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How to Use Free Time to Fuel Positivity

April 29, 2019 in Be Positive

As the school year winds down (or you may have very recently finished), you may find yourself thinking about how much free time you have coming up. Of course, this can be a great thing: youlaura-pratt-536001-unsplash have some time where you’re not burdened by homework and assignments and for possibly the first time in a while, you aren’t restricted to a Monday-Friday schedule. It can also be stressful, and a lack of structure and schedule can actually increase symptoms of anxiety, especially for students on summer vacation.

Of course, this isn’t to say that you have to book summer classes or stay in an academic headspace year-round (that can be anxiety-inducing too!). charles-651959-unsplashStudies have found that leisurely activities increase mental health benefits, and the results are stronger when they provide some sort of daily structure during long breaks or stretches of time. These may even have greater effects if these leisure activities help put you in a positive mood and are meant to increase happiness.

Not everyone’s summer is the same, and with a lack of structure, things can change everyday. Here are a couple of suggestions to add some sort of schedule depending on how much time you have to yourself on a regular basis to help ease any anxiety that may occur from feeling like you have nothing yet everything to do. These shouldn’t be treated as set schedules, since summer is unpredictable, but even doing the same sort of activity around the same time a couple of times of week can help give you a sense of a routine.

book-2389229_1280If you have 5 minutes a day…
You can fill out a gratitude prompt or take the time to do some brief meditation and deep breathing. We’ve talked about both before if you need an app or any other references.

If you have an hour a day…travel-1962318_1280
You can take the time to do some sort of physical activity. It could be something like going to a class at the gym or your local rec center, or even putting up a cycle of Youtube videos about yoga, lifting dumbbells, or whatever you have on hand. If you can’t or don’t want to be super active, you can also use this time to go for a walk outside.

donut-2916292_1920If you have the whole day…
You can do everything listed above! If you’re able to, however, you can block out the same time every day to read a book, block out another chunk of time later that to explore a new, relaxing hobby (think knitting or baking), and you can even schedule time to dedicate to watching videos online. If you live in a city or an area with a lot of places to explore, you can dedicate a couple of hours a day by going somewhere new or trying a new coffee shop.

Do you have any plans for the summer? How do you feel about giving yourself some sort of schedule over the summer? Do you notice your mood or mental health changing during long breaks?

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An App to Consider: Happify

April 26, 2019 in LINKS

We recently talked about apps that incorporate stretching of both the mental and physical variety. While both have shown benefits towards mental health and well-being, this isn’t their primary focus.chemistry-2389151_1280

This is where Happify comes in. There are a ton of apps available that do center around mental health and well-being (and we’ve definitely talked about a few of them before), Happify is a collaborative approach. The app was designed by scientists, researchers, healthcare clinicians, and digital and gaming experts to make something beneficial, evidence-based, and enjoyable.

joystick-2389216_1280Here’s how it works: you complete a few activities each week, and every couple of weeks, you answer a couple of questions to see how your “overall happiness,” “positive emotion,” and “life satisfaction” stand (they’re all scored out of 100). The researchers recommend that users complete eight activities a week, which include things like games to “conquer negative thoughtanalytics-3268935_1920s” and gratitude prompts. By doing these, your happiness scores should improve with time, and this is something that you can track on the app too.

If you want to learn more about the science and efficiency of the app, there have a few papers on their site that have been published based on research at the University of Pennsylvania, Vassar College, and Washington University in St. Louis.

Happify is free and available on both the App Store and Google Play, but if you want to unlock all the features, there is a subscription that you can get based on a monthly, 6-month, and yearly basis.

Do you use any well-being apps or anything to monitor your mental health? Do you think these would be useful?

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How Does Social Media Affect the Adolescent Brain?

April 25, 2019 in Social Media Guide

The short answer? There are a lot of ways that using technology and specifically social media affects your brain. After all, the brain is always working and responding to everything, with social media being no exception.

emoji-2762568_1280The adolescent brain is specifically known for its plasticity, that is, it changes, responds, and adapts a lot quicker to its environment.  As researchers conduct more studies on the adolescent brain and how fast it reacts and adapts to the things happening to and occurring around the adolescent, they’ve theorized that this plasticity may be part of the significant increase of mental illnesses appearing during adolescence, including depression, anxiety, and eating disorders. The limbic system, or the part of the brain that processes rewards and emotion, goes through huge changes pretty early in puberty. The prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that communicates with the limbic system and helps with decision making) develops much later however, and because of this, adolescents are much more likely to follow their emotions and immediately respond to them. Think of it as being more likely to “listen to your heart and not your head.”

maria-teneva-1163104-unsplashAnd of course, social media has recently become a part of that research too. There’s been a lot of focus on the limbic system and how adolescents respond to the notifications and responses they get on social media posts. Whenever they see a notification pop up on their phone about someone “liking” their post on any kind of site, this part of the brain lights up, and according to the study, gives the same response if they see a person that they love or when they win money. Because of this pleasure and positive feeling, adolescents are more likely to want to use social media more in order to get the same response.

