Weekly Wellbeing Focus – Mind-Body Habits / Mental & Physical Health

Welcome to the Weekly Wellbeing Focus. The focus for this week is  Mind-Body Habits / Mental & Physical Health

Parent Wellbeing:  To enjoy a healthy state of wellbeing you need to have optimism and hope for the future which relies on: goals, which guide your actions, pathways which are ways to achieve your goals and motivation, which activates your pathways. Think about how you are developing each of these optimism and hope components.

The mind-body connection is about how our physical wellbeing is closely related to our mental health. A change in one causes a change in the other. For example, when students are feeling under pressure from things such as, social media, relationships, self-image or studies, they go into fight or flight and their bodies rev up for action. This response is meant for only short periods of time.

The 21st century is both fast paced and high tech with 24/7 devices which are consuming our young people and causing them to feel the fight or flight response for extended periods of time. This situation can cause them to feel over stressed, have increased negative mind chatter, increased bad habits, have relationship issues, increased physical health problems and exhaustion. All of these problems weaken their immune system making them much more susceptible to illness.

To address this, we need to encourage students to engage in mindfulness activities to flush the excess brain chemicals causing the problems out of their systems. To be effective, mindfulness activities must have three components: pattern – do the same thing, control – concentrating to master doing the pattern, and repetition – doing it over and over.
Simple, but effective mindfulness activities include colouring in and doing boring things like brushing their teeth thoughtfully.

Acknowledgement: Rath & Hassed

Students have discussed these things during this week’s focus:

Jake McIntosh
Assistant Head of Secondary – Wellbeing