Many people in higher education expressed concerns about mental health and burn out right after the pandemic and at times it felt the topic was discussed everywhere. Many months later I am not sure things have changed and I am not an expert in this topic so I decided to learn more about this. I am fascinated by how much information I found and I want to share the basics. I hope the week before the semester starts is a good time to reflect on all this.
According to the American Psychological Association, stress has an impact on the respiratory, cardiovascular, endocrine, gastrointestinal, reproductive and all the other systems of the body. This resource from the Mayo clinic explains that stress not only has a physical effect on the entire body, it also affects your thoughts, feelings, moods, and behavior. This might affect your ability to make decisions, remember things or how you focus on your work. Another thing to consider, people cope with stress in different ways depending on their resources, beliefs and resilience. How we think and act is influenced by our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. Two people can have similar stressful situations, but it can add more pressure to a vulnerable person than to someone with a strong social network. And the amount of stress matters; more stress can bring more serious symptoms. Having daily obnoxious situations such as traffic jams can produce acute stress, but experiencing traumatic situations can produce chronic stress. Some diseases can be directly linked to the amount of stress someone experiences, especially if that person has not dealt with stress.
Here is the 2023 NAE survey showing high rates of depression, anxiety and stress among faculty, staff and students. The problem with this picture is that if we want to help students improve their mental help we need to help faculty and staff too. Faculty might be supporting students that have mental health issues, even if they are going through similar challenges. Here are some tips to build emotional well-being in your classroom, such as “building moments of excitement, social interaction, and sustainability into your fall courses”. If you want to get your students engaged, there are different strategies you can use for your class. Here are some thoughts to make your class more engaging, but if you teach at UM-Dearborn you are welcome to meet with the Hub instructional designers to tailor an activity for your class.
How do you manage stress? Here are some recommendations:
- Take care of yourself. Getting enough rest, exercising and healthy eating habits are at the top of the list of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIH), and these will also improve your physical health. Maybe it is a good idea to visit your doctor for a checkup. I know many people that when they get busy they refuse to take care of themselves and they almost see it as a sign of success.
- Build your social network. Many of the resources I found explain the benefits of having support networks. I keep thinking how some of my professors seemed content being isolated and they often talked about this as something desirable for professionals. As someone who has lived in different countries, I have seen how in some places having a social network could be more valuable than in others. Consider that social integration and support can improve someone’s health, but the quality of the relationships are important too. In your classroom, building relationships with students is essential for the success of your students. There are few individuals who can thrive in isolation.
- Meditation is another way to improve mental health and manage stress and it might be helpful even if you only practice it for 5 or 10 minutes every day. You can read more about the benefits of mindfulness meditation here and how to practice it. Keep in mind that being consistent is more effective than having long sessions once a week or once a month. Here are some steps to begin practicing meditation. Understanding your emotions can definitely help you communicate more efficiently with students, promote a positive learning environment in your classroom or to manage difficult students. Meditation might reduce stress, depression and anxiety as well as lower blood pressure, increase attention, and fight memory loss.
A surprising thing I found was that practicing gratitude and volunteering might improve your mental health. I found research that describes how gratitude is closely associated with many elements of well-being and it may reduce stress. Gratitude is linked to sleep duration and quality of sleep (maybe the thoughts we have right before falling asleep are very important). Gratitude is relevant for building positive social relationships, something mentioned above that has an effect on mental health. On the other hand, there is research on the effects that volunteering has on the volunteer relevant for mental health that might be worth reading.
After reading all this information I keep thinking, it would be great to pass some of these ideas to your students. Anybody who teaches should remember that learning is a process that involves cognition and emotions. Emotions play a role in how students learn and cannot be separated from the learning process. “Emotions affect what is learned and what is retained”. In general, building a positive learning environment in your classes and setting a positive tone help students in many more ways than I realized.
If you want to keep reading about mental health, check other Hub’s mental health blog posts.
Image by Michael Bußmann from Pixabay
Resources:
UM Mental and Emotional Health
Bower, G. H. (2014). How might emotions affect learning?. In The handbook of emotion and memory (pp. 3-31). Psychology Press.
Taylor, S. E. (2011). Social support: A review. In H.S. Friedman (Ed), The Oxford handbook of health psychology, 1, pp. 189-214. Oxford University Press.
Wolfe, P. (2011). The role of meaning and emotion in learning. In S. Johnson & K. Taylor (Eds), The neuroscience of adult learning, pp. 35-41. Wiley Interscience.