Social media sites are also aware of this addictive response too. Another way that social media affects the adolescent brain is the way that the brain abstract-1837429_1280responds to seeking content. Adolescents are likely to get excited about seeing posts that make them happy, are popular, or are specifically related to their interests. While they can seek that content themselves by searching it or follow certain tags or accounts that include said content, it may not always show up for them. That’s why social media sites like Instagram have endless feeds, and there’s no such thing as reaching the “end” of a slot-machine-2304135_1920page. It’s like a slot machine: you keep scrolling and scrolling because you never know if you’re going to see something you like, and when you do, you get excited. So what do you do? Keep scrolling until that happens again.

Obviously, adolescents aren’t the only ones with a limbic system in their brain and this affects anyone, even adults. But because adolescents get excited much quicker because of how early the limbic system develops, social media is a way for them to get that immediate reward, especially because it’s something that they can use at their fingertips. That feeling isn’t always going to be there though, and a negative reaction can occur, and these can be heightened for adolescents who experience symptoms of mental illness.

Social media is a tricky game, and can mess with our emotions. It can be difficult to avoid this or even remember this because it’s something that we’re constantly using, but it can help to be aware that it shouldn’t control how we feel.

Do you use social media as a coping mechanism? Do you find yourself endlessly scrolling? How do you feel when you get notifications, or when you check your phone and you don’t have any?

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Creative Arts Therapy Feature: Poetry Therapy

April 24, 2019 in Educate Yourself

Do you enjoy the arts? Have you ever wanted to see how getting creative can help you mentally? This feature is just one in a series of entries exploring the different types of creative arts therapy. You can learn more about other outlets here!

raphael-schaller-88040-unsplashSometimes it can be hard to discuss how you are feeling out loud. There can be a sense of pressure to try to find the exact words to fully describe how you’re feeling and the worry your words won’t come out how you want them to, leading the other person to misunderstand how you are feeling. One way to express your emotions without having to talk about them is to write about them in a poem.

Poetry therapy is a form of expressive arts therapy that uses poems, narratives and other spoken or written media to promote well-being and healing. Therapists might use existing literature or encourage those in therapy to create their own literary works as part of treatment. The goal of a poetry therapist is to offer a safe, nonjudgement environment for people to explore written expression and their associated emotional responses.

thought-catalog-470876-unsplashThe idea that words can heal dates back to 4000 BCE when Egyptians used to write words on papyrus, dissolve them in liquid and give them to those who were ill as treatment. In the mid-1700s, The Pennsylvania Hospital began using reading and writing as supplementary treatments for those with emotional and mental distress. In the early 1800s, poetry was first established as a form of treatment due to Dr. Benjamin Rush. Eli Griefer, a poet and a pharmacist, started “poem therapy” groups in 1928 at two hospitals with the help of Dr. Jack L. Leedy and Dr. Sam Spector. Dr, Leedy would then go on to start the Association of Poetry Therapy (APT) in 1969. This led to all of the leading figures in the poetry therapy field gathering to write guidelines for certification and training leading to the creation of the National Association for Poetry Therapy (NAPT) in 1980.

Poetry therapy works by

  • Providing an outlet for expressing emotions that might be difficult to express
  • Helping therapists gain a greater insight about their client
  • Promoting self-exploration and reflection
  • Validating emotions and experiences when done in a group setting

tom-rogerson-516368-unsplashIn a therapy session, the poetry therapist might select material to read from. They are free to choose any poem as long as it has poetic value. Additionally, it must be concise, address universal emotions and experiences, offer a degree of hope and contain plain language. Some techniques used in a poetry therapy session are based on the 3 Components Model by Nicholas Mazza.

