Lifestyles for Learning

The Essential Guide for College Students and the People Who Love Them

Susan Crowther

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781634508582
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

College is risky business. Life is hurled into never-before imagined freedom, independence, and choice. For many students, college brings challenges and changes in nearly every area of life—physical, physiological, emotional, social, residential, financial, spiritual, and sexual. College may well be the most volatile time in a person's life. Attending college is bad for your health. Statistically, young adults face more depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and drug addiction than in any other time in their lives. Schizophrenia emerges most often during this time. Suicide rate is highest between 16–21 years. A college student's lifestyle is a potential threat to their successful academic performance. The good news is that, with the right tools, students can create a college experience that is healthy, successful, and fits their own unique selves. Lifestyles for Learning explores the direct relationship between academic performance and key lifestyle factors: food, sleep, stress, movement, creativity, connection, addiction, and giving. It further discusses how lifestyle factors are challenged by learning disabilities and other co-occurring diagnoses, such as ADHD and behavioral disorders. Lifestyles for Learning offers guidance to prepare every college student for success. Peppered with humorous anecdotes and warm-hearted wisdom, this is important reading for students entering college, as well as for parents, educators, counselors, doctors, psychologists, and educational consultants. It is also designed for supplemental reading in college and high school courses.

PSYCHONUTRIENT FACTORS AFFECTING ACADEMIC SUCCESS

An old Cherokee told his grandson: “My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, jealousy, greed, resentment, inferiority, lies and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, humility, kindness, empathy and truth.”

The boy thought about it, and asked: “Grandfather, which wolf wins?”

The old man quietly replied: “The one you feed.”

—Traditional Cherokee Folklore

STRESS

“Stress may be the number one health problem in America today. And it is getting worse. Depression, hypertension, Type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular and gastrointestinal distress have all been directly linked to excessive stress. Wellness programs that target stress reduction are far more likely to impact other high-risk behaviors, resulting in cumulative cost savings. To ignore stress in the workplace is to ignore millions of dollars paid in medical and disability claims and in lost production.”

—HeartMath Institute

“With fifty trillion cells in your body, the human body is the equivalent of a skin-covered petri dish. Moving your body from one environment to another alters the composition of the ‘culture medium,’ the blood. The chemistry of the body’s culture medium determines the nature of the cell’s environment within you. The blood’s chemistry is largely impacted by the chemicals emitted from your brain. Brain chemistry adjusts the composition of the blood based upon your perceptions of life. So this means that your perception of any given thing, at any given moment, can influence the brain chemistry, which, in turn, affects the environment where your cells reside and controls their rate. In other words, your thoughts and perceptions have a direct and overwhelmingly significant effect on cells.”

—Bruce Lipton, PhD

You are how you perceive.

We can live a few weeks without food, a week or two without sleep, maybe a few days without water, but only a few minutes without breath. Healthy breathing is crucial to a healthy lifestyle. Breathing is a constant supply of energy flowing in and filtering out. Your job as a college student is to regulate what comes in and what comes out. This applies to your thoughts, especially. We may manage our lifestyle, but if we cannot manage our thoughts, our health is doomed to suffer.

We don’t just breathe air, drink water, and eat food; we also consume thoughts. We eat three times a day, but think about 50,000 thoughts per day! That’s a lot of thoughts. These thoughts, like an IV drop, flow through our SBM (soul-body-mind) most waking moments and some when asleep. Dr. Ted Morter, the late renowned chiropractor and author, wrote about the Six Essentials for Life: how you breathe, exercise, and rest; and what you eat, drink, and think. Dr. Morter, like many holistic practitioners, believed that the last one—what you think—has the strongest influence upon one’s health.

When we think a positive thought, we receive a drop of nourishment. When we think a negative thought, we receive a drop of poison. Thoughts fill every moment of the college student’s career. Overflowing academic information holds the mind captive, while disequilibrium constantly wracks emotions and beliefs.

It’s not enough to simply say positive thoughts, either; you have to believe them. Remember the subconscious spirit and Cognitive Belief System? By the time you are a college student, Mama and Papa brains are firmly established. Baby brain believes all the things that have happened to you and most of what you’ve been told. If you have had experiences of being a good athlete or a bad writer, you will believe these to be truths. If, all your life, you’ve been told you’re good-for-nothing or can do anything you set your mind to, you may also fall prey to these beliefs.

