72. Maintaining Balance

How can faculty and students maintain a healthy lifestyle while managing their stressful workloads? In this episode, Dr. Amy Bidwell joins us to discuss strategies that faculty and students can use to create a more productive learning environment. Amy is an associate professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Wellness at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: How can faculty and students maintain a healthy lifestyle while managing their stressful workloads? In this episode, we discuss strategies that faculty and students can use to create a more productive learning environment.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

John: Our guest today is Dr. Amy Bidwell, an associate professor in the Department of Health Promotion and Wellness at the State University of New York at Oswego. Welcome, Amy.

Amy: Thank you, John.

John: How can faculty and students maintain a healthy lifestyle while managing their stressful workloads? In this episode, we discuss strategies that faculty and students can use to create a more productive learning environment.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are… Amy, are you drinking tea?

Amy: I do not have tea this morning.

Rebecca: That’s disappointing. Are you drinking anything?

Amy: I am drinking water.

Rebecca: That sounds healthy.

Amy: It is very healthy.

John: I have pineapple ginger green tea.

Rebecca: I have my good old English Afternoon. Faculty and professional staff have regularly asked for professional development related to work-life balance. And you’ve done some workshops for us on this topic that have been wildly popular. Faculty have many demands on their time and attention…. from students and teaching to colleagues and committees to family and personal obligations. So if we’re so far out of balance, how do we get back into balance?

Amy: Well, Rebecca, that’s actually pretty interesting because I fall out of balance quite a bit and I would say that the key is that people don’t understand… they need to take time for themselves. We schedule all these things into our day, we’re constantly running around here and there, we forget to stop and smell the roses. And it’s interesting because you can actually be so much more efficient if you actually just take time to just sit back and relax and enjoy the moment and there’s actually a lot of books that I read. Jon Kabat Zinn talks all about being in the moment. We’re going from place to place. Some of us have an hour plus commute, and what are we doing during that commuting? We’re thinking about the zillions of things that we have to do. And this book is really cool and I read it 20 plus years ago, and he has since redone it, but if you actually focus on what you’re doing in that very moment… So for instance, think of all that free time we would have if we actually utilized our driving time or something as simple as our walking time. If we can just focus on that moment… what we’re doing at that moment. So if you focus on the actual act of driving, or the act of washing dishes,or walking to class, it actually frees your brain up. It’s called in brain psychology, the “agile mind.” So the agile mind is being able to go from this kind of high stress workload to quickly this resting state in our brain. And so if we as faculty, and staff, and students, and so on, can really focus on changing our brain states more efficiently, I think it really will help us just calm down and try to get in what we need for the day. Like I said, instead of us rushing to get to the next point, if we really just focus on what we’re doing at that moment. It actually makes us much more efficient.

John: And one of the things you could be doing at those moments is listening to podcasts like this one. [LAUGHTER] …..But actually taking that downtime is helpful. It lets you consolidate new information you’ve picked up, as well as just being relaxing

Amy: Right! I think our lives in general are just going 100 miles an hour all the time and that’s why we are so stressed… because we don’t give our brains a chance to relax and it’s obviously easier said than done. So again, just using that tip of listening to podcasts in the car instead of crazy music, or putting the phone away or the electronics away for just five minutes to give our brain a chance to rest. So, again, it’s easy for me to say, do this, do that, but I practice it myself. I really do. And it just takes five minutes. When was the last time you actually drove in your car with no noise? Maybe just this podcast but no noise at all; no radio, take the phone off… it will make the rest of your day that much more efficient. It really does… and it sounds kind of corny, but it’s true.

Rebecca: I don’t know the last time I did that it was freezing rain and I was really focused on not dying, but…. [LAUGHTER]

Amy: But what you were focused on something… that’s good. Next time focus on your breathing, focus on the snowflakes falling. It sounds really odd, but let me tell you, it really helps us maintain our stress levels.

Rebecca: Faculty sometimes have particular stressful times. Going up for tenure and promotion, for example, or part-time faculty who may have multiple positions and they’re commuting back and forth multiple schools and trying to balance this big workload and not having job security. What can we do when stress levels are particularly high? I think the example that you gave before was kind of that constant day-to-day stress that we can focus, but what about these like really intense moments of stress?

