Latest / College Is Fine, Everything's Fine / #67 Facing the Sleep, Study, Socialize Triangle: Using the R.E.A.C.H. Toolkit to Find Balance and Build Mental Fitness

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#67 Facing the Sleep, Study, Socialize Triangle: Using the R.E.A.C.H. Toolkit to Find Balance and Build Mental Fitness · College Is Fine, Everything's Fine

REACH - E[00:00:00] Okay. Are you ready for E? This is the second part of our Reach toolkit series where we're gonna talk more about elevating your mental fitness. All right, we're gonna talk about elevating your mental fitness. I talk about this a lot in my practice. I'm always talking about like, what are things we can do to build our emotional reserve? My hope is when I go through some of [00:01:00] these skills, which is to feel empowered that there really are, you know, behavioral cognitive skills that you can practice that have been shown to build this emotional resiliency. Now the problem is this triangle that exists , this S triangle. So how do we balance sleep, studying and socializing?So any guesses? I mean, maybe on my college students, which one tends to be sacrificed? Sleep. Sleep. Is that what we heard? Yes, it is. Yeah. Yeah. That was a pretty quick answer. Quick, quick, quick. You know, um, college students seem to like, think they can just like hoard hours of sleep, like a squirrel with acorns, you know, they're like, oh, it's fine.I didn't sleep for these two nights, but I got five the next night. And, and sleep really doesn't work that way, right? But I completely understand that a lot of things are competing for your attention. Um, and it's compelling to go out with friends, watch a movie, go watch a basketball game, and your grades really matter to you, right?So [00:02:00] hopefully sleep is not the thing that you're always sacrificing. And we can talk a little bit about how to achieve a little bit of balance there. Um, so let's hear about some struggles with the S triangle, sleep, studying and socializing, or any any cures to the, the triangle tips. Um, I would say I definitely struggle, um, with this, um, between socializing and studying.Uh, especially, um, and sleeping. I feel like I get, we we're going to bed at like one, 2:00 AM every night and kind of like, feel like it's normal. Um, but the studying and the socializing was definitely hard at first because I always wanted to hang out with my friends and do what they were doing, and maybe they didn't have a test the next day and I did.Yeah. I mean. Definitely one thing is just combining, studying and socializing, just getting that study group, definitely you don't want any more than four people. 'cause if you get more than that, you're [00:03:00] just socializing, you're not studying. Um, but it also, it really just depends on where your priorities are because if you're just trying to. Gets, you know, good grades, you know, no one needs perfect grades, then I think there's definitely more time to get all three done. Um, because there's, I, I've definitely noticed there's a lot of times where you're just kind of lying in bed, not doing anything.Mm-hmm. Um, and of course sometimes, you know, that's good to take a break. But, uh, even, even more challenging times, I think cutting out some of the, I don't wanna, I, I'm afraid to say nonsense, but, um, the flop time. Yeah. We could be a little bit more efficient with our time. Exactly. Yeah. That, um, that definitely helps.Something that was touched on a little earlier too is that you can place different emphasis. On each [00:04:00] one at different times. Like for example, for me, at the beginning of college, especially freshman year, I would say sleep, um, probably took more of a backseat and maybe sometimes studying as well.But as you're feeling more established, like in that environment, you can kind of rebalance things and put more emphasis on sleep and put more emphasis on studying. And studying is extremely important, I think, um, in university to get good grades, to commit yourself to your studies, um, that's why you're there.Um, but I don't think it's everything. I think that, um, having a healthy social life and being able to balance both is really important. Um, and. Getting one bad grade on one assignment isn't gonna kill you either. I know a lot of people in university who like bent over backwards to make sure that they had like the most perfect grades all the time, and like [00:05:00] by the end of it they were almost pulling their hair out.Um, and I also had friends who did a really good job of balancing all three and managed to still do extremely well, get really good grades, um, and still have a very vibrant social life. So I don't think that it's. As much of a struggle to balance all three, but it's definitely testing at times.Great. Thank you.Um, so sure far away when we see college students that are really