Dear MDECOE and greater community,
Dear MDECOE Community,
Summer can offer a wonderful time to re-envision who we are and how we are doing. In a Psychology Today blog, Vernita Perkins and Leonard Jason talk about how summer provides a “mental wellness opportunity.” The authors contend that summer can offer the space and time for self-development, self-awareness, and self-reflection. Below is a brief summary of their ideas.
Self-development-Summers can be re-envisioned into a time of building deeper, healthier relations with others, and doing the healing of self-development. Self-development helps reduce avoidant activities like being in denial about what is going on in the world… and can become your personal human toolkit for living a meaningful life, and not just surviving in a bubble of denial, mental stressors, and harmful behaviors.
Self-awareness- The definitions of self-awareness are evolving, partly because self-awareness requires self-examination, an inward activity, while so much in our society encourages us to focus on outward appearances, external acquisition, and socio-economic status. We have been socialized to care about our outward appearance—believing it increases desirability and worth. Self-awareness also causes us to challenge long-held and often harmful belief systems. It gives us agency over ourselves and our lives, which can be in direct opposition to the ways things are and have been for those who require control over others. Self-awareness is vital, enabling you to know yourself so thoroughly that you can make the most informed decisions (Dishon, Oldmeadow, Critchley, & Kaufman, 2017). A first step in becoming self-aware is developing comfort with the discomfort of examining and exploring your thoughts, words, emotions, and actions.
Self-reflection-is the daily—even multiple times a day—reflective pause to evaluate how you exist and interact in the world. Most of us have had to model the behavior of those who birthed us or were our caregivers, along with the larger social context. We have, out of necessity, complicity, or nurturing, built ourselves from the actions and beliefs of people around us and their beliefs and actions. Now is the time for self-reflection; particularly as the pandemic has increased levels of exhaustion and frustration, mental health is an important space to occupy and explore.
The authors conclude, “We live in a world that demands immediate results due to a constant sense of urgency and distraction. In the process of removing mental health stigmas and improving mental wellness, look for the positive signs of overall wellbeing for yourself and others, honestly and authentically.”
To read more, go to https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-mental-health-revolution/202108/what-did-you-do-your-summer
For a list of other self-care options, please see our COE self-care website for resources for faculty, staff, students, and the community at:
https://www.csun.edu/eisner-education/self-care/articles-information-self-care
May your summer be a wonderful time for self-care and self-development.
Warmly,
Shari