  1. Receptive/Perspective Component: In this component, a poem is read aloud by the therapist or a person in therapy. Participants are told to make non-verbal or verbal reactions to the poem while it is being read. The therapist will note the reactions and discuss certain reactions when the poem is done.
  2. Expressive/Creative Component: For this component, creative writing is used for assessment and treatment. Therapists might ask their clients to select a line from a poem that touched them and have them create a poem based on this line. Or they might give them a single word, topic or sentence and ask the person to write something in response. The process of writing is supposed to be cathartic, giving one a voice and the ability to free blocked emotions.
  3. Symbolic/Ceremonial Component: This component uses metaphors, storytelling and rituals as tools for effecting change. Metaphors are used to explain emotions and experiences in precise, confound ways. Rituals are used to help those that have experienced a loss address their feelings about the event.

Research suggests that poetry therapy creates and communicates meaning. Additionally, poetry therapy might help facilitate internal connection with the self and external connection with heart-care-1040250_1280others. This helps the participant develop a greater awareness of self and others, which aids in identity building. Furthermore, therapies involving writing tasks have been linked to improvements in well-being and health. Writing tasks help a participant with self-regulation, re-framing and dealing more effectively with negative emotions.

Have you ever written or read poetry for yourself? Do you have any recommendations? What are your favorite poems?

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Embracing Failure

April 23, 2019 in Educate Yourself

ian-kim-623880-unsplash“If you’re not failing, it probably means you’re not taking enough risks.”

Those are the words of Peter Forkner, director of the counseling center at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, at a recent event in which Bentley, staff, faculty, and alumni recount their stories of failure and lessons learned from them. Bentley University is one of many US colleges making the move to ease students’ anxieties around failure and teaching them to cope with it.

This move comes from an underlying effort in schools to deal with the climbing rates of depression and stress that has struck younger generations. Campuses across the nation have noticed the recent struggle among students in finding resilience amidst adversity. Professors encounter students overwhelmed with anxiety after receiving bad grades, and counselors are experiencing a surge in demand.

In response, schools have been striving to normalize failure and to grow from them. Stanford University holds an annual event called “Stanford, I screwed up!” Colorado State University encourages students to take a pledge to “fail forward” – that is, embrace failure and persist through it. Cornell College in Iowa also tells their faculty to not change students’ grades out of sympathy. The school sends the message that one bad grade is not the end of the world, and in fact, failure is often needed in order to learn valuable lessons in life.

parker-gibbons-755162-unsplashIn 2018, a survey from the American College Health Association showed that 22% of college students were diagnosed with anxiety and treated by a professional within the past year, and 17% were diagnosed and treated for depression in the past year, up from 10% for both conditions a decade ago.

Why the rise?

Some say that today, there are more stressors in society that this generation must face. Some blame social media, some blame sheltered parenting christian-erfurt-1131100-unsplashthat prevent children from adapting to difficult situations, and some blame the growing pressure to succeed that makes even small failures seem catastrophic. Yet, there is still stigma surrounding this issue – others voice that today’s younger generation are fragile and too sensitive. To counter this view, mental health advocates state that the pressures faced by students today are very different from those in the past. The landscape is more challenging now, and campuses can only respond with resources and support to help students get through these tough times.

As campus climates are changing, it will only be a matter of time before discussing experiences of failure become the norm. Bentley University is on its way there, with a “Failure Friday” series in which someone talks about a failure they experienced every week on social media. In this way, as failures are portrayed as a part of everyday life, it may be easier to pick ourselves up and grow from them when they happen. After all, until we fail, we haven’t taken enough risks.

Have you failed before? What was that like for you, and what lessons did you learn from your experience? What advice would you give to someone who is struggling with a failure? Share your thoughts and experiences below!

This SOVA blog post was based off an article from the Associated Press in the New York Post, “Failure is an option: Colleges try to ease student fear and anxiety.” To access the original post, check it out here.

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A Walk in the Park

April 22, 2019 in Be Positive

You may have noticed the abundance of people outside as the weather starts getting warmer and days get longer. There’s just something so refreshing about being able to walk outside for the first time without layers of clothing on and having the warm sun hitting your skin.

katerina-kerdi-632145-unsplashThe summertime weather and sunshine having a positive effect on your mood isn’t new information. Being outside has been proven to decrease stress and calm your heart rate. If you have access to any park or a place with a lot of green space, though, you may experience an even bigger increase in your mood. Being exposed to green space as a child has also been associated with a lower risk of psychiatric disorders from adolescence into adulthood. Parks in cities have specifically shown improvements in well-being even after a short visit, and just 20 minutes predicted high improvement in life satisfaction.

