Physical well-being is about maintaining a healthy body so that functions optimally now and in the future. What a "healthy body" is, is different for everyone. Our physical health is a product of nature (our genetics) and nurture (our behaviors). We can do a lot to nurture our physical well-being, no matter our genetics. Physical well-being is achieved and maintained through exercise, eating well, getting adequate sleep, noticing the signs and symptoms of illness, and getting help when needed. 

Particularly in this time of COVID-19, paying attention to physical health is more important than ever. Getting to know your body, to understand what is different from your norm (Is this cough unusual, or do I always cough in the morning?), is really important, and knowing your body will help you recognize when something shifts physically, whether for the better or the worse.

Some strategies to begin developing physical well-being include:

• Get to know your own body through your senses: sight, sound, smell, and touch.
• Learn about making informed, autonomous choices about your body and your sexuality.
• Keep a journal of what exercises, foods and drinks, sleep/wake times, etc. feel best to you - experiment with yourself.
• Develop good habits around the following:
  • Moving every day, with focus on strength, aerobic capacity, and flexibility
  • Developing bedtime and morning rituals, at the same times weekdays and weekends
  • Choosing healthy foods
  • Limiting screen time

• Learn how to feel more comfortable with your physical appearance.
• Practice becoming more competent at physical activities, so that you can enjoy them.
• If you smoke (vape, cigarettes, or marijuana), examine that behavior carefully by getting mindful about it, and get help in quitting if needed.
• Make responsible and autonomous choices about your alcohol use.
• Develop and cultivate active, not just sedentary, leisure activities.
• Know where to get help and medical care for illness, injury, and preventative care.

On-Campus Resources for Physical Well-Being

• Health Services should be your number one stop on campus for illness of any kind.
• Check out all the fitness offerings (classes and gyms) and one-on-one coaching sessions available here (use your Lasell credentials to log in).
• Revisit AlcoholEDU [link coming soon], which you took before you first arrived on campus.
• Make walking campus more fun: here's a campus circuit map [link coming soon].
• Information specific to COVID-19 can be found here.

Additional Physical Well-Being Resources

Some additional resources we like to develop physical well-being include:

YMCA Streaming Fitness and Yoga

The world-renowned YMCA has posted a number of ways to stream free fitness and yoga classes into your home! Get high-quality, family-friendly workouts anytime, anywhere you have internet access. Make it extra competitive by signing up for their virtual fitness challenge.

Nike Training Club

A workout app for people at varying levels of fitness, now offering its premium version for free for the rest of the year.

FitBod

A workout app currently offering its bodyweight-based workouts for free.

Down Under School of Yoga

A wonderful, local yoga school and studio that has transformed into an entirely virtual studio offering 30+ livestreamed classes daily, across all styles of yoga, for all experience levels of practice. Down Under has a library of free pre-recorded classes, and offers a free live community class every Thursday at 3:00pm. Down Under's hope is that this online space will be one of comfort and inspiration as you move through the challenges, and unexpected discoveries, of physical distancing.

CorePower Yoga

A national yoga studio chain that has opted to share their classes with everyone by posting free yoga and sculpt classes multiple times a day on their YouTube channel. Friendly warning that these classes will challenge you!

Sivana Spirit

A yoga emporium that has posted a number of free yoga videos for all ages and abilities.

Social well-being is about your relationships. This might be the hardest dimension of well-being to manage and maintain, because it involves other people! But there is a lot about your social well-being that is in your control. Social well-being means that you are able to perform your social roles (partner, friend, sibling, child, student, employee, etc.) effectively and comfortably, to create a network of people who truly support you in each of your roles, and to learn about and grow comfortable with intimacy, boundaries, and trust that align with your needs and desires for connection (and time and space alone).

Some strategies to begin developing social well-being include:

• Connections begin with getting to know someone: practice active listening and empathy.
• Identify your social needs by asking yourself some of the following:
  • In what social situations and roles do I feel best or enjoy the most?
  • If some roles and situations do not feel good, or aren't going well, how could I make those situations and roles feel and function better?
  • Who is someone, or who are groups of people, I want to connect with, that I haven't yet?
• Relationships are two-way streets: check in with yourself to see if you're making the effort to keep in touch with and support people who are important to you.
• Practice appropriate self-disclosure in ways that do not cross your (or others') boundaries, and acknowledge how comfortable you are with different levels of your own vulnerability with different people.
• Join a club or organization - there are so many on campus to choose from.
• If you want more friends, or are new to campus, it could be as easy as just saying "hi!" to the person next to you.
• Learn about your own implicit and explicit biases.
• Grow more comfortable interacting with diverse individuals and groups, and grow in acceptance of those who are different from you.
• Become aware of your responsibilities for the welfare of different communities.
• Understand for yourself your own sex and gender roles and behaviors.
• Work toward becoming a responsible local and global citizen.

On-Campus Resources for Social Well-Being

• Lasell offers hundres of clubs and activities, like intramural sports - check Laser Involvement for offerings and Student Activities for a list of clubs.
• If you're trying to figure out how to navigate certain relationships, your own boundaries, and trust, talk with the Counseling Center.
• To understand or educate yourself about sexual relationships, sexual violence, and violence advocacy, check out these course: CJ335 - Sexual Violence Advocacy, CJ741 - Interpersonal & Relationship Violence, PSYC205 - Human Sexuality .
• Learn about diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Donahue Institute and the Intercultural Center & Commuter Cottage (IC3) or take SJA302X - Promoting Racial Justice, among other courses.
  