Amy: Well, coming from a faculty that just went through the tenure process and a faculty that has been on search committees so I’ve seen it all. And we all— just like our students—we have that up and down as the semester goes. And it’s really funny we tell our students this, to not wait until the last minute, but imagine if us as faculty didn’t wait until the last minute to do our stuff. As our semester progresses and I think I see this a lot in the tenure process. I think one thing that helped me is I looked at every year as its own entity. And I didn’t look at it as “I can kind of slack year one and two, just focus on my teaching,” and then all of a sudden it’s year five and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I really need to get this research done.” So us,as faculty, really not procrastinating ourselves, putting it into our calendar. One thing that I do that’s very helpful is on Thursdays I don’t teach and I don’t schedule any meetings and from 8 a.m. until say, 3:45—and that’s when my daughter gets off the bus—I block it off and it just says Oswego and that means research and/or grading. We don’t work efficiently as human beings by doing little bit here, 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there. And so as somebody that’s moving all over the place, and really trying to grasp that relationship between academics and scholarship and service, just taking a day out of your week in your calendar that specifically says, “Okay, today I’m going to work on my grant, next Thursday it’s going to be a grading day. The following Thursday, I’m going to have all my meetings lined up with potential collaborators.” But I really find that trying to incorporate it an hour here or an hour there, it doesn’t make you efficient because… think of it… by the time you get into your office, shut the door, turn the computer on, get done checking your text messages and all that, you’ve lost 25 minutes. And I tell people in all of the realms of areas that I’ve worked in, “You need to schedule your own time, you need to schedule your research, you need to schedule your scholarship, you need to schedule even your service. You can’t just fit it in here and there.” And I think that helps in something as simple as scheduling 10 minutes of downtime for your brain; if that’s what you need to do, put it in your calendar. I think this day and age it’s so easy because we have all these electronics, we can actually use this to our advantage. It beeps, “Okay, I need 10 minutes to myself. Everybody out of my office, I need to breathe.”

John: What about some of the issues that students face? Because they may not have as much control over the timing of the pressure and so forth?

Amy: That’s a great question John. And I started to teach a new class this past fall “Bounce onto Campus.” And the purpose of the class is just how do incoming students manage the day to day changes that occur in a college setting. And going back to your question before about how do faculty survive this whole concept of getting through their hurdles and their obstacles, students have the same things and it’s really the same techniques but for my students, for SUNY Oswego students, what I tell them is first and foremost, and I did this in my class the first week, they all had to come in with a calendar, you know, a planner— and I was actually surprised at the amount people that still use paper calendars, I’m very electronic. But they all came in and we took all their syllabi, and we wrote in all their assignments for the whole 15 weeks. Which, right there was a huge eye-opener because almost looks like they had nothing for two weeks, you know how it is… nothing for two weeks, and then your midterm exam. Well, they’re thinking “Oh, I have nothing for two weeks.” But so what we did after this is we then went in and said “Okay, now I want you to look at your day and schedule in your day… I’m going to work on my ECO 101 homework from 2–4 pm. Even though I know I don’t have an exam until October 31st, or five or six weeks down the road, I have that actually planned into my schedule.” And so my students found that extremely helpful. Another thing, there’s actually a lot of apps that you can use that will actually turn off the internet. And so I taught my students… actually they taught me “Okay, what does your evening look like? Are you in your room on your computer doing your work, and then all of a sudden, you feel the need to get on social media?” Well, these apps will turn all that off, so you can’t. And so we talked about those apps and how to utilize them and they actually use them so I think between laying out their whole schedule in their planner for 15 weeks, and then within the 15 weeks plan out their study time right in there. It actually worked really well. And then what we did also was re-evaluated it mid-semester and we looked at their mid-semester grades and we looked at the study habits and the students feedback was that they found just writing in their planner “go to library” huge. I think anyone would agree with me that the biggest no-no for college students is to go back to their dorm rooms in between classes because what do we see? We see that cozy comfy bed that’s calling out our name so you want to take a nap, and next thing you know, you slept through your library time. I would say for students, incoming students as far as stress… planning it out… you have got to plan it out.

