34 Introduction to Health and Wellness

How do you feel about your overall health and well-being? These questions will help you determine how the chapter concepts relate to you right now. As we are introduced to new concepts and practices, it can be informative to reflect on how your understanding changes over time. Take this quick survey to figure it out, ranking questions on a scale of 1—4, 1 meaning “least like me” and 4 meaning “most like me.”

1. I can manage my emotions most of the time.
2. I can reduce stress when it is negatively affecting me.
3. I feel comfortable seeking out help when needed.
4. I get enough sleep.

You can also take this chapter’s survey anonymously online.

About This Chapter

This chapter explores the many ways your health and well-being may be impacted by the choices you make. The goal of this material is to help you do the following:

• Understand how your mindset influences your emotions.
• Identify strategies to manage your moods.
• Describe differences between stress versus anxiety and sadness versus depression.
• Understand the mind and body connection.
• Identify ways to maintain and enhance your emotional health.
• Understand mental health risks and warning signs.
• Outline steps you can take to ask for help.
• Describe actions you can take to improve your physical health.

As a first-year college student you will make many choices without parental oversight, including the way you take care of your body and mind. Some choices put you on a path to health, and other choices can lead you down a path toward illness. There is a strong connection between success in college and your ability to stay healthy.

Health is more than a strong body that doesn’t get sick. Health also includes your overall sense of well-being (mental and emotional, for example) and healthy coping strategies to manage life stressors. Good health is about making positive choices in all of these areas and avoiding destructive choices. It’s about learning to be smart, to set boundaries, to watch out for your safety, and to take care of the one body that will carry you through life. While health and wellness are often interchanged, it is important to differentiate the two concepts. Health is a state of physical, mental, and social well-being, while wellness is a process through which people become aware of and make choices toward a healthy and fulfilling life.

In this chapter you will learn the skills you need to live a healthy lifestyle for both your mind and body. The first step is to focus on who you are and how you can create your best self. This includes how to promote self-efficacy (i.e., your belief in yourself) and create strategies that you can use to improve your resiliency (i.e., your ability to recover from challenges and adapt to change) during your transition into college. Next we will discuss the mind and body connection and how we need to consider managing both as a top priority every day.

We will address identifying your feelings and mood and build a vocabulary that helps you communicate with others. Then we will move into the topic of stress versus anxiety and how to manage both. At this point, prepared with identifying and managing your emotions with strategies you can use on your own, we will discuss when and how to seek help including the steps you must take to establish your own support system. Once you have a support system, we will then discuss the importance of managing your problems in a way that holds you accountable for your actions and behaviors yet provides a framework for others to help you effectively. We will then discuss the role of social media on your overall health and well-being and provide suggestions for creating boundaries with the use of social media. Lastly, we will help you to gain a better understanding of how to maintain physical health through good nutrition, maintaining physical activity, and sleep.

Creating Your Best Self

You are in college to fulfill an educational, personal, or professional goal. But it is just as important to work on creating your best self in the process, as who you are and what you believe you can achieve are just as important as the piece of paper you will receive at graduation. The first step in this process is identifying your positive attributes, which will be the foundation of your self-confidence. The belief in your abilities is also known as your self-efficacy. One way to increase your self-efficacy is to identify your strengths and values. Think of strengths as characteristics about ourselves that make us feel good about who we are, things we are good at, and parts of our personalities that make us good friends or good members of our community. Values are the things that matter to us the most. Typically, we do the best we can to live by our values; however, sometimes we struggle. Identifying strengths and values is a great place to start when making big life transitions. Being clear on what you view as your strengths and the values that are important to you will help you with finding similar people to build your support network.

Let’s get started. First, consider your strengths. In Table 6.1, we have listed several examples of strengths. What are your strengths? What would your family say if we asked them about your strengths? What about your friends or community, would they have other examples of your strengths? Answer these questions to make a list of your own.

Next, let’s consider your values. When finding your support network, friends, new clubs or organizations to join, one way to start is to understand your values and then look for others that have similar values. Your values have been shaped largely by your family, friends and the culture you grew up in.

