How do you treat your friends?

How do you treat your friends and family? Do you listen to them carefully? Offer support? Help them with challenging tasks and provide encouragement when they need it. Do you think about what is best for them and take steps to make their lives a better place and experience? Probably. Most of us treat those we love and value with kindness and work to anticipate and meet their needs. We treat them with compassion- an awareness of their needs, discomfort, and pain AND take steps to meet them, limit their discomfort, and alleviate their pain however we can. Underlying our compassion is a deep desire to make sure our friends and family are WELL.

How do you treat yourself?

Do you treat yourself with the same compassion you offer those you care about? Do you pay attention to your needs, discomfort, and pain and take steps to manage them?

If you are like many students (and people of all ages) that I know, you likely don’t. Many people I know have decided that they deserve whatever unmet needs, pain, or discomfort they have and that they should live with it. Instead of thinking about how they feel and why they feel this way- which can lead to steps to manage stressors and things causing discomfort and pain- they hide from it by doing simple things that feel good at the moment but don’t solve things or by feeling bad. Many people feel like treating themselves with the compassion they offer others is a failure and a waste of time.

Research shows that treating yourself with compassion—by acknowledging failures, unmet needs, and pain or discomfort AND then taking action to resolve what is causing those feelings—can increase your success!

What does it mean to be well?

Being well means having a general state of well-being (how you feel in the moment) and wellness, which is linked to your choices and is a continuously evolving process. Wellness requires that you constantly evaluate your options and choices and choose what works best for you.

Think of it this way:

Well-being: a measure of how you are doing at a specific moment

Wellness: the choices and actions you are making

Since wellness is a set of actions you choose to improve the quality of your life, you can always work on improving it. We can break wellness and wellness choices into dimensions, and you may have a different level of well-being in each. While it’s easy to focus on your well-being (I feel good today, I feel ill today), your wellness and choices are complex and personal.

Dimensions of well-being

Developing and supporting your well-being means that you look at aspects (or dimensions) of your life, including:

According to the National Institute of Health (2017), these eight dimensions affect your overall wellness. For more information, see:  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5508938/

Let’s examine each of these briefly and consider the actions you can take to increase your wellness and well-being in these areas.

Physical wellness relates to physical health and body. It enables you to participate fully in your life and learn, communicate, and engage with others and ideas.

• Eat balanced meals with plenty of fruits and vegetables.
• Get a good night’s sleep regularly.
• Include physical activity in your daily routine.
• Maintain personal hygiene habits.
• Visit the campus health center when you’re not feeling well.
• Be mindful of high-risk activities and take precautions to prevent illness and injury.

Emotional wellness includes reacting and processing feelings in a productive, positive manner. Building your emotional wellness can help you to feel positive and optimistic about your life and future.

• Recognize and manage your feelings, especially during stressful times.
• Take moments to reflect on your emotions and why you feel a certain way.
• Show empathy toward others and try to understand their feelings and position.
• Use your emotions as a source of motivation and positivity.
• Aim to maintain a positive outlook on college life.

Intellectual/Mental wellness refers to how one thinks and processes information. Those with wellness in this area can slow down, ensure they have good information and understand it accurately, and make decisions carefully.

• Improve your problem-solving skills by seeking help from professors or academic advisors.
• Stay curious about your class topics and explore new areas of interest.
• Embrace intellectual challenges and approach them believing you can manage and learn successfully.
• Expand your knowledge through reading, research, and engaging discussions with peers and faculty.

Social wellness involves how you relate to others and manage relationships. Increasing your social wellness enables you to build a supportive network and feel comfortable meeting and collaborating with new people.

• Be a caring and supportive friend to others, and allow them to support you in return.
• Communicate effectively with your peers and build meaningful connections.
• Actively participate in campus activities and clubs to form friendships.
• Join study groups and work collaboratively on projects.
• Reach out to professors during office hours and engage with classmates in discussions.

Spiritual wellness means aligning your life activities and work with your values and motivations. It means knowing what is important to you and using your time, talents, and abilities to build a life that fits your beliefs and feels authentic and meaningful.

• Find meaning and purpose in your college life by exploring your interests and passions.
• Engage in activities or clubs that align with your personal values.
• Reflect on your life goals and what truly matters to you.
• Spend time with people with the same values and purpose as yours.

