The college experience, in accordance with the continued rise of social media, has become increasingly demanding for undergraduate students. Students suffer from unparalleled levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and exhaustion compared to the generations that preceded them. What used to be advertised as the best four years of people\u2019s lives has now become the riskiest four years for young adults to endure. In Chapter 5 of his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor, discusses his ideal college experience for students: \u201cEveryone is born with a mind, but it is only through this act of introspection, of self-examination, of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individuals, a unique being \u2013 a soul\u201d (84). Verily, Deresiewicz constructs a beautiful image of what the college experience ought to be: soul-making. Yet the lived realities for undergraduates across the United States stray far from this ideal. The act of soul-making is an afterthought amongst the swath of components and stressors that make up the present-day undergraduate experience. Can modern-day neuroscience of emotions help undergrads in the trek for creating a positive college experience, and by extension, creating a soul?<\/p>\n
I argue that before Deresiewicz\u2019s vision for the college experience can be achieved, students must engage Lisa Barrett\u2019s concept of the \u201cbody budget.\u201d As one navigates the complex lifestyle of living at a university, the brain and the body must be adequately nourished before soul-making can truly occur. Most college students, and people in general, believe that we passively experience our emotions; we\u2019re consumers rather than producers. As a result, we feel helpless when thinking about managing the difficult emotions of sadness, anger, frustration, etc. But in her book How Emotions Are Made, Barrett asserts that we have more control over our emotions than our intuitions and socializations suggest, and we can manage our environments to foster better mental and physical health. We don\u2019t merely react to our emotions; instead, we construct our emotions and our consequent lived experiences (Barrett: 28). She holds this belief to be true via the concept of experiential blindness: where we can\u2019t discern or articulate an experience when we have no prior concepts to ground the experience itself. For example, when we see a mound of dirt, our concepts of \u201chill\u201d and \u201cmountain\u201d allow us to define our experience. We think that these concepts are intuitive, but they\u2019re actually governed through human constructions. This construction occurs with our emotions, too, and they help us simulate and interpret the outside world. With this understanding, Barrett writes a chapter with practical advice for how to \u201cmaster\u201d one\u2019s emotions. This chapter, entitled \u201cMastering Your Emotions,\u201d will be the focus of this blog. I briefly highlight Barrett\u2019s most important advice, and I then discuss how Barrett\u2019s strategies for mastering emotions have serious implications for present-day students as they seek to achieve Deresiewicz\u2019s aforementioned ideal of the college experience.<\/p>\n
For the current generation of college students, there\u2019s a frenzy of challenges to face as soon as freshman year begins. Students are expected to take rigorous course-loads, and they are frequently encouraged to choose a second major or a couple minors. In choosing courses and academic tracks, students must now consider the \u201creturn-on-investment\u201d of their selections. That is, how will their transcript translate into a paycheck? How marketable are the skills that they learn in the classes they take? Such a paradigm is a direct result of a higher cost of living, a shrinking job market as the number of skilled workers increases in the American population, and the more obvious obstacle of a four-year undergraduate education costing $250k+ for out-of-state or private universities. Courses and academia writ large are no longer approached for the sake of learning \u2013 there\u2019s almost always a capitalist motive behind the decisions to pursue certain fields.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, students are expected to engage in extracurricular commitments in both breadth and depth. You\u2019re not just supposed to join a lot of clubs; you\u2019re expected to lead them too. Employers and post-graduate schools look for a student to be a self-starter who can take individual initiative, while also having extensive experience partaking in (and eventually leading) various teams\/groups. This includes sports teams, volunteer initiatives, academic societies, and identity groups to name a few. In essence, undergraduates are encouraged to have a hand in as many different communities as possible in addition to creating a distinct \u201cself.\u201d It\u2019s a daunting task to say the least.<\/p>\n
Students are also expected to live vibrant social lives outside of class and traditional extracurriculars. The culture of partying, as well as the mass celebration of sporting events (e.g. Saturday\u2019s spent tailgating for football games), renders weekends (and now weeknights) futile for completing work or for having meaningful interactions. The truth of these lifestyles is muddled, since social media posts aim to show everyone\u2019s happiness and abundance of fun. Consequently, undergraduate students compare themselves to one another in unhealthy ways while they scroll through their peers\u2019 posts during all seven days of the week. Simply put, undergrads constantly receive the message that they are not doing enough with their lives. This is a phenomenon with which our parents and our professors struggle to relate; the stimuli and pressures, and therefore the emotions that we experience, are exponentially more complex than they were even 15 years ago.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s in these realms that Barrett\u2019s advice for \u201cmastering\u201d our emotions can help us reconfigure the college experience to better align with Deresiewicz\u2019s ideal.<\/p>\n
