Second Healthy Campus Summit focuses on wellness for everyone

When the Healthy Campus Initiative kicked off about five years ago, it was a big idea without much behind it – a headline without a story – said Brian Rose, vice president for student affairs, as he welcomed students, faculty and staff to the second Healthy Campus Summit on Nov. 1 in the Mandela Room.

“But five years later, we’ve done quite a bit. We’re an inaugural member of the Partnership for a Healthier America and have fulfilled our 23 standards, we have a health and wellness learning community, we are a tobacco-free campus, we have signs marking walking and running trails and much more. Today is a point of launch, not a capstone,” he said, “as we think of the possibilities around new academic programs and initiatives including the new Master in Public Health, the School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, the expansion of the Decker School of Nursing and the partnerships we can develop. That’s what I can be talking to you about five years from now.”

“Being healthy is hard,” President Harvey Stenger said. “That’s my message. We are sometimes role models and students might look at us and say, ‘They’re sort of healthy,’ but we all know as we grow older, it’s harder to stay healthy.

“We’re lucky because our campus has embraced wellness and because we put it in our strategic plan,” he added. “We see this as an initiative we have to be really good at. We’ve built on the Healthy Campus Initiative and put it into our curriculum and now we’re expanding further. We have to be proud of that, but we can’t rest on it. What’s next? Every year 4,000 students leave and 4,000 more come in, waiting for us to help cure them of their bad habits. It never ends.”

The summit included two keynote speakers and several breakout sessions, including Bark 9 therapy dogs, a flu shot clinic, a healthy cooking class, a walking meditation session and a session on the Two Rivers Greenway.

Dr. Michael Finkelstein, MD, known as The Slow Medicine Doctor®, gave the morning keynote. He is the executive director of The Slow Medicine Foundation and teaches the course Balancing Health and Success as an adjunct for the Department of Health and Wellness Studies.

Finkelstein’s keynote, “The Evolving Landscape of Higher Education: Considerations for the Impact on personal and institutional success” addressed the questions, “What is health? What are you trying to achieve?”

“The subject of health isn’t simply academic,” Finkelstein said. “In the end, we want to prepare people to do something in the world.”

Finkelstein reviewed what makes a good learner – a healthy student is a good student – and what makes a good teacher – a healthy teacher is a good teacher.

“For students, health and being a good learner are inextricably linked,” Finkelstein said. “And when teachers embrace that a healthy teacher is a good teacher, the healthier that person is the more they can do.”

Finkelstein defines health based on the seven spokes of his Slow Medicine Wheel of Health, which includes mental/emotional health, life’s purpose work, relationship to others, relationship to the divine, community, relationship to the natural world and physical body. Each spoke, he said, is part of the whole of wellness.

“For example, if a person is good at physical health, but has terrible relationships, I’m not calling that person healthy,” he said. “As a physician one of the privileges I have is to be with people who are sick or dying. They are able to express wisdom in a way that is hard to ignore. People who died well had beautiful relationships, and though their bodies were giving out, I believe they were pretty healthy. The best barometer of that is quality of their relationships.”

With the stress that being a teacher can bring, campuses need to do more to support the cognitive, emotional, spiritual and social intelligence by introducing organizational and individual interventions to help minimize stressful situations, Finkelstein said.

With more and more students needing mental health services, colleges struggle to keep up and something needs to be done, he added.

“Anxiety, depression, stress, family, school are the top five mental health concerns and the first three are the symptoms of when people have family and school issues,” Finkelstein said. “These are important because they can be addressed every day. It’s not adequate to just counsel; there are a host of things to be brought together as you have through the Healthy Campus Initiative.

“What we really want is to explore beyond the details into why health and wellness matter,” he said. “What enlightens people and makes it possible to wake up when it’s cold and chilly and dark and make something happen? We go back to the Wheel of Health and what makes the Healthy Campus Initiative work.

“I love this initiative,” he said. “It’s an incredible place to be part of and to grow with you. It really feels good to help something. You can help someone have a better quality of life. The humanitarian subject is within our reach and it’s appropriate for us to reach out and offer to those around us, particularly in class and walking around campus.”

The second keynote – “Thriving in College: Achieving Success in School and Beyond” – was delivered in the afternoon by Dan Lerner, instructor of the popular New York University course, “The Science of Happiness,” and co-author of U Thrive.

Lerner left his position as a talent agent for opera singers and musicians after finding that some of his clients were not happy in their successful careers. He decided to pursue an answer to the question: When do success and happiness co-exist?

“What I (learned) from the beginning was that the issues I saw with my clients in high-level music performance was hardly exclusive to them,” he said.

Lerner provided the audience of students, faculty and staff members with real-world examples of unhappy and happy successful people. Steve Jobs, Kanye West and Bobby Knight fell into the “unhappy” category, while Richard Branson, Maya Angelou and Pete Carroll represented happiness.

Research shows that college students struggle to find happiness, Lerner said. A national study found that 90 percent of students have felt “overwhelming stress” over the past year; 60 percent have felt sadness; 45 percent have felt hopeless; and 31 percent have been too depressed to function.

“The way we looked at things when we were young was: ‘When I’m successful, I will be happy’ or ‘When I make enough money, I’ll be happy’ or “When I get to college, I’ll be happy,’” he said. “Yet most of you are stressed and feeling sadness.”

The equation is backward, Lerner emphasized: Success does not lead to happiness, but developing a healthy psychological state can help produce success.

“When we start with happiness, research shows that we have a better chance of realizing success in many, many ways,” Lerner said.

This theory even works with 5-year-olds. Lerner pointed to a study in which the children were asked to think about something positive for 30 seconds before taking part in a puzzle creation. Those children were more collaborative and displayed greater performance.

In another study, some college students were asked to remember a positive thing in their past for 45 seconds before taking a test. The students retained 70 percent more words in a foreign language test that followed and also performed better on standardized exams.

Lerner, who now teaches at New York University and Penn, offered several ways that audience members can increase their positive emotions, including exercise and breathing practices, conducting acts of kindness and writing a short, daily journal of three things to be grateful for.

“I can promise you one thing: These won’t all work,” he said. “It’s about trying these things. Figuring out what works for you is absolutely key.”

Lerner closed his talk with a story about a former client, opera singer Earle Patriarco. The former singing waiter had an awkward shuffle and questionable fashion sense, but also had a great attitude and was admittedly happy with life. Patriarco garnered 15 opera roles in a row, rare in the profession, including one at the Metropolitan Opera. He later gave up the starring roles to spend more time with family.

Patriarco’s happiness-success story has been part of Lerner’s lessons for the past five years, but he didn’t tell his friend about it until two years ago at a dinner.

The arms of Patriarco opened and gave Lerner a giant hug.

“He said: ‘If telling my story helps students, athletes, musicians and executives understand that being happy comes first and then success follows, you can tell my story all you want,’” Lerner said.

Lerner reminded students in the audience that they are still young enough to decide what they are going to do and how they are going to do it.

“You can change the way you experience life and you can change the way you define success,” he said.