By studying Personal Wellness, we can develop effective strategies to enhance personal wellness by applying physical, nutritional, and behavioral strategies to improve the quality or state of being healthy in body and mind.

Perspectives

During the heart of COVID, many universities canceled Spring Breaks in order to minimize exposure through travel. There was concern that this decision would have an adverse effect on Personal Wellness as that break is traditionally a chance for people to decompress before the end of the semester. Some schools addressed this issue by adding Wellness Days throughout the academic calendar. These days were intended to provide both a short break from typical daily activities as well as time to catch up on any work, which is itself an act of wellness. Fitchburg State University developed a campaign around Wellness Days to promote and educate about Personal Wellness and called it “Everything Is NOT Normal” to emphasize that it was okay not to be okay during a worldwide pandemic.  Many university faculty and staff are advocating to continue this practice into future semesters, recognizing that Personal Wellness is essential to quality of life.

Concepts to Consider

Personal Wellness is important for everyone – students included. Not only will you do better in school when your health is good, but you’ll be happier as a person. And the habits you develop now will likely persist for years to come. That means that what you’re doing now in terms of personal health will have a huge influence on your health throughout life and can help you avoid many serious diseases. Considerable research has demonstrated that the basic elements of good health – nutrition, exercise, not abusing substances, stress reduction – are important for preventing disease. You’ll live much longer and happier than someone without good habits.

Exercise is good for both body and mind. Indeed, physical activity is almost essential for good health and student success.Like good nutrition and exercise, adequate sleep is crucial for wellness and success. Sleep is particularly important for students because there seem to be so many time pressures – to attend class, study, maintain a social life, and perhaps work – that most college students have difficulty getting enough. Yet sleep is critical for concentrating well.

Wellness involves feeling good in every respect, in mind and spirit as well as in body. Your emotional health is just as important as your physical health -and maybe more so. If you’re unhappy much of the time, you will not do as well as in college – or life – as you can if you’re happy. You will feel more stress, and your health will suffer. Still, most of us are neither happy nor unhappy all the time. Life is constantly changing, and our emotions change with it. But sometimes we experience more negative emotions than normally, and our emotional health may suffer. Emotional balance is an essential element of wellness. Emotional balance doesn’t mean that you never experience a negative emotion, because these emotions are usually natural and normal. Emotional balance means we balance the negative with the positive, that we can be generally happy even if we’re saddened by some things. Emotional balance starts with being aware of our emotions and understanding them.

Everyone knows about stress, but not everyone knows how to control it. Once you’ve learned how to reduce it where you can and cope with unavoidable stress, you’ll be well on the road to becoming the best person you can be. We all live with occasional stress. Since college students often feel even more stress than most people, it’s important to understand it and learn ways to deal with it so that it doesn’t disrupt your life. It is normal to experience negative emotions. College students face so many demands and stressful situations that many naturally report often feeling anxious, depressed, or lonely. These emotions become problematic only when they persist and begin to affect your life in negative ways. That’s when it’s time to work on your emotional health, just as you’d work on your physical health when illness strikes.

Text Attributions

This section contains material taken from “Chapter I.8: Successful students take control of their health” and “Chapter I.9: Successful students practice mental wellness” in A Guide for Successful Students by Irene Stewart and Aaron Maisonville and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

View: “Why Self Care Isn’t Selfish”

Activity 5.7

• Given that Personal Wellness is so essential to learning and healthy living, create a list of resources and/or initiatives you wish your university provided to its student body.

Special note: We often think of service or therapy animals as a modern concept. Seeing-eye dogs, for example, became very well known after World War I when they were trained to help soldiers with vision issues returning home. The truth, however, is that we have evidence of service animals for thousands of years. Today, in the United States, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), service animals are defined as those trained to assist someone with a physical or psychological disability as laid out by the Americans with Disabilities Act. There are examples of illustrations from various parts of the world that depict people with vision impairments being led by dogs since at least the thirteenth century (see Murchison). Therapy animals are a bit more difficult to trace. These are today, according to the AVMA, animals that are trained to help with animal-assisted interventions, including therapy. We do have ancient and medieval descriptions of how animals, particularly pets, were perceived that certainly indicate their positive impacts on people’s mental health. 

Remember: humor is good Personal Wellness!

Activity Attributions

The activity contains material adapted from Heritages of Change by the same author.

Personal Wellness and Good, Necessary Trouble

Getting in “good, necessary trouble” can exact a toll. Some of the price people pay may be due to unexpected violence.  Certainly, we saw with John Lewis that he suffered for participating in the Civil Rights Movement, as did Harriet Tubman, who was attacked and hurt often in her career as a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Retaliation or counter-protests can be a real concern. It is important to consider issues of personal safety when attending protests, from self-defense to dehydration.

Protestors with disabilities may also have certain needs. The Liberty organization in the United Kingdom provides advice for marching while disabled, including wearing earplugs, being familiar with a march route, and bringing emergency medications. In 2020, Teen Vogue and Amnesty International offered advice for being an activist when you are unable to attend protests, noting the Disability March that organized online during the Women’s March of 2017.

A more common effect of feeling the need to participate in “good trouble” is mental. It can be exhausting to work for issues you care about, maybe rarely ever seeing immediate progress. Also, those affected most closely or directly by the issues are even more likely to feel stress, especially considering historically marginalized groups experience higher levels of emotional labor (Kelly, et. al., 2021) and worse health outcomes in almost every area of well-being (Leitch, et. al., 2021). Utah State University Counseling and Psychological Services has a page on their website dedicated to “Black Lives Matter. Black Mental Health Matters” on which they begin by acknowledging those in their community “suffering from the painful effects of continuing violence against Black people and the systemic racism that pervades our society.” Mass Humanities provides a “Trauma Informed Discussion Guide” (2023) for their annual events “Reading Frederick Douglass Together,” acknowledging that racism is a public health risk and listening to or reading Douglass’ speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” “forces us to reckon with the legacy of slavery and the promise of democracy” and “discussing its content and context can result [in] racial or historical traumatization and re-traumatization for participants and audience members.” What seem like relatively low-stress activities, such as a historical reenactment, can cause mental distress under the right circumstances.

On the other hand, some people have found that participating in “good trouble” is actually a benefit to mental health. Élodie C. Audet, et.al. (2022, p. 689), in their study “Better together: Family and peer support for Black young adults during the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement,” demonstrates that “engaging in political activism may act as a protective factor for certain young adults (Ballard et al., 2020) and is associated with higher levels of psychological well-being (Dwyer et al., 2019). Additionally, political activism may mitigate stress and isolation during intense periods of transition (Hope et al., 2018).” Some studies have concluded more mixed results. Parissa J. Ballard, Xinyu Ni, and Nicole Brocato (2020) note that “‘traditional’ forms of political engagement [voting, etc.] were related with better wellbeing while ‘non-traditional’ forms of political engagement [protesting, etc.] were unrelated or negatively related with wellbeing,” perhaps due to the stresses of protesting discussed above. Ballard, Ni, and Brocato found that there was a difference between politically-active Black and Latinx students in particular with the former reporting less stress and the latter reporting more symptoms of depression. Essentially, we all need to be aware of mental health and how it can affect people differently, never assuming that what we might consider uplifting is the same for everyone.

Discussion 5.7

• If you have already taken a course with a primary focus on Personal Wellness, think about what you were asked to do and what you learned. If you have not already taken a Personal Wellness course, think about the types of courses you could take.
• In what ways did or might the idea(s) or example(s) discussed above apply in such a course?
• What other ideas or examples would you add to the discussion?