Rebecca: In addition to time-management issues, what are some of the other struggles that students have when they’re away from home for the first time and become responsible for their own health and wellness?

Amy: Well, that’s really interesting, because this is the first time I’ve ever worked with first-year students. And what an eye-opener because I guess my experience in college was… I didn’t experience a lot of homesickness, and I was about two and a half hours away, but we have so many students that are from so far away. So a couple things. One, the biggest issue is you walk into this environment and it’s all-you-can-eat buffet, two, three times a day. And so that’s one thing that the students really struggled with. We spent a lot of time not necessarily condoning eating certain things, but planning what you’re going to eat before you go into the dining hall, knowing that you essentially can eat anything you want, you don’t have anybody hovering over you. And so I had my upperclassmen take the students to the dining hall, and we actually had discussions about, “Okay, what would your plate look like?” And so just opening up their minds about being more in tune to what they were eating… as far as the same thing when we drive and we have no idea of how we got to point A to point B because we’re focusing on so many other things. I tell them, “Be mindful when you eat. Don’t just eat anything that you can get your hands on, because it’s all you can eat.” We have a pretty intense conversation about managing the dining halls as a first-year student. They opened my eyes up to “late-night.” I wasn’t really sure what “late-night” was for the first few years I was here. “Late night”… I can explain it as like after-hours dining, I suppose. And I think the purpose of it is for people that missed dinner, but what I see is students that had dinner that want a late-night snack. It’s not necessarily the healthiest and I will be the first to say I don’t think we need to get rid of unhealthy food. I think we need to just educate people on moderation and when to eat it. So we had a nice discussion about if you’re going to go to late night for the social setting, what can you eat? And how much of it can you eat? I think the diet is the big issue for incoming first-year students. And there’s two other things. One is the social anxiety, you don’t know anyone and if you’re lucky, maybe you do know a few people from your high school, but you don’t know anyone. And so in our first-year course, it was a first-year Signature Course, we had an opportunity as a group to do some extracurricular activities and they got to know each other outside of class… that I think helped a lot to a point where towards the end of the semester, I would walk into class and I couldn’t get them to calm down. Literally, they were talking about their evenings and that has helped, I think, socially. We talked about the importance of getting out of your dorm room, getting involved with extracurricular activities more for a social way of just getting away from the studying, but to get to know people and to meet new people. And then I think the third thing, as I’ve already addressed a little bit, was so many students are surprised at the amount of workload they have in college. If I had to take a poll, I’d say 90% of my class said that either high school was way too easy or college is way too hard, but they didn’t feel like they were prepared for the workload and from what I gather it’s more the independent workload. It’s a matter of they have this exam that’s five weeks down the road and yet nothing due in between. In high school you would have assignments due every week to keep you on task, now it’s, “You have an exam in five weeks and it’s up to you to do well on it.” And so we talked about… again…going into their planner and putting in there every day or every week “Library Time: Study ECO 101,” or whatever class you have. So those tools helped them a lot, but I would say those three things, managing the dining halls and the food, finding friends, and that kind of goes along with missing their friends at home, and then managing their study time.

John: One of the things I think faculty can do for that, and you’ve mentioned ECO 101, is in every economics class, I believe, there’s weekly assignments that are due. So it’s scaffolded. And so they don’t have to worry about waiting to study. Basically, their work in most economics classes, and I think a growing number of classes in general, have some sort of scaffolding to basically ensure that students are regularly working on the material.

Amy: I agree, and I know compared to my academic experience as a student it was three exams in a whole semester and then that’s it. Whereas I feel like SUNY Oswego… as really the help of CELT and all of that… with learning how to scaffold your semester. I know I have assignments due every week. They’re usually low-stakes assignments, it could be just a two points for class participation where they, instead of me taking the time to take attendance, I will just ask them one or two questions, they write it out, and I get it back, I get the attendance for the day. I know a lot of people do Kahoot and using clickers, but that keeps students engaged, but also keeps them wanting to be prepared on a day-to-day basis.