Vocational wellness refers to the relationship between how you make a living and how you contribute to the world around you. It leads to a satisfying career and mindful decisions about what is best for you and how best to use your talents, knowledge, and abilities.

• Choose a major or career path that resonates with your interests and values.
• Seek internships or part-time jobs related to your field of study.
• Connect with professors or career counselors for guidance.
• Collaborate with classmates who share similar academic and career goals.
• Work on projects and seek experiences outside class for new learning and skills.

Financial wellness involves managing resources to ensure short—and long-term security and growth. It gives you the tools to manage emergencies, take advantage of opportunities, and feel confident and secure about the future.

• Create a budget to manage your college expenses.
• Make informed financial decisions, like applying for scholarships or part-time jobs.
• Set both short-term (buying textbooks) and long-term (saving for future goals) financial goals.
• Starting building your emergency fund for short and long-term expenses (for example, work to save enough for three months of expenses)
• Be aware that your peers may have different financial situations and priorities.

Environmental wellness involves respecting and connecting with your physical surroundings and your safety and comfort in the spaces you inhabit. Developing environmental wellness ensures that you consider your impact on the natural, built, and social environments and how those environments impact you.

• Learn about the social, natural, and built environments around you
• Understand how your surroundings can affect your health and well-being, such as adjusting your activities for poor air quality.
• Take actions to improve the campus environment, such as participating in clean-up initiatives or sustainability programs.
• Understand the unstable state of the earth and how your daily habits affect it.
• Showing commitment to a healthy planet

Academic wellness is not on the National Institute of Health’s list, but it’s important for you as a student! Academic wellness involves learning, collaborating with others in and out of class, demonstrating your understanding of course material, and using what you learn to create new and novel applications.

Academic wellness includes:

• Your understanding of the material
• Ability to ask for and access help
• The use of course material in new ways
• Your use of time, attention, and resources to learn
• How you connect with faculty and other students

A student with academic wellness is confident in their ability to learn, aware of their strengths and challenges, and takes advantage of the opportunities and experiences available in college.

The role of regulation and habits in wellness

Though most of us know what is good for us and what we should do (or at least what is NOT good for us and what we should avoid), it is not always easy to make choices and take action toward wellness. Both regulation (your ability to control your behavior to achieve your goals and meet standards) and habits (behavior that is routine or nearly automatic) affect your wellness.

Self-regulation

Another word for self-regulation is willpower. We have a lot of words for self-regulation! They include willpower, determination, drive, resolve, self-discipline, self-control, and delayed gratification.

Self-regulation = willpower = resisting short-term temptations to meet long-term goals.

Your ability to regulate your thoughts and behaviors is vital to learning and wellness. Self-regulation is a process that lets you monitor and control your thinking, motivation, and behaviors as you work towards your learning goals. Though we’ll discuss learning more later, learning requires that you:

• Plan your actions and set your goals
• Exercise self-control and perform whatever learning tasks fit your goals
• Monitor your progress and reflect on your performance and learning process.

Self-regulation or willpower is one factor in getting your work done. With it, you may be able to sit down and complete the work you need to do, especially if you are not very interested in the work itself.

Self-regulation takes energy to do well, and given how many distractions you have in your life, it can be very tough to do! The less energy you have, the more you feel overwhelmed, the less likely you can self-regulate. Many external factors make willpower and self-regulation difficult. These may include:

• Living arrangements (where you live)
• Demands on your time (family, work, school, social)
• Your health status (physical, mental, and emotional).

It is important to realize that you may not be able to control internal or external factors. Even so, you can learn how to manage them for your health and well-being. The first step is identifying them, and then you can try strategies to make wellness and well-being a priority.

Specific self-regulation skills

There are 4 self-regulation skills that you will want to strengthen as you pursue your degree. They will help you in classes and beyond as you build your life and progress in your career.

Goal setting: determining what you want to accomplish and what success will look like so that you can develop and implement plans to reach your goals.

Self-monitoring: keeping track of your progress to increase your awareness of your performance.

Self-talk and instruction: talking yourself through a task, including how to complete the task, identifying options, managing a situation, determining if you understand something, and encouraging yourself.

Self-reinforcement: rewarding yourself for progress through small rewards such as breaks or treats.

