Mindfulness, meditation, and breathing exercises: reduced anxiety for clients and self-care for social work interns

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to identify and describe a teaching tool that supports social work student success in the classroom and in field placement. The project introduced mindfulness, meditation, and breathing techniques to 2nd-year master of social work (MSW) students in a group classroom setting and engaged students as they applied those techniques in their internship settings with clients. Students were introduced to mindfulness, meditation, and breathing techniques through lecture, experimental exercises, video clips, and case studies and used the group setting to learn to use those tools to add trauma-informed mindfulness interventions to the clinical techniques they concurrently practiced in field placement. Students learned methods to incorporate those interventions into their psychotherapy/counseling sessions with clients and discovered that mindfulness-specific interventions also helped regulate their own autonomic nervous systems, contributing to decreased anxiety. Thus, mindfulness skills taught in social work programs have significant multidimensional benefits; engaging a group classroom setting to learn to utilize mindfulness, meditation and breathing techniques can reduce stress and anxiety for clients and promote adaptive self-care skills for MSW students.

KEYWORDS:

• Mindfulness
• breathing
• self-care
• meditation
• group work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. All names are pseudonyms.

2. Group 1 consisted of Hospice Settings, Palliative Care for Cancer Patients, Hospital Settings (ER & ICU), School Settings; Group 2 consisted of Department of Children and Family Services, University Health Clinic, Substance Abuse Clinics, Department of Mental Health; and Group 3 consisted of Veteran Affairs, Child Guidance Client, End of Life Clinics, and Residential Substance Abuse Facility.