Maintaining your health and wellness is important throughout the year and especially relevant as we navigate COVID-19. Navigating multiple roles and responsibilities as a student, family member, friend, and professional can make it difficult to find time for your own self-care and well-being. This summer, we’ll be sharing themes each month that promote wellness. This month will be focused on the mind-body connection to wellness. July will be focused on connection to ourselves and others and August will be focused on stress management, as you gear up for a strong fall semester. We know that your time is limited and valuable, so each month we’ll share a list of key resources that help you take action based on each theme. You’ll find live programming, on-demand resources, and a few suggestions about how to start maintaining and improving your well-being.
June: the Mind-Body Connection to Wellness
Have you ever noticed that you experience more energy and focus when you’ve established a good exercise routine or intentionally noticed the small things in life you’re thankful for? There is strong research to show that training our brains and our bodies — think eating, sleeping, and exercising — has a big impact on our overall well-being. Try out some new practices based on this month’s resources:
Live Programming
- Campus recreation classes: Establish a fitness routine with your fellow Penn Staters by attending virtual live and on-demand classes.
- Life Hacks: Learn coping and stress management strategies every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 3:30 p.m.
- Virtual Health Promotion and Wellness events: Attend events like Wellness Wednesdays and Yoga and Meditation.
On-Demand Resources
- Get information on setting routines for yourself and other general coping strategies.
- Implement mindfulness tactics in your daily life.
- Quick Mindfulness Strategies
- Neural Self-Hacking (video)
- Learn about “savoring” and how to express gratitude.
- What is Savoring? (article)
- Practice Gratitude (video and article)
- Try out wellness tools.
Action Challenges
- What’s a habit or goal related to well-being that you want to work toward? Create a goal on You@PSU today and get started.
- For one week, complete the 6 Daily Questions to Ask Yourself During Quarantine (one of the On-Demand Resources above).
- Keep a gratitude journal for the month and write down one thing you are grateful for each day. During that moment, try pausing for 15–30 seconds to savor the experience.
- Sign up now and start training for the Virtual Firecracker 5K! You can do this as a team or as an individual and be matched up with other World Campus students to have some accountability buddies.
- Log some active hours for Penn State during the 2020 Recreation Movement challenge, a competition between universities to be the most active, by tracking hours of activity and using a database of live and recorded fitness classes from more than 40 universities.