By the time you arrive at college, others have navigated your identity. College is your turn to steer the ship. It’s why college is so shattering: young people are expected to shatter their perceptions of themselves and re-create them, based on their own beliefs. This is traumatic, not only for the young adult, but also to the parents and guardians who have nurtured a particular value system unto their baby.

College does not prepare you for “what you are going to do” with your life. These days, people wear so many professional hats and engage in so many relationships that the myths of a linear career and single monogamous relationship have disintegrated. With choice comes opportunity, economic turmoil, and transitions. College prepares you for “who are you going to be” with your life, so that, no matter what happens, you remain yourself: where you live, who you date, how you work, and all the thousands of decisions that add up to you.

A young adult has the developmental task of redefining who they are. It’s their job. “Isn’t it enough to do well academically? Do I have to find myself in college?” Yes, you do, or else it finds you. You either consciously choose who you are going to be, or others will decide for you. As you discover who you are, it may be very different from who you once were.

Hans Selye “Discovers” Stress

As you might imagine, that causes a lot of stress. Stress may be considered the number one lifestyle factor affecting academic success. How a student perceives, reacts, and responds to stress will make or break his academic success and, maybe, save his life.

What is stress, anyway? It’s such an overused word, tossed around so often that it doesn’t hold any particular meaning. Stress is change. In terms of lifestyle, stress is a change in soul, body, or mind, due to an experience. This change is a physiological change: functions alter in response to a stressor, which is the thing that causes the change. The stress response is the way we respond to the stress. The coping strategy is how we deal with the stress response in order to regain balance. The whole experience is what we simply refer to as “stress.”

Although stress has been around as long as life itself, it wasn’t formally recognized as a lifestyle factor until the 1950s. Dr. Hans Selye is regarded as the founder of stress research and pioneered the field of psychoneuroimmunology—the interaction between psychological processes. Psychoneuroimmunology is the in-depth study of the interaction of the mind, the central nervous system, and the immune system, and their impact on our health and well-being. Psychoneuroimmunology is generally referred to as the mind-body connection and what I refer to as the soul-body-mind connection or SBM.

The story of how Hans Selye discovered stress is stressful. Dr. Selye conducted experiments with mice and needed to inject a select group with a chemical. He may have been a good scientist, but he was an awful animal handler. The mice would continually escape, and he would have a heck of a time trying to get them back into their cages. They’d be scrambling all over the counters and floor, while he’d be “sweeping” at them with a broom, in a pathetic attempt to corral them together. What he discovered was that he had, in fact, created another variable in his “controlled” experiments. There was a new factor to be measured: stress.

The mice exposed to stress developed significant health issues, particularly in three systems: immune, digestive, and adrenal. These three areas are responsible for keeping one well, energetic, and nourished. When stress attacks, one becomes sick, tired, and starved.

Stress affects the SBM, but not all stress is created equally; rather, not all stress affects in the same way. Stressors used to be classified as distress (negative) and eustress (positive). New studies reveal that it’s not the stressor but your reaction to a stressor that determines if it’s good or bad. In other words, your attitude about the stressor determines how it will affect you. If you see the stressor as a reasonable challenge and opportunity to grow, then you respond positively, as eustress. If you see the stressor as an unrealistic challenge that you are unable to handle, then you respond negatively, with distress. This is immediately illustrated when introducing a group of kindergarteners to a tarantula.

We witness this all the time (not with tarantulas, hopefully). Twenty-five students take the same academic course. They are exposed to the same stressors: professor, class, assignments, and exams. By the end of a semester, they will have twenty-five unique experiences. Like a bell curve for academic performance, students will report different perceptions of the class. Some insist it was life-altering. Some might remark how it helped them to see things in a new way. Some will hate the teacher. Some may dismiss the course as a waste of time. Some have no opinion, whatsoever. It’s as if they were all enrolled in their own solitary classroom.

