Final Exam Flashcards
What hangs in the study-life balance?
While enrolled in university, students will have to make choices about how and when to prioritize studying over other factors.
Factors:
* Socializing
* Employment
* Volunteering
* Commuting
* Exercise
* Caring for a family member
* Hobbies/interests
* Holidays
Why is a study-life balance important?
All of the things outside of your formal studies contribute to your overall experience of the world. A richer world experience will inform your daily life, work, and ultimately strengthen your understanding and of the world.
Time Commitment: the expectation for a full-time university student is around 30-35 hours of studying a week, including lecture, seminar, and lab times.
Rest: allocating time to rest is just as important as studying or exercising. The brain needs time and rest to process new information. Likewise, the body needs exercise and sleep to keep it in a proper state of alertness to focus on learning effectively.
Plan: if you commit to well-defined study times, there will be plenty of time to enjoy a range of other activities.
What is the impact of overstudying?
- negative impact on relationships with family, friends, and partners.
- interfere with your ability to fulfil other non-study related obligations and interests.
- increase the likelihood of unhealthy behaviours such as smoking, excessive alcohol or drug use, unhealthy eating, feelings of loneliness and isolation, anxiety or depressive symptoms, and, for some, increase the risk of hopelessness and self-harm.
What are the benefits to a healthy life balance?
Health & Absences: reduce worry and stress.
Efficiency: improves efficiency of work during the allotted study hours.
Engagement: supports greater connection to and interest in courses, lectures and relationships.
Focus & Concentration: facilitates attention on the task at hand and staying present.
Academic Success: improves learning efficiency and productivity, which is needed for academic success.
Discuss the wheel of life.
To help assess how time is spent and if there is a balance you can use the Wheel of Life.
Academic/Professional: study and work commitments. Is there time for other interests and activities?
Finances: are your finances a worry to you?
Health: how would you rate your overall well-being?
Family and Friends: do you take the time to stay connected to family and friends?
Relationships/Love: do you take the time to maintain your personal relationships?
Personal Growth: it’s up to you what you define as personal growth.
Recreation, Culture, and Hobbies: recreation is a healthy pastime, and exercise has many important physical and mental health benefits.
Physical Environment: a safe and pleasant home and work environment is important to your well-being.
You can then use the wheel of life to assess where changes need to be made.
Balance: how would you like your Wheel of Life to look?
Overload: what areas are you spending too much time on?
Time on Self and others: are you spending enough time on activities/interest that support your own health and mental health? Are you taking enough time to connect with others?
Changes to Make: what areas on your Wheel would you most like to change and why?
How can campuses be passionate about mental health?
It is important that universities consider how institutional contexts, environments, values, practices, and cultures can impact student mental health and well-being.
Building compassionate campuses involves working hard to ensure institutions are inclusive and kind learning communities.
Inclusive learning modules, flexible assessment, forming positive learning communities and tackling stigma and discrimination in all of its forms allows students to not just “survive” but “thrive” in higher education.
What is connectedness?
Connectedness is important to well-being. Personally meaningful connections can be made on the basis of your world view, environment, values, relationships, work, and recreational interests.
Other People: include your friends, family, peers, and colleagues.
The Natural World: refers to all of the animals, plants, and other things existing in nature and not made or caused by people.
Meaningful Values: refers to faith-based activities, and activities that reflect importance with family or personal values.
Meaningful Work: refer to your work, hobbies, volunteering, or passion projects.
Culture and Heritage: include celebrating traditions, cultural holidays, or relating to people and places from your past. These connections can be physical, mental, emotional, or a combination, and they will be different for
everyone.
What are the benefits of social connectedness?
Social connectedness refers to a personal sense of belonging to a group, family, or community. Social connection doesn’t necessarily mean physically being present with people in a literal sense, but rather someone’s subjective experience of feeling understood and connected to others.
Improve Quality of Life: social connection is an important determinant of health and mental health.
Boost Mental Health: increased feelings of belonging, purpose, increased levels of happiness, reduced levels of stress, improved self-worth, and confidence. Those with insufficient perceived social support were the most likely to suffer from mental health disorders like anxiety and depression.
