Mind-Body Modalities for Nursing Students

PMR (Smith Version) involves a tense-let go exercise of 11 muscle groups including hand, arm, arm and sides, back, shoulder, face, front of neck, stomach, chest, leg, and foot. This tense-let go exercise is performed twice for each muscle group. The tensing up phase for each muscle group should last for 5 to 10 seconds and the letting go phase for 20-30 seconds. Simultaneously, the subjects will be asked to pay attention to the sensations of muscle tension and relaxation. After the tense-let go exercise, subjects are asked to systematically scan the muscle groups to notice and let go any remaining muscle tension. The entire exercise should take around 30 minutes, not counting instructions and times of measurement \[11\].

Guided imagery (Smith Version) involves creating in one's mind or imagining a passive relaxing places or activities. In sense imagery, one simply imagines sensations associated with a relaxing setting or activity. The relaxation approach involves the sense of sight, sound, touch, and smell. The categories of stimuli consist of: (1) Travel such as boats, plains, trains, balloons, horses, (2) outdoor nature settings such as mountains, gardens, and forest, (3) water such as rivers, lakes, ocean, beach, rain, and (4) indoor settings such as childhood home, castle, religious institution, and cabin \[11\].

"Smith version of the mindfulness meditation will be used in the current study. The mindful mediators are neutral observers who view the world as it is, without reactions, judgments, and evaluations. They quietly attend to, note, and let go of every internal external stimulus such as thought, feeing, sensation, sound, idea that enters awareness. They do not try to think about, push away, and do anything with these stimuli experienced and do not have to figure out the connections between each stimulus. They simply let each stimulus come and go and wait for the next stimulus. They do not have to be concerned about distractions. Each time they are distracted, they note it as yet another passing stimulus (Ah, a distraction… how interesting) \[11\]."

Participants in the control condition will be instructed to sit with their eyes closed and relax during the intervention periods. Participants in the control group will follow an identical procedure and time periods as the experimental groups. For instance, when the experimental groups will practice for 30 minutes, the participants in the control group will be asked to sit with eyes closed and relax for 30 minutes.