The best part about these studies is that it can mean doing anything in green spaces and parks, whether it be taking a walk, reading on a bench, orben-mater-1476256-unsplash talking with a friend on the swings. No matter what you do, no matter how much or as little intensive, simply being around nature and green space (especially in a city and more industrial environment) can make the biggest difference.

As final projects and assignments build and feel daunting as the school year begins to come to a close, even the smallest amount of time outside can make a big difference. If you’re able to take twenty minutes one day when you’re particularly stressed, you could put your earbuds in, play something light, and walk around a beaten path surrounded by trees. You may find yourself breathing a little easier and feeling more refreshed to tackle that assignment (or several).

Do you live near a park? Are there any green spaces around you that you have, or would want to, walk around in for stress relief? What are your favorite activities to do outside?

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A Good Stretch

April 19, 2019 in LINKS

Stretching your body is a good thing. It’s highly recommended, especially if you’re active. Even if you aren’t, there are still health benefits to even the slightest movements with the body, especially mentally. While stretching is often something that experts insist on doing before exercising to prevent injury, you can try adapting that for your own lifestyle, such as stretching in the morning to help wake up and improve your mood before starting the day.

There are obviously a lot of ways to stretch and move your body, but if you want some guidance, we’ve included a couple of apps below that you can use as a reference or as a coach to instruct yoga-297527_1280you:

While you can’t do so literally, you can also stretch your mind as well. Mental illness can affect memory, especially working memory, and depressive thoughts can disrupt your ability to remember information as you’re learning it. Although it’s not a cure, taking some time out of your day to stretch your mind and do a couple of rounds of brain games can help improve your overall memory, and because they involve solving a problem, may even be a good source for relaxing and stress relief.

idea-305335_1280Just like the physical stretching, here are a few options for apps that have games that require a little bit of problem solving and thinking:

Do you incorporate either mental or physical stretching in your routine now? Have you ever tried playing brain games or anything like pilates or stretching to help relax? Let us know if you have any recommendations!

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#tbt: How Did Teens Use Social Media in 2007?

April 18, 2019 in Social Media Guide

While the lasting power of things on the Internet is permanent, the significance and popularity of some things are fickle. Even if Facebook is still up and running, notes and middle school achievement-3634485_1280photos buried somewhere deep down your feed, you probably don’t use it anymore – what was once one of the most popular website for teens is now only used by 51% of them, with only 10% saying they use it the most often. MySpace is pretty much nonexistent (as well as all the music on the website – one of the main features of the social network, and Tumblr has had a significant decline in users in recent years.

Social media sites aren’t the only things that are fickle on the Internet: the content posted on them are as well. There can be a million posts about the Ice Bucket Challenge one week, and not a single mention of it the next. The topics people talk about online are also changing, whether it be a movement, celebrity, or popular television show.

With that being said, how did teens use social media twelve years ago? 2007 was a different time: Snapchat and Instagram didn’t exist, and Facebook was primarily used by college students and high schoolers, not a single advertisement in sight. Vlogging wasn’t really a thing, and Youtube was there to provide meme-y videos and illegal uploads of TV shows split into three parts.

2007 was really the first time that teens were not just taking in media on social media, but were actually participating and creating their own content for it. These included blog posts and uploading creations like artwork and music. Adolescents who used social media were more likely to be girls in their late teens, compared to now where just about every teenager is on social media. Another major difference was that researchers had found that teenagers who were using social media and going online spent just as much time away from the screens too.

ipod-touch-2269621_1920The first iPhone also came out in 2007 – while this wasn’t the first smartphone, it started the idea that anyone can use the device in the palm of their hand to access anything they wanted, anywhere, with or without WiFi. Those that didn’t have iPhones may have had iPod touches, which still made the Internet that much easier to access.

There’s little information and even less studies done that talk about the effect of social media on adolescent mental health. This may be because social media was not as widespread, accessible anywhere, and exhaustive at the time, but it may also be because the dialogue surrounding mental health was different, especially when it came to young people.

There were distinct gender differences in how teenagers in the early 2000s talked about the issues they were going through (girls were more likely to tell their friends and boys their parents), but overall, neither were likely to seek treatment because of high stigma. Additionally, nearly half of 8th graders surveyed talked about mental illness as “something being wrong in the mind” and often had a negative view or interpretation of what it meant to be as a person with a mental illness. All of these could have affected how much teenagers disclosed online to the few platforms they had access to depending on what sites they used and how much they could control their privacy settings.

