12. Intervention of mindfulness training in physical education teaching on anxiety emotions of vocational college students

Abstract Background Vocational college students generally face the dilemma of anxiety, while traditional forms of mental health education are relatively single. Mindfulness training emphasizes conscious and non judgmental awareness of the present, and has been proven to effectively alleviate anxiety. The research aims to explore the innovative approach of integrating mindfulness training into physical education teaching, in order to evaluate its intervention effect and application value in alleviating students' anxiety. Methods The study was designed with a randomized controlled trial, and 100 higher vocational students were recruited and randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group. In the 12-week regular physical education course, the experimental group embedded about 30 minutes of structured mind training in each course, including mind breathing, body scanning and mind integration in exercise; The control group only had conventional physical education. The Self-Assessment Anxiety Scale (SAS) and the Notation Awareness Scale (MAAS) were used to assess before and after intervention, and the data were processed by repeated measure analysis of variance and independent sample t-test. Results The SAS scores (mean ± standard deviation) and intra - and inter group comparisons between the experimental group and the control group at three time points are shown in Table 1. As shown in Table 1, as the intervention progressed, the anxiety score of the experimental group at T1 time point was significantly lower than the baseline of the same group (p<.001) and the control group during the same period (p<.001). At the end of the intervention (T2), the scores of the experimental group further significantly decreased (compared to T0, p< .001), The average score decreased from 58.4 points to 46.3 points, a decrease of 12.1 points. This fully proves that mindfulness training integrated into physical education teaching can effectively and significantly reduce the anxiety of vocational college students. Discussion This study has confirmed that integrating mindfulness training into physical education courses can effectively enhance students' mindfulness abilities and alleviate anxiety. The path of "integrating body and mind" has the advantages of convenient implementation and easy promotion. However, the research sample is relatively single, and the long-term effects and specific mechanisms still need further verification. In the future, relevant research can be deepened in a wider range of groups.