Science of Wellbeing: Too Many Weeks

I gotta say, this science of wellbeing is starting to get me down. I feel accosted by these mental health tips. I realized (too late) that there were four more behaviors of well being that we have to cover before we can even move to week 4! And they are all the WORST: Sleep, exercise, using your strengths, and time affluence. I don’t even know if I should write about these because, let’s face it, you're not going to do them any more than I am. This is why we all have the same New Year’s resolutions every year, right?

All right, enough grumbling, let’s start right in! What do I know about exercise? I know that Laurie is right when she states that exercise is the single best behavior that you can employ for improved mental health. In more than one study, it was proven to be more effective than antidepressants. Exercise is reliably effective for reducing both depression and anxiety. It improves your brain function, your physical health, your immunity to illness, your sleep, AND the way you feel about your body. It is absolutely a no-brainer to exercise. Move your body for 20-30 minutes every day, consistently.

Sleep is very much the same. Chronic sleep deprivation significantly impacts your mood and also your brain function and even your GPA. Sleep regularity, over time, correlates strongly with GPA, with reliable data to suggest that the more regular sleep you get, the higher your GPA is. When folks study sleep deprivation in adolescents they find that its effects are akin to, you guessed it, clinical depression. These studies were based on 5 hours a night. And you can’t really catch up on sleep either (like if you sleep for 20 hours on the weekend). But, when you get 7-9 hours of sleep on a regular basis, it improves everything. And don’t fool yourself into thinking that missing sleep is a sacrifice that you are making to study or complete homework because, if you do it on a regular basis, the hit your mental health and brain function will take will be enough to lower your overall academic success.

Time Affluence is just what it sounds like: having an abundance of time. This means that you have a subjective sense of having enough time to pursue leisure activities, take a day off, etc. Most people report that they often prioritize money (aka work) and school over time. This is a tricky thing because I don’t think we directly believe that these things will make us happier, it’s more that we feel responsible for doing these things and that having “free” time is perceived as frivolous or extra. However, people who value time over money and accomplishments tend to feel happier. Having extra time allows you to pursue some of the other behaviors that we know matter, like seeing a friend or engaging in a flow activity. It enables you to access your creativity and develop your sense of play.

Time affluence also has a positive effect on how kind or helpful you are. There is a great study about monks going to a lecture on the golden rule. One group was made to feel that they were late, while the other group was told they had plenty of time. Then they planted a person along the route who was in need of help. It’s not surprising that those monks who felt they had the time were the ones who stopped, while the others kept their heads down and kept walking.

I think one of the reasons I am annoyed by the above behavior studies is that often, we already know what to do. It’s the DOING that is hard. I have spent a LOT of time incorporating regular exercise into my daily life since the pandemic. It has taken all my creativity, all the exciting music, all the mantras, and all the schedule blocking. I have it in place now, and I have no question that it does all of the things which Laurie reports but, it is still a chore to start.

Sleep is hard because we often sacrifice it in order to save ourselves from time famine (a term Laurie uses to express what it feels like to be overscheduled). Sleep and time affluence are inextricably linked. It’s hard to ignore that changing this will require tough decisions and self-advocacy on a level that many of us are uncomfortable with and feel powerless about. These are decisions like choosing to take one less AP course, or one less project at work, advocating for more time off, choosing to leave your assignments incomplete, or choosing NOT to take an extracurricular that you might want to do. Grrr. If we really really want to have a balanced life, there are some choices we have to make that are in opposition both to our desires and to the powers that be. This includes the broad culture of school as well as the culture of most work environments.

I will end today with the last behavior we can use to increase happiness. It can be a silver lining and a strategy that we can employ now, as we wrestle on a deeper level with the other behaviors. This is using your signature strengths. Did you take the strengths inventory at the beginning of this course? If you didn’t, here it is: https://yalesurvey.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_4HIDbXg3lehoWNw?user_id=bbf19ca9681618fbd77a75a7627e9481f4861c87

Using your strengths in your daily life can improve your happiness reliably over time. Something related to this is called “school crafting” or “job crafting” where you take what you normally do every day and you find ways to add into that routine more your signature strengths. For example, if one of your strengths is humor, you can be proactive about employing more humor into your regular old routine. My friend Amy often pranks her co-workers. Once she filled all of their cabinets with ping pong balls! She gets great enjoyment out of planning and executing these pranks and her coworkers get a lot of joy out of them.

One of my old clients very wisely recognized that their chronic sense of boredom and hopelessness regarding school was lessened by taking an active role in daily goals for approaching and talking to new people, trying to use their humor in class, and actively researching activities and extracurriculars they might like. This is school crafting at its best. It can take the mundane of every day and add back some of the zest. It involves a little risk taking, but you may find that this also increases your wellbeing.

In closing, and in the interest of practicing my own time affluence, I am going to settle down with these newsletters. When the course looked like an easy 6 weeks, I planned to do 6 weeks worth of posts, and then go to a monthly newsletter. I think I will go ahead and go down to monthly, even though we are nowhere near done with the Science of Wellbeing. Ok, good luck and don’t forget to share your victories in these areas. One of the ways we can make taking good care of ourselves normal is to do it an talk about it.