A lot can change in a year for social media, and a lot has changed in 12. Nowadays, people talk about anything and everything online, can connect accounts across social media platform, and have most likely talked to everyone they know in real life over some sort of social media. This can have its positives and negatives when it comes to talking about mental health – it can normalize it or you might be afraid of being judged by even just one person – but at the very least, the discussion around it and social media as a whole has changed.

What stood out to you? Do you notice any similarities about how technology was used in 2007 and today? How do you think social media may change in the next 1, 5, or even 12 years?

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Loneliness in Adolescents

April 16, 2019 in Educate Yourself

When was the last time you felt lonely? What about left out?

scott-webb-270034-unsplashA national study published this year showed that 39% of high school seniors said they often feel lonely in 2017, an increase from 26% in 2012. 38% of high school seniors also reported often feeling left out in 2017 compared to 30% in 2012. According to a national study from the health insurer Cigna in 2018, young adults between the ages of 19 to 23 are the loneliest.

The same study from this year shows how our activities have changed too. From the 1970s to 2017, the percent of 12th graders who met with their friends almost every day dropped from 52% to 28%. To be exact, they got together 68 fewer times per year (that’s 1 or 2 fewer times per week). They also went on dates 32 fewer times a year than in the 1990s. High school seniors spend less time on paid work and the same amount of time (or less) on homework and extracurricular activities than they did in the 1980s and 1990s, so having more work may not be a huge factor for young Americans’ increasing social isolation.

What’s wrong with feeling lonely? Feeling lonely is different from being alone – it is an intense, uncomfortable emotion that makes you feel isolated and as if no one understands you or what you are going through. While not a mental illness, it could be related to anxiety and depression. It also has the same impact on death rates as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

darion-queen-1334795-unsplashHow do we explain this trend in loneliness? Some say technology use has a hand in this in two ways. First, as social media takes the lead in younger generations, it gives a sense of closeness and connectedness, which can replace face-to-face contact and ironically makes us increasingly alone. Second, social media can represent all the things we could be doing but are not, thus feeding our FOMO.

However, social media alone has not been found to be a predictor of loneliness, especially if one makes the effort to follow up with in-person contact. Rather, it’s argued that when technology is used to the extent that it replaces relationships is when it becomes problematic.

It’s a worrisome sign when some Americans prefer their smartphone and gaming more than socializing with friends. Through these virtual relationships, young people may start to hold unrealistic expectations of achievement and accomplishment, as other social media users post only the very best and happiest part of their lives which becomes interpreted as their norm. This replaces taking the time to relax and be who they are. A conscious effort needs to be made to save us from loneliness. Psychologists and other experts in the field have a few easy tips to ease the loneliness in our day-to-day life:

  • Eat healthfully
  • Get 7-8 hours of sleep
  • Exercise regularly
  • Maximize your human contact in a day
  • Join groups based on shared interest (a religious organization, book club, therapy, classes, pets, volunteering, fitness centers, meet-ups, and others)
  • Monitor alcohol and drug use

Do you feel lonely or left out, or know anyone who does? What are some tips that you can share to ease these feelings? Share your thoughts and experiences below!

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What is Somatization?

April 12, 2019 in LINKS

Have you ever experienced an upset stomach, a tight chest, clammy hands, or any other physical reaction when you’re stressed or depressed? The mind and body have an incredibly strong connection, and when you’re feeling an overwhelming amount of emotion, your brain can process it as being in danger even if the situation isn’t life-threatening, and initiates the fight-flight-freeze response.

brain-2029391_1280This is called somatization, or the way your body reacts to what it thinks is danger, even though nothing seems to be physically wrong with you. The video below, produced by the Kelty Mental Health Resource Center in British Columbia, Canada, explains this in more detail. Reading about the science behind it can be a little overwhelming, including how the nervous system is divided into the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system (it can feel a little bit like biology class), but the 7 minute video breaks it down, with cute animations and animals to keep you entertained.

The video shows different situations where people can experience somatization: pressure from an upcoming test or game and the feeling of rejection from people you care about. While these aren’t places where things are necessarily life-threatening, they can have an intense effect on you, especially if these are things that cause you stress or are particularly emotional about. This intensity is what makes your brain see this situations as dangerous to you, and that’s how your body reacts.

Learn more below!

Do you experience physical reactions when you’re feeling upset or depressed? What kinds are they? What do you do to help them, if anything?

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