dysregulated emotionally, they might be struggling academically or socially, chronically ill, physically ill, I mean, I'm sure a lot of you freshman year were sick at times due to the lack of sleep.Um, if you don't move your body and you're not eating in a healthy way and not sleeping consistently, and if you're staring all the time at social media, that is like. Uh, those are behaviors that we do see that tend to lead to poor academic and emotional outcomes. The hard part is, particularly with the top three,those are habits for most adults that are hard to do. , How do I establish like, , exercising consistently and [00:06:00] eating in a balanced way and making sure that I don't sacrifice, um, my sleep too often. , But it's doable. So I would love to hear maybe just really quickly, like of those, which was like the hard, what's, what was the hardest for you to kind of navigate?I feel like all of them kind of at the beginning. Definitely. Yeah. Um, I feel like getting in a routine, going to like the gym at school was kind of tough at first. Um, but if you find, you know, one or two people to go with it makes it a lot easier to go. Um, you're more motivated to go. It's, it's a better time.. And then social media, uh, in our generation is very hard. Everyone's always, you know, on their phones.Looking at Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, um, it's kind of just become a part of our culture and our lives. As I've gotten older, it's, it's going down. I've, I'm less reliant on it. But when there were those kind of periods of time where I wasn't doing anything, that's kind of just what I was doing.I was laying in bed, um, and being in a triple dorm room, I had nowhere else to sit other than my uncomfortable desk chair. So at first it was [00:07:00] definitely hard to figure those things out. But again, with time I really was able to figure it out. Okay,I think that the key part here again, is that I think a lot of times initially college should just kind of give up, right? And don't take the opportunity to develop like some self-regulation skills until there's a crisis. And our whole point of this is like, can we prevent the crisis from happening? Um, and even with taking space from social media, which might not seem that normative 'cause it's so normal to kind of be on it.I'm sure if I looked in a cafeteria on campus, everyone has their phone out and they're probably on social media. Um. But we want you to be mindful of the impact that it has on mental health, which we know it does. Whether you're making comparisons that your friends are at home or having like the time of their life at a tailgate and you're miserable where you are, or you know, you have all these other shoulds of things that you should be doing.So, um, a quick, another quick little acronym. Tools for mental fitness. It's about moving your body. Even [00:08:00] this, like I always say like call your parents on a walk across campus, like walking is the cheapest, most effective form of movement. And I think a lot of college students set these really ambitious goals about what their fitness routine is gonna be.Now, when I was in college, I don't know about you, Sarah, like this was not part of the culture. So, but now I feel like, okay, I'm gonna go to this workout class and I'm gonna do this. And, and while I appreciate the commitment to fitness, I think sometimes our goals are so large that we're not successful.So whether it means that you're gonna do like a quick yoga video or if it's a walk. Um, and I will say, I, sorry to interrupt. Yeah. Because I know we just have more to get through, but I was thinking that again, this is one that we'll give you access to, but none of this, by the way, Liz and I do not think that we're like, guys, we're gonna blow your mind tonight.We are gonna tell you to eat Well, yeah. Like we know that that's not happening. But we also know that when people come in to see us really dysregulated and they say, we need to study better, I'm [00:09:00] failing a test. I'm so moody. If we ask them if they're doing any of these things, the answer's always that they're not right.And so it's really just a way of saying, Hey, if you're not taking care of your physical health, we can't help you as much as if you are taking care of it. That's always gonna be the first step. So I think that's, it's not to say like, let's blow your mind tonight with this information. This is pretty well known.No one is surprised by this, but it's also a matter of needing to understand that it is. Going to have to happen if you want to stay in a steady emotional state. So let's move on to this . This idea about how to be more flexible in our thinking about school. I think a common area that we could start with is about socially anxious thoughts.There is this performative aspect when we get onto campus. We wanna like present our best self