The central concept that Barrett promotes is keeping one\u2019s body budget in stable condition. The body budget is like any other type of budget: you keep track of what you put in and take out of your body. For instance, if you put in a good night\u2019s sleep, then you will be able to have consistent energy as your output. Barrett argues that based on the psychological evidence, and contrary to the philosophical concept of Cartesian dualism, there exists deep interconnection between the body and mind (176). As a result, the body must be well taken care of in order for the mind to function well. Our brains constantly make predictions about our bodies, whether it\u2019s our heart rate, breathing, blood pressure etc. When those predictions do not calibrate with our bodies\u2019 actual needs, we struggle to feel stable and healthy. Barrett says that the first steps for setting a good body budget and calibrating our bodies\u2019 predictions, then, are \u201ceating healthfully, exercising, and getting enough sleep\u201d (177). These actions sound simple, but they are the three pillars that ultimately govern our minds\u2019 and bodies\u2019 health. Such actions are also the most achievable goals that one can set and consistently meet, and they make a substantial impact on our ability to construct positive emotional experiences.<\/p>\n
From the outset of his book on the college experience, Deresiewicz seems to argue that Barrett\u2019s three-fold action plan for better emotional health is unattainable within the current mold of the college lifestyle. He notes: \u201cThe problem is that students have been taught that that is all education is: doing your homework, getting the answers, acing the test. Nothing in their training has endowed them with the sense that something larger is at stake. They\u2019ve learned to \u2018be a student,\u2019 not to use their minds\u201d (13). Deresiewicz\u2019s analysis contends that the central problem isn\u2019t that students aren\u2019t eating, sleeping, or exercising properly; it\u2019s that they\u2019ve been built to be high-achieving robots. <\/p>\n
Yet Barrett also provides other actions that would support Deresiewicz\u2019s hope for students to recurrently examine their actions and themselves. First, she notes the positive benefits of human touch (178). She suggests receiving massages to physically heal and destress, but a college student on a tight budget could experience similar benefits from consistent hugs from friends. This sort of interaction with another human would both restore the body budget while also providing a meaningful connection. I argue that human connection of this kind inherently evokes introspection. Next, Barrett notes the restorative benefits of yoga and spending time in places that have reduced noise and crowding. Going to a yoga studio can be expensive, but there are now apps and videos readily accessible on one\u2019s smartphone for a college student to an affordable restorative experience. The advice to do yoga and spend time in serene environments is therefore practical for a college student, and the activities are explicitly centered on mindfulness and reflection. Barrett\u2019s final two suggestions: read novels to temporarily escape your own life story and go to lunch with a friend to give or receive a treat. These two suggestions involve some sort of interaction with other humans, and they come in the form of learning about and empathizing with people. From Barrett\u2019s intentions, all of these practical tips are aimed at reducing stress while connecting your mind and body. However, Barrett\u2019s advice fits quite well with Deresiewicz\u2019s hope for college as a space for self-examination.<\/p>\n
In short, managing the body budget is foremost crucial for maintaining one\u2019s mental and physical health. But even further, it\u2019s also vital for one to maintain a positive outlook on life, especially in environments like college where there\u2019s reduced opportunity for silent reflection. Deresiewicz would likely appreciate Barrett\u2019s core assertion in the \u201cMastering Your Emotions\u201d chapter: \u201cEvery experience you construct is an investment, so invest wisely. Cultivate the experiences you want to construct again in the future\u201d (Barrett: 183). By thoughtfully constructing tranquil spaces and positive emotional experiences, Barrett\u2019s advice fundamentally coincides with Deresiewicz\u2019s plea for students to think carefully about their college experiences and the opportunity to create their unique souls.
\n\u2003
\nSources
\ni. Julie K. Jones, \u201cMental Health Challenges of College Students,\u201d August 10, 2018, https:\/\/psychcentral.com\/blog\/mental-health-challenges-of-college-students\/.
\nii. William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, First paperback edition (New York London Toronto Sydney New Delhi: Free Press, 2015).
\niii. Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2018.
\niv. Barrett.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The college experience, in accordance with the continued rise of social media, has become increasingly demanding for undergraduate students. Students suffer from unparalleled levels of stress, anxiety, depression,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":311,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-barret"],"splot_meta":{"author":"Kyle Adams","license":"","source":"https:\/\/giphy.com\/explore\/drunk-yoga"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gallegft.sites.wfu.edu\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gallegft.sites.wfu.edu\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gallegft.sites.wfu.edu\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallegft.sites.wfu.edu\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallegft.sites.wfu.edu\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gallegft.sites.wfu.edu\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":652,"href":"https:\/\/gallegft.sites.wfu.edu\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions\/652"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallegft.sites.wfu.edu\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gallegft.sites.wfu.edu\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallegft.sites.wfu.edu\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gallegft.sites.wfu.edu\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}