Mindfulness, Part 2: How Meditation Can Raise Your SAT Score

In my last post, I discussed how mindfulness and the simple act of noticing your breath can help you overcome stress and respond to challenges in a conscious way.

So what does all this have to do with academics? Here’s what: A study published last March in the journal of Psychological Science shows that practicing mindfulness exercises such as meditation may actually raise students’ test scores.

That’s right.

The study showed that a group of college undergrads who went through a two-week intensive in mindfulness training program were able to see a decrease in how much their minds wandered and improvements in their working memory--plus they did better on a reading comprehension section of the GRE.

Are you sold yet?

Ready to try mindfulness for yourself? 

Try this meditation exercise »

Or want to hear the most relaxing song ever written?

A group of scientists (unrelated to those scientists mentioned above) recently identified the most relaxing song ever written. How'd they do this? In essence, they monitored people's brain waves while listening to different types of music.

It turns out the most relaxing song ever written (according to this study) is called Weightless, by Marconi Union. You can listen to it here. It's also the background music for the meditation exercise above.

Read more on the study in Forbes magazine and on the NYTimes blog.

For more on mindfulness click here.

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Written by Ethan Sawyer – In addition to being the College Essay Guy, Ethan is a writer, teacher, speaker, and voice actor. He has worked at Elite since 2003 is also the coordinator for the Elite Community Scholars Program, a program very close to his heart. You can email him at ethan.sawyer@eliteprep.com. The views expressed in this blog post are Ethan's and don't necessarily reflect those of Elite Educational Institute.