New Beginnings
The new school year is a time for new beginnings. It’s a time of possibility, re-evaluation, and reconnection. This can be exciting and inspiring, or it can cause some worry and stress. This stress can be felt in the body as tiredness, belly pain, headache, or trouble focusing.
When these concerns appear, it’s useful to look carefully for a root cause. Sometimes symptoms of low energy, sleep trouble, or disorganization have a clear infectious or biochemical cause, but other times they are caused by our life experiences. Our brain receives messages from our surroundings and conveys those to the heart, muscles, and organs. Thoughts can guide the body to fight, flight, and freeze, or they can inspire rest, relaxation, and recovery.
It is normal and natural to experience stress, and some stress is healthy for the body and mind. Just like lifting weights, running, and cycling present healthy stress for our muscles and bones, mastering academic challenges or meeting new friends can grow our mind and spirit.
The key is to become aware of what produces healthy stress, how to balance the work with the rest, and the growth with the recovery. The new school year and the turning of the seasons from the activity and movement of spring and summer, to the retreat of fall and winter, present an opportunity to build strategies for managing and maintaining our well being in the face of dynamic routines.
The Zenith Wellness Coaching program helps us assess 6 areas of well being - physical, social, emotional, intellectual, environmental, and occupational/financial. By examining how each category contributes to our overall well being, we can build on our strengths and bolster our challenges.
For example, as the academic year starts, we might have trouble managing sleep. After a summer with open schedules, beach vacations, or day camps, its hard to get used to getting up in the morning. On top of that, daylight hours shorten even as social and academic demands increase. Getting to bed at night is harder when projects must be completed, tests come around, and social and sports time pick up.
Recently I’ve met with young people who return home from school or college, exhausted at 3 pm. They feel they must take a nap, so they sleep through the afternoon and get up at dinner time. After dinner, they feel they need to stay up to complete homework and study for tests, so they drink caffeine and sugar in coffee or energy drinks. Then they can’t fall asleep, so they look at their BeReal or log onto discord for some gaming, and suddenly it’s 3 am, but they have to wake at 6 to get to school. So they go through the next day in a caffeine daze, like a vampire just hoping to get through until the next cat nap and respite of Roblox or TikTok videos.
Since our bodies are not meant to sleep during daylight and wake during darkness, eventually our body chemistry becomes unbalanced - and so do our moods and appetites. Lack of daylight exposure, decreased healthy physical activity, stimulants like caffeine, sugar, or on-screen content, all confuse the mind, sending signals for sleepiness in the day and wakefulness at night. A cycle of dysfunctional habits builds on itself. This leads to mental and physical problems.
But there is good news! Cycles of healthy habits also build on themselves. When youth are able to commit to sleeping from 11 pm to 6 am, spending at least 20 minutes outside in daylight early in the day, and avoiding caffeine and other stimulants after 3 pm, sleep improves. Depression and anxiety scores improve. Social and family interactions stabilize, and academic goals are reached.
Something as basic as sleep can affect every other part of your well being, and vice versa.
Using the Zenith Wellness assessment to identify which parts of ourselves are thriving and which need some support, we can deepen self-awareness, and balance stress consciously with rest and recovery.
Here’s to a healthy transition to the autumn season. May we harvest the light of spring and the joy of summer as we spin into autumn, sharing the gifts of our growth with ourselves and all those around us.