initially, and we can get really stuck everyone. I'm not someone who struggles with social anxiety, but in new social settings I can really get stuck and like, oh, what did I sound like?Like, did they like me? Like, did I have any food in my teeth? You [00:10:00] know, like, whatever my worries are. And these social worries are so strong when you first get to school, like you said, like wanting to like make your friend group within the first, you know, week that you're on campus. Um, so can you gimme like an example of a socially anxious thought?Just gimme a thought and I'll kind of walk through this, that any of you anyone wants to talk that had maybe freshman year, what was a worry? Anyone? Um, I would say at the beginning, maybe a good one would be like, oh, no one, no one wants to like meet me or be friends with me, or something like that. Okay.Um, and that would prevent you from doing, like if you were, like, for example, everyone has their doors open like in the dorm hall or something, like preventing me from going into someone's room and introducing myself because they don't want, I would think that they didn't want me to. Good. Okay. Good.That's a good example. And when I kind of go through this, so there's a couple things that we do with our thinking,, and your thoughts are what fuels your emotion. [00:11:00] So a lot of times we buy into our thinking, we treat all of our thoughts as facts. I tell every patient who walks in my office, I'm like, I've got one sentence.I'm gonna tell you it's four words. Remember this for the rest of your life, it'll change your life. And they're like, you know, none of them have notepads. They're like taking their phones out, their notes section if they like me. Um, and it's that thoughts are not facts. So what happens a lot is that we just assume when we start to think something that it's true, and we particularly think it's true because I can, I, I remember this feeling that you're talking about my stomach, like when I was in my dorm and I'm like, okay, they have like the little whiteboards and like, do I like write my name and like my, it's come like I wanna go to the dining hall with them, right?So when my stomach is really tense like that and I'm having the thought that nobody's gonna like me, my brain's gonna believe that that thought is true, right? 'cause my body's having this reaction. If I can kind of take some space from my thoughts and accept that it's just a thought. We all have random thoughts.I'm sure if I asked all of you a random thought that you had today that was like bizarre and unusual, you'd give me one. Right? But you [00:12:00] kind of let that go, like. You know, a cloud in the sky and you didn't really pay attention to it. I think it's really important when you walk onto campus that you recognize you're gonna have more worry thoughts about whether or not you pick the right major, whether or not you pick the right school, whether or not, you know, uh, your friends from home are still like you, whether or not you're gonna make any friends.Right? And our goal is how do we kind of create some space from our thoughts and see that they're really just thoughts and that we don't have to believe every single thought that pumps through our, our, our mind. And lastly, this last step is about just. Being skeptical about the authenticity of our thoughts.Right. You know, the, the one that college shouldn't make the most, I would say, um, this mistake is something called mind reading. So they'll come to me and they'll be like, ah, I just, I just know, uh, Jill's like so mad at me, so mad at me. And I'm like, why was she, why is she mad at you, Liz, you just her face when she, she walked by me.She didn't say hi. And you should have seen her face. She was definitely mad at me. Um, there are a [00:13:00] million reasons why Jill could have made a face or why she didn't. And then I, you know, I, I detect things a little bit more. Oh, you were in a crowded hallway. There were a lot of people. Right. How loud were you?Are you sure Jill heard you Right. Jill's really stressed out. She's going through a hard time. So I think you get the gist that a lot of times we need to take a step back and really examine our thoughts with a little bit more logical reasoning and not use emotional reasoning. Um, and so we talk, we've talked a little bit about being rigid and flexible.I think the, the gist is you wanna be a lot more flexible in terms of how you approach a lot of the worries that you're gonna have when you get onto campus.<h1>Marker</h1> All right, so that was a quick summary of e Elevating your Mental Fitness, and you can always find more resources on this on our website where we have infographics that outline the mental health fitness tools, as well as go a bit deeper into some of the cognitive flexibility pieces that Liz spoke about.So tune in tomorrow for a. [00:14:00]