the function and role of arguments in the discipline of history itself. Through discussions with the English department, who have also used the PEE tool in their teaching, we realised we shared similar concerns.

Not satisfied with simply holding these, we decided to do something about it and have since embarked on a piece of action research with the English department.  Action research is interested in finding solutions to problems to produce better outcomes in education and involves a continual cycle of planning, action, observation and reflection such as Figure 2 below illustrates.

We started our first cycle of our piece of small-scale research last term teaching analytical writing to classes using two different lesson sequences: one which teaches pupils PEE and one which omits this.

We then compared the writing produced by these classes to identify any noticeable differences and structured our reflections around four questions:

1.      How has the experience of teaching and learning been different to previous experience, and why?

2.      How have students responded to the new method?

3.      How far has the intervention resulted in a different approach to analytical writing so far?
4.      What are our next steps – what went well, and what needs adjusting?

Figure 2: The action research spiral (Wilson, 2017, p. 113)

Thus far, the comparisons have allowed us to make some tentative observations. Whilst these do not seem to show an established pattern yet, there does seem to be a greater sense of originality and creativity in some of the non-PEE responses. Pupils seemed to produce more free-flowing ideas and were making more spontaneous links between those ideas, showing a higher quality of thinking. In addition, a few of the participating teachers noticed that their questioning became more tailored to developing the ideas and thinking of the pupils they taught rather than getting them to write something particular. However, others noticed that pupils were already well versed in PEE and so the change in approach may have had less of an effect. Other pupils seemed to feel less secure with a freeform structure. In order to encourage the more positive effects, our next cycle of teaching will experiment with different ways of planning essays that provide pupils with a way of organising ideas more visually and focus on the development of our questioning to further develop the higher quality thinking we noticed with some classes.

The first research cycle has thus been a worthwhile collaborative reflection on our teaching practice in the pursuit of improving our pupils’ historical and literary analysis. It has given us some insights which we’re looking to develop further as we head into the second term of the academic year.

References

Bakalis, M. (2003). ‘Direct teaching of paragraph cohesion’ Teaching History 110.
Chapman, A. (2003). ‘Camels, diamonds and counterfactuals: a model for teaching causal reasoning’ Teaching History 112.
Counsell, C. (2004). History and Literacy in Year 7: Building the lesson around the text. Abingdon: Hodder Education.
Fordham, M. (2007). ‘Slaying dragons and sorcerers in Year 12: in search of historical argument’ Teaching History 129.
Foster, R. and Gadd, S. (2013). ‘“Let’s play Supermarket ‘Evidential’ Sweep”: developing students’ awareness of the need to select evidence’ Teaching History 152.
Hammond, K. (2002). ‘Getting year 10 to understand the value of precise factual knowledge’ Teaching History 109.
Laffin, D. (2000). ‘My essays could go on for ever: using Key Stage 3 to improve performance at GCSE’ Teaching History 99.
Pate, J. and Evans, G. (2007). ‘Does scaffolding make them fall? Reflecting on strategies for causal argument in Years 8 and 11’ Teaching History 128.
Wray, D. and Lewis, M. (1994). Working with Writing Frames: Developing Children’s Non-Fiction Writing Scholastic.

The Brain Chemistry of Eating Disorders

Jo, Year 13, explores what is happening chemically inside the brains of those suffering from eating disorders and shows how important this science is to understanding these mental health conditions.

The definition of an eating disorder is any range of psychological disorders characterised by abnormal or disturbed eating habits. Anorexia is defined as a lack or loss of appetite for food and an emotional disorder characterised by an obsessive desire to lose weight by refusing to eat. Bulimia is defined as an emotional disorder characterised by a distorted body image and an obsessive desire to lose weight, in which bouts of extreme overeating are followed by fasting, self-induced vomiting or purging. Anorexia and bulimia are often chronic and relapsing disorders and anorexia has the highest death rate of any psychiatric disorder. Individuals with anorexia and bulimia are consistently characterised by perfectionism, obsessive-compulsiveness, and dysphoric mood.

Dopamine and serotonin function are integral to both of these conditions; how does brain chemistry enable us to understand what causes anorexia and bulimia?

Dopamine

Dopamine is a compound present in the body as a neurotransmitter and is primarily responsible for pleasure and reward and in turn influences our motivation and attention. It has been implicated in the symptom pattern of individuals with anorexia, specifically related to the mechanisms of reinforcement and reward in engaging in anorexic behaviours, such as restricting food intake. Dysfunction of the dopamine system contributes to characteristic traits and behaviours of individuals with anorexia which includes compulsive exercise and pursuit of weight loss.

In people suffering from anorexia dopamine levels are stimulated by restricting to the point of starving. People feel ‘rewarded’ by severely reducing their calorie intake and in the early stages of anorexia the more dopamine that is released the more rewarded they feel and the more reinforced restricting behaviour becomes. Bulimia involves dopamine serving as the ‘reward’ and ‘feel good’ chemical released in the brain when overeating. Dopamine ‘rushes’ affect people with anorexia and bulimia, but for people with anorexia starving releases dopamine, whereas for people with bulimia binge eating releases dopamine.

Serotonin

Serotonin is responsible for feelings of happiness and calm – too much serotonin can produce anxiety, while too-little may result in feelings of sadness and depression. Evidence suggests that altered brain serotonin function contributes to dysregulation of appetite, mood, and impulse control in anorexia and bulimia. High levels of serotonin may result in heightened satiety, which means it is easier to feel full. Starvation and extreme weight loss decrease levels of serotonin in the brain. This results in temporary alleviation from negative feelings and emotional disturbance which reinforces anorexic symptoms.

Tryptophan is an essential amino acid found in the diet and is the precursor of serotonin, which means that it is the molecule required to make serotonin. Theoretically, binging behaviour is consistent with reduced serotonin function while anorexia is consistent with increased serotonin activity. So decreased tryptophan levels in the brain, and therefore decreased serotonin, increases bulimic urges.

Conclusions

Distorted body image is another key concept to understand when discussing eating disorders. The area of the brain known as the insula is important for appetite regulation and also interceptive awareness, which is the ability to perceive signals from the body like touch, pain, and hunger. Chemical dysfunction in the insula, a structure in the brain that integrates the mind and body, may lead to distorted body image, which is a key feature of anorexia. Some research suggests that some of the problems people with anorexia have regarding body image distortion can be related to alterations of interceptive awareness. This could explain why a person recovering from anorexia can draw a self-portrait of their body image that is typically 3x its actual size. Prolonged untreated symptoms appear to reinforce the chemical and structural abnormalities in the brains seen in those diagnosed with anorexia and bulimia.

Therefore, in order to not only understand and but also treat both anorexia and bulimia, it is central to look at the brain chemistry behind these disorders in order to better understand how to go about successfully treating them.