Rebecca: I think that accountability makes a big difference.

Amy: Yes, yes. And, you know, I do grade them or I don’t grade them. And if I do grade them, it’s only worth a few points. So if they miss class, it’s not the end of the world. They can’t make it up. But the students know that when they walk into class, there’s an expectation that they’ve reviewed the notes from the previous lesson.

John: Going back to things like procrastination. One thing that behavioral economists have found is that commitment devices can be really helpful. And you mentioned that finding friends and making connections can help but that can also be used to help I think, encourage persistence towards goals, which could be any number of goals.

Amy: Yes, I definitely agree. You know, something as simple as, for instance, if you were looking at like a physical activity goal. Any brand of activity monitor, you can sync it up with a friend or you can watch a friend on the app to see how they’re doing for the day. I know I have a couple friends on my activity monitor app, which I don’t pay attention to too much, but I do know that if I’m kind of feeling a little lazy that day, that l’ll kind of click over to see what they did. And I’m like, “Oh, they have 10,000 steps in today, now I have to get moving.” So that, from a physical activity perspective, really helps me. And then I do agree something as simple as social networks… I think the social media can kind of be a downfall sometimes, but I think we can use it in a positive way. For instance, going out with a friend to the lake and taking a picture of yourself in front of the lake. That’s a good thing. You know, you’re not showing off yourself you’re showing off the fact that you’re socializing with a friend, you’re taking time to enjoy life. And then I’m also a really big fan of the different software that all sync together. So if I write it to do list down, it’ll cue me on all my devices to say, “Okay, let’s stop. Let’s take five minutes to myself. Or let’s go to the gym.” Technology, I think, gets a bad rap. I think we can really use it to our advantage by networking with each other and doing some light-hearted competition with each other with the different apps, especially the physical activity apps. But again, social networking isn’t really as bad as it seems. You know, our students… that’s how they socialize and you know, it’s okay if they want to talk about going out that night, but they’re socializing. And so maybe bringing it back more to say, you know, “I went to this event on campus, I went to this showing of a particular movie. This was my experience, next time can you come with me?”

John: … and if you have any exercise goals or study goals, agreeing to meet at a certain time for a certain while, can help encourage each person because you don’t want to let your friends down.

Amy: Yes.

John: I remember we had an associate director at the teaching center not too long ago, who often would go to the gym along with a couple of friends. And if one of them didn’t show up, pictures would show up saying, “We’re missing you.” [LAUGHTER]

Amy: [LAUGHTER] Yes, yes. Another perfect use of social media, I completely agree. In our first-year experience class, we actually did a lot of that where it was more studying. You know, we only had a class of 19 people but we realized that there were kids that were taking the same courses and then by the end of the semester they had study partners with each other… study groups… and I knew just by coming into class and overhearing conversations that so and so didn’t show up that night. And now that person hears about it the next day, and they feel almost guilty, and they respond by coming the next time. For my BOUNCE class, we took them to the gym. We showed them how to use the equipment and how to get involved with different classes. And we did it as a group because, as we know as human beings, most human beings can be motivated by others. There’s that extrinsic motivation, knowing that that person is there waiting for you, then you need to go and be there. And I think studying and exercise are two very easy examples. Exercising with a buddy and setting up study times with friends in the library or wherever.

Rebecca: It works for faculty too.

Amy: …Yes..

Rebecca: Our accessibility fellows group is meeting weekly for an hour and we’re getting tons done collaboratively, but also individually because we have that time set aside. I think early on we had a bad weather day and people ask like, “Hey, are we still meeting?” like, “Yeah, I’m here already.” You know, and everybody showed up.[LAUGHTER]

Amy: [LAUGHTER] It’s the social setting. I definitely agree that, from a faculty perspective, we have so many groups on campus. You know, something as simple as book club, the amount of people that show up for that type of stuff. I think in technology now I’m noticing many more people are using Zoom. But knowing that they’re there and seeing their face up on the screen, it gives you that feeling of collaboration. And from a faculty perspective, I think we sometimes get lost in our own little worlds, we get lost in our grading. And again, you know, going back to what we were talking about earlier with the tenure lines and how to navigate the stress related to that, another piece of advice would be, collaborating with others, but making the time to do that. And I think making it regular scheduled time, like it sounds like you guys have, which is, you know, at a certain time, every week you’re meeting at the library or at the cafe to spend two hours discussing your research, or whatever it is. I completely agree with that. I think people get stuck in their own little office and forget that we have technology… if the weather is bad, you can Zoom in or whatever. I think that helps tremendously.

