6 Tips for Student Emotional Wellbeing
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Feeling down, anxious, or stressed out? These tips for emotional wellbeing can help. If you are able to change your mindset in small ways, larger changes in your outlook will begin to take shape. Here are some places to start.
1. Pair a chore with a favorite activity. When Katy Milkman started graduate school, her exercise routine went out the window, as all she wanted at the end of a long day of classes was to watch Harry Potter. What got her back to regular workouts was something she calls “temptation bundling.” She resolved to indulge in her love of wizard-lit only while at the gym by listening to audiobooks with earbuds. Milkman, now a professor at the Wharton School of Business who specializes in human decision-making, says that when it comes to making a behavioral change, the trick is to pair the thing you dread with something you love.
2. Take a minute today to consider your life’s purpose. Having a purpose in life seems to have a more powerful impact on decreasing a person’s risk of premature death than exercising regularly, quitting smoking or curbing your alcohol intake, research suggests. Maybe you find greatest meaning in guarding the environment, raising good children, making music or touching lives through your volunteer work. It doesn’t seem to matter what your life’s purpose is, a growing body of research suggests. What matters is that you feel you have one.
3. Prepare to fail. It’s part of succeeding. If you’re trying to get a new routine to stick — whether it’s getting more exercise, eating less sugar or learning to play the ukulele — scholars who study human behavior say the key is to accept failure as a part of the process. Expect that at some point you will mess up. And when that happens, don’t give in to the “what-the-heck” effect — the feeling that since you’ve missed one session, your whole plan is a bust. Just get back to taking steps toward your goal, and don’t beat yourself up.
4. Redefine exercise: move a little bit, often. We all know movement is incredibly relevant to emotional wellbeing. One student learned to love exercise when she realized every little bit counts. “I reframed what I thought of as exercise,” she says. Vacuuming with gusto, taking the stairs, doing a YouTube dance or yoga video — these little bursts of movement throughout the day add up over time, like pennies in a piggy bank.
5. Feeling extra angry? Get checked out for depression. Many patients — and doctors — associate depression with feelings of hopelessness, sadness and lack of motivation. But a growing number of psychiatrists say depression is also behind some hypercritical tendencies and outbursts of anger. The good news: This sort of irritability is responsive to counseling and medication.
6. Find ways to cultivate joy. Feeling stressed? Just eight techniques — a “buffet of life skills” — can make a significant improvement in well-being, say scientists who taught the techniques to caregivers of people with dementia. After learning techniques such as how to keep a gratitude journal, for example, and how to quickly reframe negative experiences in a positive light — these family caregivers reported impressive decreases in both stress and anxiety.
Allison Green
Boston Tutoring Services
The 3rd item referring to the realization about failing as part of the process of succeeding can be expanded if we take a broader look at development in the classroom. For example, the process of change in mental development occurring among a collective of students is overlooked to the extent that it is not seen as a type of “losing one’s mind”. Indeed, Psychologists and Psychiatrists have it wrong when they address a person thinking they have or are losing their mind. Hence, I say it is necessary for a person to lose their (former) mind in order to find a new one. As students progress, there is a collectively individualized loss of one’s mind that is easily recognized but not acknowledged. This may occur sequentially, episodically, or by a “punctuation”. The old adage of “Know Thy-Self” should be augmented with the phrase “Lose thy Mind, because it is necessary to gain a new one.”