Integrating Self Compassion into Mindfulness Meditation Lowers Math Anxiety in Indonesian Junior High School Students
MaPan June 30, 2026 Widodo Winarso, Arif Abdul Haqq
A brief mindfulness meditation program, especially when combined with self-compassion practices, substantially reduced mathematics learning anxiety in seventh-grade students. In a quasi-experimental study with 112 Indonesian students, those who received four 5–10-minute mindfulness sessions before math lessons over two weeks showed a significant drop in anxiety scores. Students who received mindfulness integrated with self-compassion showed an even larger reduction, with all 37 participants experiencing decreased anxiety. The mindfulness-only group's average anxiety score fell from 95.55 to 81.68, while the mindfulness-plus-self-compassion group's average fell from 92.00 to 66.68. A control group receiving conventional instruction showed no such improvement. The authors argue that adding self-compassion enhances the effectiveness of brief mindfulness interventions for subject-specific anxiety in early adolescents.