Rebecca: A lot of times we think of like, faculty do this in a group or students can do this. But the class that I’m currently teaching is a travel class to the Czech Republic and my students and myself and another group of students and another faculty member who are all traveling together, are all in an app together to learn some language skills….

Amy: Oh, wow.

Rebecca: …And so there’s leaderboards and what have you, and it provides some friendly competition. And so every week when we meet as a class, I’d say like, “Oh, good job,” whoever, you know…

Amy: Right.

Rebecca: …got the leaderboard, the faculty joke a little bit about like, okay, we’ll keep our third place. [LAUGHTER]

Amy: [LAUGHTER] I think there’s so much opportunity to collaborate within the economic environment with students and faculty. We worked on a study a few years ago, or a project I would call it more less, where we had Brazilian students here. Their faculty came and worked with me and I worked with his students and my students and we all learned Portuguese together. Well, my students learned Portuguese, I just sat in the back of the classroom thinking how are they doing this, but they did an amazing job. But it was faculty and students in the same classroom from two completely different countries learning different languages and we were all equal. And it was such a great experience that I wish we actually more of that.

Rebecca: We’ve talked a lot about healthy habits and things that we can all take advantage of. What role do faculty have in helping students develop those kinds of habits?

Amy: We have a role. And one of the projects that my students did in my BOUNCE class was to find ways to incorporate physical activity and stress management skills in the classroom. And it wasn’t just my classroom, but it was if they were in another classroom, how could they tell their professor, we need five minutes. And a situation that came to my attention this year is, my daughter’s class, she’s in fifth grade, and her teacher is very much into the importance of physical activity and stress management for brain function. And so every hour, they actually have five minute brain breaks. And my thought process with faculty is if a teacher with a classroom full of 27 ten-year olds can get them to do five minutes and calm down and get right back on task, then I think a classroom of 20-25 twenty- year olds can do it as well. Some of the things that they came up with was to, even in a 55- minute class, halfway through have the instructor stop. And I did this in my class the other day, because you saw the eyes kind of getting a little lazy. And so they literally, we stood up, just walking slowly, five circles around the room… stopped… and went five in the other direction. They sat right back down, and it was like a whole different class. And so having the faculty understand that just like it’s hard for us to sit for 55 minutes or an hour and 20 minutes, to focus on one thing, it’s hard for them. And what’s wrong with actually giving them a five- or six-minute break in between. Sometimes I’ll actually have a break where I’ll say, “Go ahead. You have five minutes to check all your text messages, answer all calls, go to the bathroom.” Because I get sick of the students coming in and out of the classroom to go to the bathroom. And so I’m like, “Okay, let’s take five minutes to do this.” And then we start up again. And they’re like 100% on task. I think they respect you because you understand that they need that time. But then they perform better because they gave themselves a brain break. Just like all these activity monitors that tell us to get up and move after 50 minutes. It is so important. And there’s a lot of research to show that… it’s not a lot, it’s an enormous amount of research now… that says, physical inactivity is the new smoking. If we can get up and move for five or 10 minutes every hour we’re negating that issue of sedentary activity. And so if our faculty and staff can understand the importance of getting our students up moving, there’s so much research to support their brain health. And in fact, there’s a couple studies in New Zealand in college students and in grade school that their standardized test scores have increased substantially since they started incorporating five-minute physical activity brain breaks into their day. And what they thought is, instead of spending an hour on math, you might only get 50 minutes in of math. But that 50 minutes is so much more efficient because the brain is working so much more efficiently. And so they’ve reduced the length of time they spend on these, say, math, science, English, whatever, and they spend less time on it, but they’re more efficient. As a professor, set an alarm after 40 minutes, “Okay, let’s stop.” I don’t need an alarm, I can just gauge it for my students, their brains are starting to falter a little bit. There’s nothing wrong with taking three or four minutes, tell them to “get up, switch seats.” I did this a couple semesters ago. In the middle of the class I had everyone get up, I was in the lecture hall, everyone get up and completely sit on the opposite side of the room. It’s amazing how their attention completely changed. Just like I use the example of if you are driving to work the same route every day and all of a sudden there’s a detour and you have to go a different way, all of a sudden you’re paying attention a little bit more. And so I noticed something as simple as switching their seats, having them switch it, so it’s not you forcing something on them. But that worked actually really well, it was kind of funny too. And then the next day they all came in those new seats.

