In this issue: gratitude and Frozen attitude, or Elsa.
Week 5: All the feels edition.
Tritons: for the next couple weeks, we’re going to steer a bit more toward mental health, joy, and gratitude. Please find some suggestions and tactics, below, that we hope you find helpful.
We are so very grateful for you. - Ed.
Feel it, don't conceal it.
Now is the perfect time to embrace mindfulness, but that doesn’t mean ignoring your feelings. The past year has been marked by anger, fear, and grief, and it’s important to acknowledge and address — rather than pretending that the COVID never bothered you, anyway.
Let it grow.
And experience some better living through plants. Horticultural therapy is the practice of gardening to improve mental and physical health, and it’s rooted(!) in the substantiated concept that being with nature can help people live longer, healthier lives.
The journal is the destination.
We know that it's important to analyze and learn from the negatives in our lives (oh, hi 2020), but it's become increasingly possible to dwell too much on what goes wrong—and not enough on what's going right. Keeping a gratitude journal forces us to pay attention to the good things in life that we might otherwise take for granted.
Do you even lift spirits, bro?
Exercising doesn’t just do physical wonders, it actually builds new brain cells and encourages holistic well-being, according to neuroscientists. Start with some easy exercises you can do in your space, on your time.
You are not throwin' away your shot.
Help make history by volunteering to distribute vaccines at one of the UC San Diego Vaccination Super Stations. Medical and non-medical volunteers are needed to effectively vaccinate thousands of people in our community each day.
Do it before the 'gram.
Deserve a break from that midterm study sesh? Rewarding yourself with five minutes (OK, an hour) of scrolling through IG could be sabotaging your productivity. It’s called context switching, and it can cost you up to 23 minutes at-a-time. Here’s how to reclaim your attention span.
As you do your weekly COVID tests. For every student who completes a perfect 10/10 tests this quarter (one each week), we will donate $50 up to a total of $500K to the Basic Needs Hub on campus.
