Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction For High School Students’ Academic Burnout

Studies show that Chinese students in general experience burnout when learning. Under the current educational system, schools, parents and students pay lots of attention to Gaokao, or the National College Entrance Exam of China, which gives too much pressure on the senior high school students. There are many theories now about academic burnout, but intervention studies are rarely seen.Mindfulness-based stress reduction has been proven fairly effective for working burnout. The concept of academic burnout originated from working burnout, so it could be inferred that mindfulness-based stress reduction is also effective for academic burnout.Basing on the effect of mindfulness mechanism and emotion regulation on burnout, it can be deduced that mindfulness-based stress reduction could make the subjects use cognitive reappraisal more often to regulate their emotions and thus alleviate academic burnout.This paper aims at studying the intervention effect of mindfulness-based stress reduction on senior high school students and testing whether the subjects use cognitive reappraisal more often to control their emotions after such kind of intervention.The first study which surveyed 501 students is the status quo of the academic burnout of the high school students.The second study is the intervention of mindfulness-based stress reduction on high school students. Altogether 23 students who were divided into two groups, the experimental group consisted of 11 people and the control group consisted of 12 people, participated in the survey and they received five interventions.There are two assumptions:First, mindfulness-based stress reduction could effectively alleviate students‘ academic burnout.Second, mindfulness-based stress reduction could make people use cognitive reappraisal more often to regulate their emotions.Conclusion: the high school students of the High School attached to Northwest Normal University have more or less academic burnout. The degree of academic burnout differentiate among different grades with the students of grade two experiencing the worst burnout and those of grade one and three ranking second and third respectively. There is no significant gender difference but difference between science and arts students considering academic burnout. Mindfulness-based stress reduction which is most effective in decreasing physical and mental exhaustion can make the individuals use cognitive reappraisal more often to regulate their emotions.