L&S News  Tag: Center for Healthy Minds

The Art & Science of Human Flourishing helps students develop their own mental health toolkit to navigate their first year of college.

Nearly 150 UW-Madison students took part in a new kind of class that focused not on traditional subjects, but rather their own minds. The Art and Science of Human Flourishing was designed with first-year students in mind and many students experienced personal growth from life's setbacks and a renewed sense of meaning in their lives.

As schoolchildren in Wisconsin’s Fox Valley encountered ideas from the UW-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, teachers and parents noticed that one kind act begets another.

"Tenacity," a game designed by the Center for Healthy Minds, affected the areas of the brain associated with attention.

Our own unique experiences shape how we view the world and respond to the events in our lives. But experience is highly subjective. What’s distressing or joyful to one person may be very different to another. These differences can matter, especially as a growing body of research shows that what happens in our inner landscapes — our thoughts about and interpretations of our experiences — can have physical consequences in our brains and bodies.

Richard J. Davidson, director of the UW-Madison Center for Healthy Minds, says research into how mental training like meditation affects our health throws light on what constitutes a healthy mind. Well-being – as understood by its qualities of awareness, connection, insight and purpose – is a skill that can be learned.

The Kindness Curriculum is part of a growing global movement to teach emotional intelligence in schools. Advocates of this approach say it’s shortsighted for teachers to focus narrowly on intellectual learning and ignore the cooperative emotional skills that enable learning — and learners — to flourish.

The Madison Police Department teamed up with UW–Madison's Center for Healthy Minds for a pilot study exploring a mindfulness-based program with officers and is partnering again with the UW alongside UWPD and the Dane County Sheriff's Office to expand the research and understand ways to improve the well-being of law enforcement professionals

The Center for Healthy Minds works to cultivate well-being and relieve suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind. Applying its teachings helps this doctor better cope with the stresses of his profession.