Increased Life Expectancy: individuals with stronger social relationships had a 50% increased likelihood of survival.
Decrease Risk of Suicide: relationships can play a crucial role in protecting a person against feeling isolated, suicidal thoughts, and behaviours.
Build More Inclusive Learning Communities: increases compassion for self and for others while challenging stigma and discrimination.
Discuss healthy relationships.
Forming strong, healthy relationships with others means opening up and actively listening.
These relationships can change the course of your life. Some relationships will endure and some will be shorter lived - but just because a relationship doesn’t last forever doesn’t mean that it didn’t serve its purpose at the time.
Discuss loneliness.
Loneliness stems from a lack or reduced feeling of social connectedness. It is the unpleasant feeling when your social needs are not being met and is often accompanied by a desire for social connectedness. Loneliness can negatively affect your mental and physical health in a number of ways.
Increased Cortisol: increase your levels of cortisol, which can lead to depression, stroke, or heart attack.
Increased Sleep Disturbances: more frequent sleep disturbances.
Reduced Activity: you are less likely to be physically active if you experience loneliness.
Increased Risk of Heart Diseases: middle-aged adults who live alone have a 24% greater risk of dying of heart disease.
Challenge Immune System: compromises health, similar to chronic stress.
Discuss self-harm in older adolescence.
A lack of connection can take many forms, including withdrawal, ignoring or being ignored, lack of support or approval, or the feeling of being abandoned.
Pathways to self-harm and suicide are complex, but social exclusion or lack of social connectedness, loneliness, and other risk factors such as substance misuse are important contributors.
Early Childhood Indicators: genetic factors, such as family history or psychiatric illness, certain biological factors, and early adversity.
Changes: temperament, personality, and psychological functioning can change. For example, mapping on to perfectionism, optimism, aggressivity or impulsivity.
Proximal: social isolation, academic failures, and substance use increase the risk of self-harm.
How can you combat loneliness?
The mental health and healthcare sectors are using social prescribing as a way to improve connectedness, reduce loneliness, and optimize well-being.
What is the difference between loneliness and social isolation?
Loneliness: the sensation or unpleasant feeling that accompanies the perception that one’s social needs are not being met by the quantity or quality of one’s social connections.
Social Isolation: an objective measurement of the number of people you interact with. It is a lack of quantity of social connections.
What are the impacts of isolation?
Physical: poorer health and substance abuse, which in turn negatively impacts health further and increases risk of disease.
Emotional: reduced confidence, diminished self-worth, despair, depression, worthlessness, and self-harm.
Cognitive: shortened attention span or forgetfulness as individuals may not see any reason or opportunity to remain aware and alert.
What is one of the strongest predictors of depression later in life?
Social isolation
What is recreation?
A person involved in recreation is “re-creating” themselves. The whole point of recreation, as the original Latin word recreate implies, is to refresh and renew.
- refreshment by means of some pastime, agreeable exercise, or the like.
- a pastime, diversion, exercise, or other resource affording relaxation and enjoyment.
What are the two types of attention?
Directed Attention: a form of focused attention that requires great effort to remain on task and process the information. This type of attention is mentally demanding, as more appealing external information must be blocked out.
Involuntary Attention: effortless fascination. This type of attention is held when the subject is interesting. Involuntary attention is a pleasurable way of processing information and, comes at no cost to the human in way of tiredness.
What is directed attention fatigue?
DAF refers to a neuropsychological phenomenon indicating overuse of the brain’s inhibitory system necessary for maintaining focused attention
Input Deficits: misinterpretation of or failure to notice social cues.
Thinking Problems: restlessness, confusion, or forgetfulness.
Behaviour: act impulsively or recklessly
Executive Functioning: reduced ability to plan and make good decisions.
Emotions: short-tempered and have feelings of unpleasantness.
Worry and Rumination: easier to slip into worry and overthinking.
How do you promote attentional recovery?
One way to promote attentional recovery is to engage in positive activities you find absorbing.
