Mental health professionals and parents alike are asking with more urgency than ever what has gone wrong with millennials’ ability to handle stress. According to the 2013 National College Health Assessment (which covers 125,000 students from over 150 colleges and universities), approximately one-third of college students in the United States struggled to function in the past year due to depression. Nearly 50 percent reported overwhelming anxiety, and more than 30 percent of students who sought counseling admitted to suicidal ideation and at least one serious attempt. Clearly, there is a problem.
On the flip side of the coin, there is a movement towards the uppercased lifestyle genre of wellness. In a world filled with gluten-free labels on olive oil, yoga mats, and indoor cycling classes that claim to give your “soul” a workout too, wellness is a hot topic, but so is college-age depression. So what is “wellness,” and why does it not appear to be working for the very demographic that kale shakes are marketed towards?
“Wellness is about the whole person [and would] encompass many domains of life,” said Heather Horton, director of the Wellness Resource Center at Colorado College, “including intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, socio-cultural, environmental, financial, and career. Each of those domains is complex within itself.”
If there are several domains of wellness that a student has to balance on top of the block plan, some may get more attention than others. However, “it’s important to try to pay attention to all aspects of ourselves,” said Horton, because by focusing all of your energy on just one aspect of wellness, your goals will actually suffer without the support of a holistic system.
For example, if you neglect your emotional well-being in an attempt to improve physical fitness, over-exercise may result, with injury as another possibility. Similarly, if you focus on homework without nourishing your physical well-being, you may not have the energy or brainpower to fully support your studies.
Alternatively, by caring for yourself in one area of your life, you support another. This phenomenon can easily be seen at Colorado College, where many students utilize the stress-relieving and self-motivating benefits of physical activity to perform well academically and as social and environmental activists.
Zoe Holland, a junior, describes how CC students often combine physical and mental wellness by socializing in an active environment. “I think what’s interesting about CC is that a lot of the popular fitness or wellness activities are pretty social, like rock climbing, skiing, or hiking, which makes balancing things less intense,” said Holland. “In my experience, the Block Plan kind of makes you rotate your priorities throughout the year depending on the time of year and the intensity of the class.” The nature of the block plan, as Holland points out, often necessitates a rotating focus on certain domains of wellness over others. However, various school programs are increasingly making efforts to support the aspects of wellness that most often get left behind. The counseling service, for example, offers six free sessions per year to each student, and 30 percent of the student body utilizes this service every year.
The fitness center also provides services to customize nutrition and fitness plans for students and faculty. Tiana Perry, Assistant Director of the Fitness Center, says that this individualized training “includes basic nutritional guidelines and an individualized workout program. The CC student, faculty, or staff member can then choose to meet on a monthly basis to get an updated program and have one on one discussions regarding his/her progress.”
In addition to this are student-led groups, such as GROW, which advocates for mental health awareness and offers support for sufferers of mental illness. Several ORC trips last year were also geared towards promoting mental and emotional wellness. The Wellness Resource center strives to find new ways to help students every year. One such initiative is the Rock the Block program, which is a series of events that help students learn how to balance physical, emotional, and social wellbeing with academic stress.
If you or a friend is struggling to balance all of the various domains of wellness, these services are available for you to use at any time. Your mental and emotional health is as critical to whatever kind of success you hope to achieve in life as physical fitness and academic prowess. There is no wealth without your health, so take inventory on your life, and take care.