We’ve all been there – you have a long night of duty, rushing around campus from one crisis to the next, and now you’re sitting at home, unwinding from the night. You might pop a favorite movie on (Shrek 2 was always my duty night comedown movie), eat a sweet treat (Cosmic Brownies have a different flavor at 4:00am, I swear by that), or take a long hot shower. Those are all practical and useful ways to take care of yourself, and they can help in their own ways. These are after all among the top self-care techniques prescribed to all of us. Heck, we often preach the same things to our students.
But are they that effective?
Sure, I can feel myself calming down when I engage in those activities. More often than not though, these routines offer merely a band-aid to the emotional intensity we just experienced. No matter how tasty that Cosmic Brownie is, no amount of treats will help me effectively process and grapple with seeing a resident experience an intense mental health crisis, or having a disgruntled resident scream every obscenity under the Sun at me. These commonly preached self-care techniques offer fleeting moments of calm, but they don’t help manage the deeply rooted emotions. That’s where mindfulness comes in.
For the last few years, I’ve been on a bit of a mindfulness journey. My institution hosts a class about mindfulness, wellness, and emotional resilience, and Student Affairs staff are welcome to teach recitations of the course. Prior to my engagement with the course material, I had a naive and misguided view of mindfulness, thinking it was no more than doing sunset yoga and eating granola (I’ll take my Cosmic Brownies instead, thank you very much). Instead, I found a holistic subject area that teaches you how to manage your emotional intensity, view the world in a grounded state, and better appreciate and understand your surroundings. It helps me navigate my personal life in a more clear lens, and serves as an instrumental tool in navigating the hard and heavy times in Residence Life.
As we have these larger conversations about self-care and Residence Life, mindfulness is a powerful tool that isn’t often raised in the conversation. To that end, I wanted to spend some time sharing some cursory information about mindfulness that I believe can really help professionals.
So what is mindfulness? Mindfulness is being aware of your present surroundings. It’s tuning in to your thoughts and feelings and emotions with a clear and undistracted mind. It’s a skill more than an activity, but there are plenty of activities to help with your mindfulness. In a world where we are hyper engaged and active, mindfulness encourages you to take a step back and just observe. An important component of mindfulness is being non-judgmental when you observe, too.
As I mentioned, there are certain mindfulness activities you can do to help practice being more mindful. Some of those skills include:
- Breathing Exercises: you can do something simple like just taking deep breaths in and deep breaths out. Or, you can do something like boxed breathing. For boxed breathing, you inhale a deep breath, count to five, exhale, and count to five again. Then repeat. While you are doing this, try to keep a clear head.
- Observing: one of the most basic, yet powerful, mindfulness activities is just observing what’s around you. In whatever room you are in, just look around and see what you notice. What’s on the walls? What color is the door? Is there anything outside of the window? Clear your mind as much as you can and just observe, and make sure you are doing so without judgement.
- Sensory Exercises: one of my favorite mindfulness activities is an exercise where you engage all five of your senses. To start, notice five things around you that you see. What are the objects? Again, just observe. Next, what are four things that you hear? Moving forward, what are three things that you can feel? I’m sure you can guess that you will then observe two things that you can smell. Finally, what’s one thing you can taste in your mouth? Feel free to switch up the order in which you use your senses.
A recommendation for these mindfulness activities is that you incorporate them into your daily life. These skills are often so simple to do, that you can do them practically anywhere with little time at all. Maybe on your walk to work, you can observe the sounds around you instead of listening to music or a podcast. Or if you’re riding the bus, you can do a quick breathing exercise. Mindfulness is like a muscle – the more you engage it, the stronger it grows.
By engaging in mindfulness activities in normal day to day life, you can help prepare yourself to be more grounded in stressful situations. In the middle of a high stress duty situation, if you can catch a free few seconds, observe your surroundings to help come down a bit. When you get back home, engage in some breathing exercises before you write your report. These activities can help you better focus your mind as you work to understand and process the intensity you just endured.
Mindfulness goes deeper than just observing and breathing skills as well. In more emotionally intense situations, there are various skills you can employ when you feel like your emotions are hijacking your mind. Some of those skills include:
- Reality Acceptance: reality acceptance encourages us to accept a situation as it is. Sometimes we feel like we can change the outcome of a scenario, or feel like some other force is going to change the outcome, when in reality, that won’t happen. By accepting the situation as it is, we can move forward.
- Example: you missed a step in your duty protocol. There’s unfortunately no going back and re-doing it. You have to accept the situation, learn from it, and move on.
- Check the Facts: sometimes, our emotions are incredibly heightened. We might feel extremely angry or upset, and start to exaggerate the situation. Checking the facts asks to observe the emotion you’re feeling, think about what prompted it, and think about if the triggering event warrants such a strong response.
- Example: a student gets a conduct referral from a duty incident and blames you, calling you unsupportive. You feel very upset by this, and feel like a bad professional. By checking the facts, you realize you followed all of your protocols and supported the student the best to your ability. You can’t control the emotions they’re feeling, and it shouldn’t make you feel like a bad professional.
This barely scratches the surface of the mindfulness world, as there are a multitude of resources, theories, skills, activities, and more that you can engage in. I would really encourage you to look at these skills to see what might benefit you and help you. Res Life is full of stressful and highly emotional situations. Routine self-care techniques can help, but mindfulness is a tool that allows us to really focus on sustained and in-depth emotional resilience.