- Clearing the mind of internal distractions and take short breaks from directed attention tasks
- Getting good quality sleep
- Allowing the mind to wander freely
Attention Restoration Theory: you think better when you spend time connecting with nature.
This concept can be expanded to feeling restored mentally when immersing oneself in a restorative environment.
- Nature
- Creative tasks
- Kinaesthetic activities
- Highly sensory/sensual tasks
What is the cost of physical inactivity?
As society takes on a more sedentary life, physical inactivity has become an increasing health problem. 3.3 million people die around the world each year due to physical inactivity, making it the fourth leading underlying cause of mortality.
The cost of physical inactivity is felt in the health care sector and in the economy, caused by people unable to work.
Canada: $6.8 billion.
UK: £8 billion.
Discuss the importance of exercise.
- Exercise releases endorphins, that are beneficial to one’s overall well-being. Endorphins connect with receptors throughout the brain and body to trigger positive feelings and reduce pain sensitivity.
- Having completed exercise gives us a sense of self-effectiveness or self-efficacy in this feeling that we can do it.
- Regular exercise promotes healthy sleep patterns
Positive Emotion: pleasure, vigour, and energy,
decreased anxiety, tension, tiredness, and anger.
Unity of Body and Mind: feeling of more improved well-being and life satisfaction from active leisure. Students who engage in physical exercise may be more likely to engage in other health behaviours.
Heightened Self Esteem: sense of accomplishment, fulfillment, self-effectiveness, and self-esteem afterwards.
Leisure: for many people and they feel it is precious to invest free time for one’s own health. This freely chosen activity may enhance stress coping due to a heightened sense of control over their spare time as well as health.
Problem-Focused Coping: enhances problem-focused coping derived from positive emotion, such as seeking information to tackle problems rather than emotion-focused coping such as blaming, venting, denying, or avoiding.
Discuss the relation between nature and well-being.
Being in touch with nature and spending time outdoors is beneficial for physical and mental health. Access to green space can also alleviate a range of problems, reducing levels of chronic stress, obesity, and improving concentration.
Physical Health: improves through increased physical activity.
Stress: reductions in stress and anxiety.
Emotional Regulation: increased positive mood and self-esteem.
Social Life: a better and healthier social life.
It is not a matter of spending lots more time in nature, it is about noticing nature wherever this may be. It is about engaging our senses focussing on how nature makes us feel, finding meaning in nature through the celebration of changing seasons, and appreciating the beauty you can find.
How can you interact with nature everyday?
Indoors:
* Keeping plants in your home.
* Having photographs of nature.
* Having a landscape as your screensaver.
* Having your breakfast by a window or patio.
* Watching a nature show on tv.
* Meditate to the sound of nature.
Outdoors:
* Taking your laptop outside.
* Work near a large window.
* Walk around a park, garden, or field.
* Going outside on your lunch break.
Discuss the relation between cultural activities and well-being.
Culture refers to the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people. It encompasses language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music, art, and more.
Like nature and exercise, participating in cultural activities, including art, music, reading, and writing, can be good for your well-being.
Engaging in purposeful and meaningful activities such as creative pursuits can work
like a natural antidepressant by improving mood.
What is the flow state?
Flow is the state you get into when you are so engaged in a creative task that your sense of time disappears and you temporarily forget
yourself and your “internal chaos”.
Some people achieve the flow, when they’re swimming or running, but even the repetitive motion involved in a task like knitting can help regulate strong emotions and calm your nervous system
Being in flow states reduces worry and rumination, increasing well-being
What is living GLAM?
GLAM includes living a life with Galleries, Libraries, Arts, and Museums.
Longevity: help keep us well, aid our recovery, and support longer lives better lived.
Resiliency: help meet major challenges facing health and social care including ageing, long-term conditions, loneliness, and mental health.
Community Connectedness: offer a range of non-clinical programs. Some are well-being
programs helping communities with preventative lifestyles and others are early intervention support for mental health difficulties. Such programs can reduce pressure on money in the health service and social care.
