The Active Minds club hosted a mindfulness seminar on Wednesday night to discuss ways to deal with mental health and understand difficulties through a new perspective.
According to the club’s president Kailan Bragado, the club was created to spread mental health awareness on campus and provide resources to destigmatize anxiety and depression.
“College is a stressful time in our lives and even with the pandemic, it has definitely taken a toll on mental health,” Bragado, a junior nursing major said. “Active Minds had hoped to offer a seminar with a counselor to discuss some coping mechanisms and provide information on what we can do to better manage our busy lives.”
Guest speaker and licensed counselor Patrice Dunn began the night by outlining the difference between worry and anxiety.
“Worry is grounded in reality and anxiety is marked by catastrophic thinking,” Dunn said. “Anxiety doesn’t know how to tell the truth.”
Dunn also explained how stress is a physiological response connected to external events and emphasized that not all worry is anxiety and not all sadness is depression.
Dunn discussed many different types of coping mechanisms and self-care strategies, such as taking a walk, journaling, and being communicative. She also detailed a mechanism known as color breathing, which consists of deep breaths in which you imagine your body filling with a color of relaxing feelings and releasing a color of negative feelings.
The main idea of the talk was mindfulness, a type of meditation where one is intensely aware of their senses and feelings at the moment.
“When you get a bad grade on a test, just be in the moment,” Dunn said. “It doesn’t mean that you are never going to graduate or you are never going to get a good job. Stay in that moment and there is a way to talk yourself out of that thinking. Take a breath.”
Dunn further explained that practicing mindfulness to validate and understand certain emotions can be needed in order to move forward.
“What you think affects how you feel which affects how you behave,” Dunn said.
Bragado said she was pleased with the engagement from the audience.
“As a club, we were hoping that others would gain a deeper understanding of what their stressors in their life may be and how to manage them by being mindful of their feelings and surroundings to decrease our levels of stress,” Bragado said.
The Active Minds club has a silent auction fundraising event on April 14, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Alumni Quad and there will also be a game night hosted by the club on April 2.
