Why Schools Should Be Teaching Students What It Means to Manage their Energy
When a constant mobile dopamine drip (that’s your smartphone) combines with empty calories (i.e., processed food), a majority of time spent indoors, and a disregard for sleep, students today don’t even realize they are not functioning at full capacity. It’s time for schools to step in and get them up to speed.
Clearly, resilience and adaptability are skills we are all going to need in the years to come, two qualities that stem from being of sound mind and body. The idea of mens sana in corpore sano, Latin for "a healthy mind in a healthy body,” as a basic life precept is nothing new, dating at least as far back as pre-Socratic ancient Rome. I suspect that even when our lifespans were a lot shorter, the healthier your body and the sounder your mind, the quicker you outran the lion and the easier you caught the mammoth. It’s rather key for survival. Why would that be so different today?
What’s missing from our education is that resilience—our ability to bounce back—improves when you optimize energy management using three levers:
Physiology
Mindset and emotional control
Environment
With energy at its full potential, and the resulting resilience, people have what it takes to face whatever challenges lie ahead as their best self.
Teaching future leaders cutting-edge concepts stemming from positive psychology, performance science, mindfulness, and optimism will provide them with tools to build resilience.
The State of Affairs
Yet, even in France, so reputed for the good life, students today are exhausted (60.8%), stressed (59.4%) and have trouble sleeping (45.4%), according a 2016 survey. Another study showed that 82% of students at UK universities suffer from stress and anxiety.
It’s no wonder than that when Yale University Professor Laurie Santos created a course called "Psychology and the Good Life," it became the most popular class in the school’s 300+-year history. It covers the psychology and neuroscience that drives happiness and challenges students to change their behavior, based on the premise that happiness and contentedness stem from repeatedly doing simple tasks.
The Basics
The idea of repeatedly doing simple tasks applies to happiness and to health and wellness in general. But what simple tasks? More and more, wellness experts concur that, yes, the basics of sound nutrition, physical activity, quality sleep, and emotional intelligence—which contribute exponentially to overall well-being—apply to everyone, yet the actual details of how you implement them are individual.
The Stuff of Resilience
There are four basic ingredients to resilience:
Awareness, which is the ability to step back and notice what is going on around you and inside your head.
Interpreting the events that are going on, rather than simply reacting.
Working with others to meet the challenges that we face.
Having the mental and physical fitness to be able to cope with the challenges without becoming ill.
The tools to increase resilience also give access to greater creativity, better decision-making, enhanced memory, and smoother interpersonal relations. Again, all skills our future leaders can benefit from learning now.
Teaching institutions can help their students by introducing the concept of overall mind-body self-care, allowing them to understand the principles and have a methodology for finding what they need individually along with tools to implement behavioral change.
Hacks for Students and Teachers
It’s hard to choose a starting point. Yet, since I have to, here is a short list:
Meditate. By far the best investment in time anyone can make. Any kind of meditation will do. Ten minutes a day is enough to change a lives and minds.
Learn about happiness. Take the Yale Happiness Course online. It’s free.
Prioritize brain health. Follow Jim Kwik, a world-renowned brain champion, and learn to learn faster and care for your brain.