Many of these values may be challenged as you go through college and grow as an independent person. Understanding your current values and recognizing when they are being challenged may give you some insights into why you value what you do and what changes you may be open to. Consider the values in the table below and then list some of yours. Did you come to these through your family, your community?

Table 6.1

Throughout life, your values will often be challenged by other individuals. Someone may challenge your political views, or your religion, or your value in family. It is best to recognize your current values and then, as they are challenged, you can have a clearer understanding of the person you want to be.

Although your journey through college is just starting, you will soon have to make critical decisions as to what courses you want to take, you may have to choose a major you want to focus on, and you will be start to look for your next step, life after college. One of the most asked questions you will face on this journey is where you see yourself in the next three to five years. Use this time to draft your vision.

Your Overall Well-Being

Day-to-day, you most likely experience situations that either align with your values or go against them; you may undergo experiences that make you confident or unconfident. These situations may trigger strong emotions or lead you to react in a manner that you may later regret. During transition periods, such as the transition into college, you may be even more likely to have these experiences, particularly involving topics and people you do not know well. When these situations happen, it is best to consider your thoughts, consult available resources, and allow time to understand how to best navigate your emotions.

Understanding Your Mindset

Let’s first talk about your mindset. Have you ever heard someone refer to “seeing the glass half full” or “seeing the glass half empty?” This is another way of saying that, given a situation that could be interpreted multiple ways, some see the positives (half full) while others see the negatives (half empty). It is natural to move in and out of these frames of mind depending on the situation, your confidence level, the amount of stress you have in your life at the time, and so on. Setbacks and mistakes will always occur, and it’s okay and appropriate to feel negatively about them. With experience and practice, you will learn how to move on from these negative feelings and adapt your attitudes in order to promote success.

Let’s consider the following example:

• Negative reaction: “I forgot to complete an assignment and now I will fail the course because this is the second time I missed submitting my work on time.”

How does this feel? What emotions are you experiencing? What is your mood?

• Now let’s reframe to a more positive reaction: “Yes, I will get a zero for that assignment. However, if I work hard on the final two assignments and get at least a B on my final exam, I could improve my final grade to at least a C+.”

How does this new thought feel in your body and mind? Is it different in a good way or not so good way? What emotions are you experiencing now? How has your mood changed?

Most likely you feel differently in your body and in your mind when you consider each of these responses. When the thinking is that the course is lost, you may feel disappointed, frustrated, and uncertain regarding the future. However, in the more positive reframing of the situation, the mood may shift to one of calmness and even purpose, because there is a way forward.

A key aspect of effective and positive attitudes is the awareness and ability to take responsibility for situations in which you contributed to the outcome. In the example above, the person did recognize that they were the ones who forgot to complete the assignment. Consider similar situations you’ve been in. Do you tend to put the responsibility for a missed assignment or a bad grade on yourself or your instructor? Do you tend to blame technology, unclear instructions, or too much work? While unfair situations can certainly occur, it is very important to recognize the role we play in them, and take ownership of mistakes and any extra work we need to undertake.

The ability to reconsider situations and find positive ways forward is a critical skill in navigating not only your college experience, but throughout your life, career, and relationships. To do that effectively, you will also need to identify your feelings and emotions. Examining what you are feeling will help you to more easily navigate those emotions. By understanding your emotions and how to communicate with others about how you are feeling, you will decrease the chances of behaviors that may have negative consequences.

Expanding your emotional vocabulary (see Figure 6.2) will allow you to be more specific in identifying the feelings you experience. Identifying your emotions will help you to find a solution or coping strategy more quickly. Using a tool such as this emotion wheel enables you to identify the emotion you may be experiencing. You may think that you are “angry”; however, after you look at the emotion wheel you may realize you are hurt or disappointed. Also, by identifying your emotions at a given time, you will be able to improve your mood and the relationship between your feelings and mood. Once you have a better understanding of the relationships between your feelings and mood, you’ll be better equipped to overcome situations in which you have low moods versus when your moods are more positive.