Rebecca: Oh, that’s funny.

Amy: Yeah, it was great.

John: Students do tend, once they get into a seat, they tend to stay there. But there’s a lot of other activities like clicker questions…

Amy: Yes.

John: … or other things you can do, just to break up the class and and bring their attention back to focus. This discussion also reminds me that a lot of students have been using a Pomodoro technique where you have a timer or an app that gives you 25 minutes of focused attention. And then you take five minutes off to do something else and then go back and focus again.

Amy: Yes, I had the Student Academic Success specialist come into my first-year class and they taught them that. A lot of the students already did know it but there’s actually an app… the Pomodoro app, I don’t know the exact name of it. But I actually did it myself because my problem is, most of my students’ assignments are on Blackboard. And so I’ll be at home grading my papers, and then I last about five minutes and I get distracted, and I go on and start window shopping on the internet. And so I actually use it myself and from a faculty perspective, it makes me so much more efficient. So for the students it’s great. I learned so much about the different apps, there’s also one a time management app where the students can lay out exactly where they spend all of their time. And then they notice how many hours they actually have free. I know when I start to work with people from a physical activity perspective, what is the number one reason that people don’t exercise? They don’t have time. So I actually use this app where they actually fill in where their day is, and then they realize that there’s four hours where they’re really not doing anything. Instead of spending five minutes five times a day on social media, combine that all up, walk, and there’s your physical activity for the day

John: One other strategy, going back to behavioral economics, there’s a website called Stickk.com that Dean Karlin (a friend of mine) and some other economists put together where you make a commitment to do something and you post that. You give them your credit card number and then if you don’t meet your goal, a certain amount of money is deducted. You don’t have to put money up against it, but that’s strongly recommended. And the money could go to a charity, it could go to an organization…

Rebecca: You did that, right?

John: I did that, yeah.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: But what they actually recommend as being most effective is an anti-charity. You set a goal—they break it up into weekly segments—it could be exercising for a certain number of hours or studying a certain number of hours. It could be anything you want. They have some preset ones and then you can configure your own. You find someone who will verify that report, a weekly report, and then if you don’t meet it, money is taken out. So what they recommend is using an anti-charity where if, say you’re a liberal, money would go to the NRA if you don’t meet your goal, or to a Republican super PAC. If you’re relatively conservative, they recommend using something like the ACLU or a Democratic super PAC. And they found that that’s been fairly effective. There’s been a number of studies doing that.

Amy: That is absolutely amazing. That’s something that would work really well for me. I know there’s some apps and programs where if you check-in at a gym to exercise, I don’t know if you have to be there for a certain length of time, I don’t know exactly how it works, but you get money put back into an account. But I think any way to motivate somebody, whatever it is, I almost wonder if we could create something where you check into the library a certain number of times to study, where you meet with your study groups a certain number of times. I know in my BOUNCE class they have to set weekly goals and those goals are recorded in their online journals that I look at so I’m they’re kind of big brother, so to speak, watching over them. And the goals that these students have accomplished just knowing that I’m looking at it, that motivation helps. I remember when I first started running, I announced it on social media and it wasn’t to brag. It was to give myself that…

John: Well, it’s a commitment…it’s a commitment device… You stated it publicly.

