Wellness

Today in my Positive Psychology class, we started a chapter on Wellness. In positive psychology terms, health is more than the absence or presence of illness, disorder, or physical impairment, but a complete state of mental, physical, and social well-being. First of all, let me begin by mentioning how booming a field positive psychology is becoming. It is the most popular class given at Harvard University currently and it is hard to get into because it fills up so quickly. Positive Psychology is a scientific study of what goes right in life. It's basically the opposite of Abnormal Psych, which is the scientific study of mental disorder. Pos Psy teaches ways to help people improve their lives. We talk about everything from stress reducing, to how important it is to be engaged in healthy activities (flow), and what our character strengths, abilities, and accomplishments will do for our overall, life long well-being.  Sound like a fantastic class? It truly is. And I want to share some insight.


Some examples of quick and easy activities you can do to improve your mental health:
   Three good things: reflecting on what we are grateful for, writing it down, explaining why it was good and why it happened; just recalling mood boosting activities will get you to appreciate the good things in your life - you are forcing yourself to think of the pros versus the cons on a daily basis
   You at your best: writing down a time, or many times, where you thought you were strong, determined and performing at your best; this boosts your confidence, it reminds you that you are capable of doing great things, and whenever you feel like you're a complete failure, you will remember that you have done other great things 
   Identifying signature strengths: using this website - authentichappiness.org - scroll down to where you see VIA Survey of Character Strengths and take the test. If you answer honestly, the website will generate about 10 of your own personal character strengths, starting with your strongest. It's a great insight into your personality and confirms what you use in your personality during challenging times to get by, and also you can see what strengths are low and try to improve them. 
   Gratitude letters: writing out a long, thoughtful letter thanking someone for being in your life. There are benefits to both the sender and receiver. You feel the memory of how great the person is in your life and they feel good about being that person to you. 

According to the research, performing any of these activities boost happiness, confidence, and social acceptance, and reduces chances for depression and increases life span! People who focus on the good things in their life are happier on a daily basis, because they are not focused on all the bad. Just taking a week and performing these simple tasks will improve your happiness, whether you believe it or not. Even if you think it's bogus, it STILL makes you feel good! So if you don't believe in the outcomes, at least trying it will no doubt make you feel good. 


Wellness - 
Stress occurs when we are faced with challenges in our lives, when we take on too many things at once, if we have money problems, relationship problems, etc. We need stress in our lives, it's how we build our resilience and accomplish our goals, but only if we regulate it properly, and that means being able to recover after every stressful event. In my class today we watched a professor from Harvard talk about stress. He said that 50 years ago, the onset of depression (due to stress) averaged at about 29 years of age. In present day, the onset of depression (due to stress) averages at 14 years old! It's blatantly obvious as to why. There are so many more ways to allow stress to take over our lives. Even 50 years ago, it was uncommon for women to go to college, so they were home raising a family, doing housework, cooking, and men were working to provide money. Nowadays a couple has to juggle these duties because both of them are working. The mere fact that we enter into college at such a young, undeveloped age and our goal is to build our resume, build build build and leave no time for anything else, is stressful! Yes, a filled resume is great but the means we go about to achieve it, is almost impossible. You can only multi-task so much before certain work gets shafted for others. It's a matter of quantity versus quality, so which is more important? 


College students are under a certain kind of stress because it is becoming more and more difficult to get a great job. You need a certain level of degree, a lot of experience in your field, a goal-oriented personality, dedicated to your work, and also need to have time for family, friends, a part-time job for extra money and SLEEP! Think college students are pros at multi-tasking? Well we sure try to be, but like I said before, the more things we have to take on, the more likely one area will not get as much attention. In order to improve the unavoidable need to multi-task, we need to know how to perform in a way that will benefit in the long run. 

Certain ways to go about improving our multi-tasking ability is to take time during the day to relax and free our minds of the stress. If we keep doing one thing after another with no rest, we will burn out. Taking maybe 15 minutes to sit in quiet and let the brain relax can be very healthy. And I don't mean sleeping, because when your sleeping you have no control of your mind and it is working. Take 15 mins to free yourself from cell phone/computer usage, no TV, no talking, no eating, just sitting. If you take that time, all the junk/stress that builds up in your brain will have a chance to not mean anything for 15 minutes. Eventually, after the 15 minutes you have to come back into your reality, and if that means stress than that's fine because you allowed your mind to pretend for 15 minutes that it wasn't stressed. This task is surprisingly hard, because it's almost impossible to free your mind of its stress for a whole 15 minutes. Your mind will keep thinking of all the things you have to do before the day is out, and how you cannot waste 15 minutes of doing nothing, it's like losing valuable time. But according to the research, if you don't take time for yourself to recover from stress, you lose years off your life. So, would you rather lose 15 minutes of stressful daily activity, or would you rather lose years off your life because stress does have a correlation with physical ailment. 


It is important to improve on things like time management in order to be able to perform these stress relieving, health improving techniques. Procrastination is something that gives me the most stress. Letting my obligations build up to the last minute is the opposite of stress-relief. So that's something I have to work on. Pin pointing one thing at a time to work on is useful, instead of seeing everything you need to work on at once, which might be overwhelming and useless. This is what I am learning in my Positive Psychology class, and it is not a waste of time! Your health (mental, physical, social) is the most important part of living, because without good health, you die. 


A quote to leave on: "It is possible to have an illness, yet feel very healthy." Because it's our minds that control how we feel about everything. I watched a live speech from a person who was in the process of dying and he was optimistic, full of zest, and intelligent. He did not let his physical ailment damaged his mental wellness. It was truly inspiring. I cannot relate to physical ailment since I have none, but if I ever do someday, I hope I can take what I learned from my positive psychology class to get me through it.