By Ben Painter & Jon Luke Tittmann
Today’s youth are navigating an unprecedented mental health crisis: nearly half of teens report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, youth mental health hospitalizations have more than doubled since 2016, and daily screen time averages have surged to over seven hours per day–a two-hour increase since 2015. According to CDC data, one in five LGTBQ+ youth have made a suicide attempt.
Those working directly with young people don’t need statistics to understand the severity of what’s happening–they see it playing out every day. Whether you speak with parents, teachers, school administrators, or counselors, the message is unanimous and clear: this crisis demands our immediate attention.
Much of the dialogue regarding possible solutions has centered on schools, which have become a site for intervention. Naturally, these conversations often focus on questions of impact and resourcing. Which solutions are backed by evidence, and which solutions can we implement at scale with limited resources? In other words, how do we help as many people as possible in as little time as possible? The urgency is understandable–confronting the depth of young people’s suffering is oftentimes unbearable.
How mindfulness can help
One promising approach that has gained momentum in recent years is mindfulness. Mindfulness practice has proven to be effective in helping adults manage stress, reduce anxiety, and build resilience, and a growing body of studies suggests it can lead to similar outcomes for youth. In recent years, mindfulness organizations specifically focused on implementing mindfulness programming in schools have also published research demonstrating its impact on improving mental health among other outcomes.
In one such study, the Mindful Life Project, an organization focused on supporting schools through mindfulness, found that in schools they worked with, 92% of students report being able to better focus in class, 89% report that their mental health has improved, and 91% feel better able to bounce back from tough situations. The qualitative feedback from students was even more compelling:
“The way mindfulness has helped me is it helps me and my peers become better friends as a community and just helps people understand that it’s okay to feel however you feel on the inside.” – 6th Grade Student
“Once [mindfulness] helped me because it was a test, and I was very nervous. When we did the test, I took 3 deep breaths, and I did my test, turned it in and I got the results. It was a pretty good result.” – 4th Grade Student
Despite the evidence of mindfulness’s impact on mental health though, the question of whether mindfulness can be a scalable solution remains popular among mindfulness skeptics–and their skepticism isn’t unfounded. Efforts to scale mindfulness efficiently across multiple schools have often fallen short of the successes achieved by more culturally responsive approaches where programming was tailored more thoughtfully to specific school contexts.
But perhaps these shortcomings are to be expected. After all, as mindfulness practitioners know, mindfulness inherently calls into question a quick-fix, one-size-fits-all mentality. Instead, its power lies in cultivating deep, intentional awareness, which takes time, practice, and attentiveness to the present moment. In many ways, the very principles that make mindfulness effective for personal transformation and building resilience are also what makes it valuable for addressing today’s mental health crisis–a crisis that requires us to attend not only to its urgency but also to its systemic nature and root causes.
One question we should be asking ourselves is: What can mindfulness teach us about creating lasting, sustainable change?
Case Study: Lessons Learned from The MYRIAD Project
The MYRIAD Project was the largest study of school-based mindfulness to date. It sought to answer a critical question: Can mindfulness be scaled effectively in schools via a curriculum model to prevent depression in early adolescence?
The study began with promising early findings. A small pilot program, led by experienced mindfulness teachers, showed positive effects on students’ mental health and well-being. Encouraged by these results, researchers expanded the study to test a more scalable model, one that took into account the realities of most schools where mindfulness was not yet established.
To do this, they designed the study to introduce mindfulness from scratch, using teachers who had no prior experience with mindfulness. These teachers received minimal training, were not allowed to have a prior mindfulness practice, and in many cases, were mandated to teach mindfulness whether they were interested or not.
The results? It was helpful for teachers’ mental health and school climate, but had no measurable impact on student well-being.
“When comparing schools-based mindfulness training with regular social-emotional teaching, we found no evidence that the mindfulness training programme was more effective than usual social and emotional teaching in helping young people’s mental health or well-being.” – MYRIAD Study
Deeper Lessons
For those looking for an easily scalable solution to the mental health crisis at hand, these findings were disappointing. It would have been ideal if mindfulness could be easily scaled in a way that fit into existing school structures via a scalable curriculum. But to many mindfulness practitioners, the results were unsurprising. Mindfulness is not a simple curriculum—it is a relational and cultural practice. Expecting teachers with minimal training and little personal investment to guide students in mindfulness was unlikely to yield deep impact.
Mindfulness, in this way, is teaching us a deeper lesson—not just about its own implementation, but about how we approach change itself. The impulse to find a quick, scalable fix to a deep-rooted crisis is understandable. But when we focus solely on quick fix, top-down interventions, we risk overlooking the deeper systemic conditions that keep the problem in place.
Sustainable change doesn’t happen through mass implementation alone. It happens when we invest in relationships, engage authentically with local communities, reshape cultural norms, and commit to long-term engagement. It requires rethinking the system itself. If mindfulness teaches us to slow down, observe carefully, and cultivate authentic change from the inside out, then its greatest lesson for education reform is the same: deep transformation requires patience, responsiveness to context, and a commitment to long-term growth over short-term expansion.
What’s Next? Focus on Quality.
If we abandon or de-invest in mindfulness in schools simply because the methods of scaling tried to date have had mixed results, we risk losing a practice that has demonstrated tremendous potential in smaller, well-supported settings and research studies.
Real transformation doesn’t happen overnight. The most effective, lasting change starts small, with deeply rooted, high-quality programs that then grow outward. Instead of chasing a one-size-fits-all solution, we believe the path forward is to build strong proof points—schools where mindfulness is integrated with care and intention, yielding real results.
Dr. Robert Roeser, a leading mindfulness researcher at Pennsylvania State University, has spent decades exploring this issue. In a recent live Q and A with us, describes this approach as such:
“Maybe in the beginning, we want to put a thousand lights on the hill as opposed to reaching a million people as quickly as possible.”
In other words, rather than trying to scale mindfulness rapidly in a way that potentially dilutes its impact due to a lack of fit with a given school culture, staff and broader context, we might instead focus on raising up inspiring models of whole school efforts—beacons where mindfulness thrives and demonstrates its full potential. These schools can then serve as models, helping us refine best practices and expand in a way that preserves mindfulness’s integrity and effectiveness.
How Can Mindfulness Be Implemented in a Way That Lasts?
At WholeSchool Mindfulness, we focus on supporting schools that have the right conditions for a thriving mindfulness program.
Here’s what we look for:
- Leadership That’s Fully Committed. The most successful programs happen in schools where administrators actively support it by allocating time, budget, and structural resources. If decision-makers aren’t on board, even the most well-intentioned efforts struggle to take root.
- A Genuine Mindfulness Champion. This could be a math teacher leading her class in meditation before algebra, a guidance counselor running a faculty mindfulness group, or an assistant principal with a deep personal practice. The keys are that they are connected to their community, and they want to lead—not because they have to, but because they believe in it. When schools give these champions the time and support they need, mindfulness thrives.
- Clarity and Alignment on Mindfulness’s Role. Mindfulness isn’t a classroom management tool. It’s not a disciplinary tactic to make students “calm down” and comply. The most successful programs have a clear purpose: supporting well-being, healing, and community. When administrators and mindfulness champions share this vision, the program has a real shot at lasting impact.
Mindfulness teaches us to slow down, pay attention, and go deep. Infusing it into our education system should be no different.
By helping our partner schools succeed, we have the opportunity to demonstrate how to implement it effectively. As these success stories grow, they lay the foundation for a more thoughtful, sustainable approach to scaling mindfulness in education—one that can contribute to the broader, holistic solutions needed to address the youth mental health crisis.