Mindfulness took off in recent years as a way to draw your attention away from the anxieties of the future and all the various doom spirals therein, and to firmly plant your brain in the present. It’s pitched as a wellness trend, but for college students, especially those panicking about their futures, it’s become a practical survival tool. A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that even a short burst of mindfulness training can significantly reduce stress in one very specific group of college students studying a field that fills me with anxiety just hearing about it: introductory physics. Videos by VICE Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that about half of students in these courses experience what psychologists call “psychological threat, which is a state where the demands of the class feel bigger than the student’s ability to handle them.…