Like all skills, you can strengthen these through practice, reflection, and repetition. You might need to push yourself to use these in situations you encounter, but over time, they become automatic. Once they become automatic—which means you do them without reminding yourself to do them—you will notice your ability to self-regulate will become stronger.

Habits

Habits are different from self-regulation. Habits are routines that you build over time that happen with little or no active thought. For example, you likely have a habit of checking your phone. You don’t think about it. You just do it. It’s automatic.

Nearly 40% of your daily behavior can be attributed to habits, and building a habit can take as little as 18 days or up to 254 days to create.  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ejsp.674

It is tough to change a habit. One of the challenges for wellness is prevention- avoiding creating bad habits. Once created, a habit may be impossible to erase and, instead, will need to be replaced with a new habit. To prevent yourself from building a habit that will negatively affect you, you need to pay attention and use your self-regulation skills to identify and stop the behavior. Willpower can help you prevent a habit, but it likely won’t stop one you already have.

Unfortunately, most of us do not realize we have a bad habit until it is created. And once created, it is nearly impossible just to stop. You can’t undo a habit—you have to replace it.

Remember, once set, you cannot untrain a habit; you can only replace it with a more vigorous habit! You have to REWIRE your brain; willpower is not enough.

Challenges, barriers (and distractions) to wellness

In addition to your habits and ability to self-regulate, you may also encounter other challenges, barriers, and distractions that you need to manage. For example, many students I’ve worked with list challenges such as:

• Loud and active home environment
• Hours at work
• Family needs
• Social life
• Physical or mental health challenges
• Finances
• Heavy class loads
• Poor sleep and work habits

All of these challenges are tough because you might not be able to change or control the situation. What you can do, though, is seek help in managing the situation.

Identifying and balancing your responsibilities

College comes with many responsibilities- and not a lot of structure to help you get things done. You are expected to manage your workload, your time, and your health. This can be complex and requires constant evaluation of what is happening and what needs to be done first. Determining your priorities can be a significant challenge, but it is part of managing your wellness.

Look at your next week.

1. List out the things you do in a week.
2. Decide if each is a responsibility (something you need to do), or something you want to do, or something that would be nice to do.
3. Take your list of responsibilities, add the dates they must be done on or by, and then schedule your week around them.
4. When you have time, add what you want to do and would like to do.

Self-care

You’ll hear the term self-care frequently- and maybe sometimes with an edge of frustration. Self-care is portrayed as an indulgence when you watch TV and often with expensive and impractical trips or purchases. These could be self-care, but self-care is a very specific and simple (as in not-complex) idea.

Self-care is listening to what you need and taking care of it. 

For students, self-care can look like:

Notice how all of these are linked directly to a form of wellness.
Building time into your schedule for these activities will help you manage the stress of college.

Speaking of stress…

College and stress

If you aren’t stressed, you are not in college—one of my colleagues often says this about both students and faculty. It isn’t false. But does it have to be true? Let’s look at why and what causes stress.

Students in college are under more stress than ever before. Recent studies show that college students feel pulled in many directions, struggle to manage the requirements of college and the transition to adult living, and feel overwhelmed. There are many reasons for this, including:

• Finances
• Jobs (many students need to work to live)
• Social relationships
• Family relationships
• The challenge of managing your workload

Most students would be capable of college work if they did not have other stressors in their lives. Unfortunately, life is not simple or easy, and most students have jobs, relationships, and habits that make it hard to focus only on college work.

Stress is a reaction to challenges. Feeling stress can start your fight, flight, or freeze response and help your brain and body react to what is happening to you. Sometimes, though, these reactions are out of line with the actual challenge (most people are not at risk of being attacked by a bear while in a college classroom) or do not match the challenge (again, fleeing may make sense when you feel attacked by a wild animal, but not when you feel stressed about a paper you need to write).

Think about the three responses and where they do and do not fit in a college lifestyle. For example, you can’t fight a professor or assignment. Flight (running away) does not help you get ready for your sociology exam or have that difficult meeting with your advisor about your grades. Freezing does not help you get through a class presentation, nor does it enable you to think reasonably about how you are doing in your classes.

