For the mental health intervention. We had talked about how the student lifestyle is such that it's extremely risky for mental health and mental wellness. Things like sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, alcohol and other substance abuse, chronic stress, financial strain, feelings of isolation, separation from one's family and primary social support network and also certain types of thinking, pessimistic styles of thinking can all contribute to these observed spikes and depression and anxiety and stress that we see in college and in graduate school. So for the mental health portion, students again shows mental health goals, mental wellness goals. They did things like scheduling mindfulness, doing yoga or meditation, writing in gratitude journals, engaging in prayer and so a lot of research showing that participation in spirituality is a known protector for mental wellness. Pleasurable events scheduling, going out and having fun, getting together with friends, engaging in something that you enjoy. I'm trying to remember what mine was this first semester. They might've been progressive muscle relaxation or scheduled breaks, but something that you're really taking the time to attend to your mental wellness or trying to reduce stress or something like that. Can you think of one that you would ideally like to finish out the rest of the academic year doing? I've been trying my best to get as much sleep as possible. I've discovered that my mental well-being is very dependent on the amount of sleep and the amount of just rest and even alone time. Not necessarily resting, but just a time to decompress a little bit and so I very much been allowing myself more to be all right, not spending all of my time in social situations and trying to take a little more time just to rest and decompress after a long day, even if it means pushing my bedtime back by an hour or two, just decompress and allow myself to step back from this crazy world that we live in. I'm glad to hear that. Good. I think for me it also has a lot to do with personal recovery. I think that a lot of the work that I'm very privileged to be able to do on campus has a lot to do with sort of activism and structural change and so all of those things go towards helping the mental health as students in the future, especially students who are from marginalized communities. But what's not talked about often is what tool that takes on your personal health and how much personal processing and decompressing and working through things, whether it's with mental health professional or even just on your own or through different forms of community being able to develop that resilience and so when I'm thinking about how this can be applied to marginalized communities and people who are doing really incredible work to make the world and were just an equitable place. A lot of that is tailoring these goals to making sure that you're processing everything that you're doing and making sure that you're recovering from the labor that you're performing on this daily basis against various structures of inequality. The work is important, but it only goes so far as the people who are doing it. Exactly. Yeah, and it's also relates to what we were saying just a few minutes ago about things being put on the back-burner. When you've got this and this and you're super busy taking care of everyone else, sometimes to the detriment of your own well-being. It is incredibly important work, but you also need to make sure to protect yourself. Because if you start to suffer, then your work can't go on anymore. So it's critically important to attend to your own well-being while you're doing all these wonderful things for others. There was a great article that was released recently in Harper's Bazaar that was entitled, I think the revolution for the black women is rest and so really thinking about how are we resting? How are we resting ourselves? Excellent, great points. So what do you think we found? Beautiful. Beautiful in that there wasn't a change? Yes. So I was expecting that this would be very helpful and reduce depression and reduce anxious days and what we saw was that there was no change, there was no statistical change and in fact, it almost looks like a little bit of a trend toward increase. So that's what's disappointing. Contrary to hypothesis, all of this wellness, all these initiatives to attend to one's physical well-being and to specifically focus on one mental wellness behaviors, did not result in a clinically or statistically observable improvement. So that was disappointing. But the incidence of depressed mood and the incidence of anxiety did not increase. Exactly. Why is this important? Because of the observed research, the knowledge base that shows upon matriculation and competitive graduate program and college, that there's typically a very radical increase in the incidence of depression and anxiety and stress and suicidality and many variety of mental health challenges that occur in these pressure cookers. So when looked at from that lens that there was not an increase in depression, anxiety, and stress. Maybe we can feel good about this. I don't know, it's premature, but potentially, that's a conclusion here. I think experientially and I don't know what your experience has been [inaudible] I think the issue too is that it tends to snowball. So if you don't get good sleep one week, then the next week is progressively more difficult and then maybe something happens the next week and so on and so forth. So the way I feel in September versus the way I feel in November and December drastically changes because there's so much going on during that time. Even outside of a university setting, it often feels like a free train. Once you start, you can't really stop and if you slip a little bit, it's hard to get back to the place that you were. So looking at a result like this, where it seems like an analogy, there might be that people aren't slipping as often, which seems like a great outcome to me. I agree. Now the student feedback in their papers talking about it, It's been a stressful semester. One thing to consider is the beginning of the semester announced that exam week and people are having to do all their final projects. But I would have undergone a lot more stress the semester if I hadn't been attending to my health. So people felt, at least from a subjective viewpoint, from their overall observations, not just what they're writing down in a questionnaire, but here's what their experience was. It's still stressful, but I know it would've been a lot more stressful if I hadn't been attending to my well-being in this way. Again, just echoing this in paper after paper, it would have been more stressful. It would have been more stressful and this highlighting really with the overall goal was that I was actually instructed, almost prescribed to buy and my grades depended on my taking this time for myself. Suddenly that gave me license to take time for myself, which was the overall idea.