Amy: It’s a commitment. Yes, I stated it publicly. So now I’m telling everybody out there, “I am really going to do this. I don’t care if you’re paying attention or reading this but knowing I just told the world that I’m going to exercise three times a week, now I’m going to do it.” And so… again, using social media to our advantage. And goal setting, however you do it, is huge. We do this in my BOUNCE class. We set goals every week, they have to enter this journal. I mean, in a way we’re doing that… we’re giving them points, graded points for completing their journal entry. There’s no way for me to say whether you’re doing it or not. I can’t tell if you really went to the gym those days. But I think eventually the student realizes that they’re only cheating themselves. And I tell them this all time in my class, “Don’t just write these goals out to get your five points. The point of the class is a behavior change.” And I’m thinking the students, they have appreciated this weekly goal setting so much. And I think using these different—I think you mentioned it’s called ClickIt—these different…

John: Stickk.com.

Amy: I think these different apps and technology use it in our favor. We have so much out there to use and I think we need to use it in our favor.

REBECA: The last thing I wanted to really ask you about is one of the things that I find that I end up having conversations with my students about is the fact that they actually need to sleep and eat.

Amy: Yes. We have in my BOUNCE class—like two weeks we talk about sleeping and eating. Again when we had the SASS people coming in, the Student Support Specialist… Academic Support Specialist, when they showed us these programs where you can record all of your time that you spend. What I was finding is—and what the students actually discovered—they thought they were up until one in the morning studying. No, they were up til one in the morning either on their phones or on the computer watching different movies. And so I actually get in my class, what we get involved with physiologically, what’s happening with your body, when you don’t sleep. Something as simple as that fretful cortisol hormone that is increased with lack of sleep and that causes your body to store fat. And so really, they look at their daily behavioral patterns and they start to actually schedule sleep into their calendar. And again, going back to some of those apps. There’s apps that turn off the phones and turn off the computers at a certain time, and the students are actually using it, which surprises me and then they come into class and it’s like a whole ‘nother person. It’s like, “Wow, you look so different when you actually get more than two hours of sleep.” And then after we navigate the sleep system, we discuss the importance of getting up just 10 minutes earlier and grabbing something to eat, even if it’s just a simple granola bar walking out the door. How important it is to fuel your body. I use the example of picture a fire, your metabolism is your fire. And as that nice big fire’s going throughout the day, it starts to slow down at night, and the way you have to grab that fire back up, is to throw logs on it, throw sticks on it. Same thing with your eating. When you wake up in the morning that fire has kind of died down. You need to throw some sticks on it to rev it back up. And so even if it’s, you know, 100 calorie snack here and there—I know people just sometimes hate to eat breakfast—but you cannot survive without sleep and without breakfast, whatever it is. Something…except candy. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Was there anything else that we wanted to make sure we discuss?

Amy: You know, I think overall if I wanted to just summarize everything that we chatted about from a faculty perspective and professional staff, taking time to live in the moment—I mentioned it in the very beginning—but if you could really just take five minutes every hour to just turn everything off and breathe, you will be so much more productive. And then scheduling in time chunks, very large chunks of time to get the research done, get the grading done, get the social collaboration in there, putting that into your schedule is huge. And then from a student perspective, scheduling into your planner your exams, your exams for the whole entire semester, and then putting right into your schedule time going to the library or going to the dining hall. We had people actually scheduling in lunch because they would forget to eat lunch. Scheduling in physical activity, whatever it is… planning. Just planning being present and participating. And then keeping in mind that technology can be our friend if it’s used in the right way.

John: We always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Amy: What is next? Well, there’s lots next. For one, I am offering a program, a BOUNCE now for adults, for faculty and staff that actually focuses on the eight dimensions of wellness. And we actually—I teach you the behavior change techniques needed to encompass all of this. And then from a student perspective, you can take BOUNCE for credit in the Spring. Anyone can take it. In the Fall, it’s just first-year students. And then if you wanted to really know what’s next, it’s to take five minutes for yourself.

John: Thank you.

Rebecca: Yeah, thank you so much.

Amy: Thank you. This was enjoyable.

[Music]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Kim Fisher, Chris Wallace, Kelly Knight, Joseph Bandru, Jacob Alverson. Brittany Jones, and Gabriella Perez.