How do we feel stress? Beyond the fight, flight and freeze reactions, you likely feel the physical process linked to stress, especially as it builds. Some students first realize they are under stress when they begin to have physical symptoms like sweating, breathing hard, stomach or headaches, or clenched muscles. Other students feel it mentally, with an inability to focus, a sense of doom, or fear that they are not “college material.”

As stress becomes a constant, you might see a disruption in your eating habits (eating too much, or too little, or food that is not healthy for you), in sleep (sleeping too much or too little, or not being able to stay asleep), or in your relationships (avoiding friends and faculty and activities you enjoyed). Those around you will likely see symptoms of stress, too- including a short temper, a loss of sense of humor, and withdrawal from social interaction. These are just a few examples, but being aware of these can help you identify how YOU feel stress so that you can take steps to manage it.

Managing stress can be a challenge, especially in college. Part of college is about challenging your abilities and developing new ways of thinking, which is stressful. Add in the need to manage your time, stay aware of work that has due dates and multiple steps, and manage the tasks of daily living, and it is easy to feel overwhelmed. So what do you do?

As you can tell, coping with stress takes many forms. Some increase wellness, while others just pause stress, letting it build up while you avoid feeling it in the moment.

For more information on stress, read: https://www.apa.org/topics/stress/tips

How do you deal with stress at the moment? Sometimes you may find yourself paralyzed with stress and unable to start working- what do you do when this happens?

Take a look at these quotes from students and consider their stressors, how they manage it, and what they do.

Notice that some of these are good, or at least good, if they are short-term and allow the person to recharge and get back to work. Others are likely to lead to more stress as they make the person fall more behind on the things that they need to do, especially those that qualify as self-care.

There is no one right way to handle stress- but handling stress positively means making a decision that will lead to the outcome you want, even if it includes immediate discomfort. Sometimes, you need to take a break from what you are doing (for example, when you find your time reading for a class is not helping you understand, and a break is followed by you returning to reading with strategies in mind- more on these later!). Still, we often take a break with something that helps us avoid thinking about the stressor. The stressor is not gone, and it may be even bigger when we get back to work.

Ideas for breaks

• Talk to someone about the work you need to do and how to manage it
• Switch to a different task
• Have a snack and a large drink of water
• Take a walk or exercise
• Do something you enjoy that won’t lead to you losing track of time (hint: set an alarm)

Stress and anxiety

Where stress is a reaction to a situation or demand, anxiety is not usually linked to a specific stressor. One of the signs of anxiety is constant and excessive worry even when there is no stressor present. Stress and anxiety share the same symptoms and look alike.

Many of my students have talked to me about their constant sense of dread and fear, even when they are doing well in classes, and nothing specific is happening to cause them to feel this way. Some of it is a reaction to the many changes between high school and college and their awareness of the differences between how they think and what they feel and other people. For many people, there is no specific cause for anxiety, and seeking help from our college counseling and wellness center is an essential step to feeling better. Constant worry does not lead us to do better, making it hard to learn, complete work, connect with others, and be happy.

Resource instability

One major stressor for any person is instability- and college students may have to handle housing, food, or healthcare instability. Housing instability refers to not having a stable home to live in or return to, and food instability means not being sure of how or where food will come from in the near future. Healthcare instability means not knowing how or if you’d access care if you become ill or injured. You can’t learn when worrying about these areas of your life.

Being a scholar, pursuing a higher education for your benefit and to benefit society requires dedication, time, and energy. You need and deserve support, and reaching out on campus is the first step to ensuring you have it.

A note about mental health

Stress seems to be part of the typical college experience, and it seems like everyone feels a bit of anxiety, too. Once it starts to impact your ability to care for yourself in any area (for example, academically, physically, or emotionally), it is time to seek help. You deserve to feel good and like you can meet the challenges in front of you—and there are people on campus and in your community who can help.

Many individuals who struggle with mental illness will see the first symptoms appear in their late teen years and early 20s. To learn more about mental illness and the help available, see your college counseling center or campus doctor, and visit the National Alliance on Mental Illness https://www.nami.org/About-Mental-Illness

Your mental health is important, and you cannot learn if you are struggling with your mental health.

Resources you might find on your campus for support

• Mental and emotional: counseling center and student services
• Physical: medical and wellness center, campus doctor, basic needs center
• Academic: advising, tutoring, writing center, library

When in doubt, ask a faculty member or visit student services to ask about where to start with accessing support