Perception is created completely based on our own beliefs. The stressor may be “bad,” such as a car crash or failed assignment. It could be “good,” such as rooming with your best friend or acing a final exam. On the other hand, the car crash might result in a new, better car. Rooming with your BFF may fail miserably and you become enemies. Thus, determining if stress is good or bad ultimately depends upon your perception of the events unfolding and your reaction to them. This perception, in turn, affects how your body responds to that stressor.

It can become more complicated. Let’s say you are planning a long-term project with a group of students. You might consider this eustress while your classmates consider it distress. Some people thrive in chaos and last-minute deadlines, while other people thrive in routine and discipline. If you were to poll most of my Bryn Mawr classmates, most would shake their heads, asserting, “All she had to do was ask someone about the essay!” This stressor could have been transformed into eustress in seconds. Instead, it became the catalyst for failure. Stress is definitely in the eye of the beholder.

How do you know if the stress is good or bad? Here is where the energetic order of SBM enters. Discernment is as simple as how you feel. Check in, honestly. If the experience affects you in a good way—if you feel calm, happy, excited, or ready, it is likely the bing of eustress. On the other hand, if you feel lousy—angry, sad, confused, thrown off balance, and “not yourself,” it is likely the thud of distress.

When determining if stress is a bing or thud, check in with the soul and body, because they never lie. Papa brain doesn’t think; he responds to Mama’s emotions and Baby’s tantrums. Papa just nods his head and says, “Yes, dear.” In the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Maria Portokalos claimed, “The man is the head, but the woman is the neck … and she can turn the head … any-way-she-wants.” Only Baby and Mama lie; Papa is pure response. The mind lies all the time. Emotions mask true feelings. “I’m fine!” we shriek to our partner after they’ve mistreated us. Oh, really? You don’t seem fine. If words could kill, that “fine” would have cut someone’s head off.

We are in constant denial of our true feelings. Whatever. I’m over it. I don’t care. These throwaway lines are akin to shoving a drowning person’s head under the water in order to stop them from making such a commotion. Baby’s denial masks Mama and Papa’s true message, and until we face the message, it remains. When we bury our feelings, we bury them alive. This is especially true of young adults. Forget self-management. Baby brain is still experiencing some emotions for the first time.

Baby doesn’t always lie intentionally; sometimes, he’s hijacked. You ever see one of those action movies where the main character is trying to talk a killer into relinquishing his weapon? In that calm, hypnotic voice, he will gently repeat, “Give me the gun. Give me the gun.” The killer is under siege, held captive by his own brain. In the cognitive industry, we call this an amygdala hijack. This image illustrates where emotional stress stimulates the brain. Teenagers show more activation in the amygdala, the part of Mama brain that receives and processes emotion. The amygdala has the ability to shut down the frontal cortex while Mama protects Baby.

As Baby matures, he has more emotional experiences: more romantic relationships, more jobs, and more life. We come to realize that we will not die of a broken heart or failed career. We begin to recognize strong emotional responses and stop ourselves, reflecting on the experience. Our frontal cortexes observe, “Gosh, I sure am feeling sad and angry; however, if I drive my car into my ex-girlfriend’s front porch, there may be dire consequences to deal with.” We employ our higher-order civilized mind to analyze the situation and inhibit dangerously strong reactions; in short, Baby grows up.

Allostatic Stress: Daily Hassles

Stress is not just a state of mind, but a state of being. Duration and intensity influence our stress response. In terms of duration, there are two kinds of stress: acute and allostatic. Acute stress is fast and furious: earthquakes and break-ups. Acute doesn’t necessarily mean catastrophic. An acute stress could be a pop quiz (or failing one). Acute stress is an isolated type of event, while allostatic stress lasts longer. It is referred to as the “daily hassle” type of stress. If you are managing an illness, monitoring medication, or handling an unhealthy relationship, these types of stressors inject a more “timed-release” type of stress response.

Intensity is not directly related to duration, but we tend to perceive things that way. If you are in an abusive relationship, you will find strategies to survive it. If you are in a loving relationship and your partner suddenly attacks you, it will feel quite intense. The attack is new and unexpected, so you pay close attention to it. Long-standing abuse may be just as intense, but you become desensitized and see it less as a direct threat. Coping with long-standing stress becomes a “procedure” of sorts, and we become automated in our response.

Allostatic stress ...