• Connect and lead others by becoming a Peer Mentor, Peer Advisor, or Peer Health Educator.

Emotional well-being relates to understanding your feelings and coping effectively with stress, and your development of inner resources to help you learn and grow from your experiences. It includes awareness of your emotions, the ability to recognize what your feelings are (to name them and be able to express them), to accept your emotions (without necessarily acting on them), to be responsible for your own emotions rather than ruled by them, and to make autonomous decisions about what actions to take. It may also include understanding why you feel the way you do.

When you develop emotional wellness and its related skills, you are able to form supportive and interdependent relationships with others.

Some strategies to begin developing emotional well-being include:

• Take notice of your feelings and emotions by checking-in with yourself.
• Figure out what feels good and what doesn't. This takes checking-in with yourself a step further, and includes noticing your feelings when you are:
  • Exercising
  • With a certain person or group of people
  • Alone
  • In class
  • About to take an exam
  • In any situation, really...
• Name your feelings and emotions -- write them down, or say them out loud to yourself, to practice expressing them.
• Use the emotion wheel (below) to help you identify your feelings.
• Reconsider your "mistakes": turn them around and ask yourself how they were learning experiences.
• Journal daily or write yourself letters from time to time: take time to reflect.

Emotion Wheel

Image source: https://dontmindmeblog.com/2017/12/23/primary-and-secondary-emotions/

On-Campus Resources for Emotional Well-Being

• Schedule an appointment with the Counseling Center.
• Take a meditation class - check Laser Involvement for offerings.
• Take a yoga class - check Laser Involvement for offerings.
• Check out this amazing list of resources from the Counseling Center.
• Watch our Instagram and Twitter for a lot of new "support" groups, wellness groups, and other well-being offerings.

Intellectual well-being is about continuing to grow intellectually, and maintaining curiosity about all there is to learn, as well as a bit of awe and wonder. It's the continual recognition and revitalization of creative abilities and finding ways to expand both knowledge and skills. Intellectual well-being is related to valuing lifelong learning, and responding positively to intellectual challenges. After all, each day brings new discoveries across every aspect of life, and the key is to remain humble about what we know and what we don't!

The great thing about being at Lasell, is that this place is practically designed to help you develop your intellectual well-being. Although the university has other goals and objectives, a big one is about helping you expand knowledge and skills while discovering your potential for sharing your gifts with others.

Some strategies to begin developing intellectual well-being include:

• Stay curious. Ask lots of questions.
• Keep awe and wonder central to your life - whether that's about the unexplored depths of oceans and life beyond the stars, or the inner depths of your mind and body, and how they work.
• Practice creativity. It doesn't matter how or what - music, art, crafts, fashion, building robots, new workout routines, whatever!
• Read... anything! Newspapers, fiction, non-fiction, magazines, etc.
• Try puzzles, like crosswords or Sudoku, or jigsaw puzzles.
• Learn a new language.
• Try a new musical instrument.
• Teach or tutor others.

On-Campus Resources for Intellectual Well-Being

• The Academic Catalog is a great place to start learnning about the many things you can learn at Lasell.
  
• Discover learning-oriented or skill-developing clubs through Laser Invovlement.
• Talk with your Academic Advisor about ways to develop more deeply in your field or major.
• Make an appointment with the Academic Achievement Center to learn about your learning style and how to learn more effectively
• Explore the world! Study abroad for a semester or a year.
• Become a Peer Mentor, Peer Advisor, or Peer Health Educator.

Occupational well-being is about discovering and rediscovering across your whole life, the work (job, profession, or even a hobby) that gives your life the most meaning, the most personal satisfaction and greatest enrichment. When you are in an occupation you like, it is said that work doesn't feel like work, time slips away, and you are immersed, "in the zone". Occupational well-being is also about how you want to make your unique contribution to the world. It is not about "productivity", but about the ways in which you harness and express your abilities, talents, knowledge, and skills.

Choosing what your career will be is a pretty important life choice. But know that neither your major, nor your first job after graduation, need to define your career. You can have dozens of careers - after all, it's your life! Be as creative as you want to be with it. Whatever your career, though, working takes up a majority of your waking hours, so the way you feel about your work has a considerable impact on your overall well-being.

Some strategies to begin developing occupational well-being include:

• Stay curious. Ask lots of questions of your peers, your professors and teachers, advisors and mentors, parents and parental figures, about how they landed in the work they do.
• Discover your personal strengths by taking the free VIA Character Strengths questionnaire. (Note that the "strengths" are really those things that you value most, and that bring you the most joy.)
• Take courses in a wide range of subject matters -- you never know what might light your fire.
• Imagine what you want your day-to-day life to look like in the future: are you in an office, outdoors, with children, in a workshop or a studio?
• Use volunteer activities, as well as both paid and unpaid jobs or internships, to see what certain types of work are like.
• Develop relationships with mentors. Most of the time, those who are at the top like to lift up others, too, so don't be afraid to ask.

On-Campus Resources for Occupational Well-Being

• Visit the Career Development Center (virtually, if needed). They offer a wide array of services to help you figure out not just what you might be good at, but also how to get work that aligns with your strengths.
  
• Take advantage of your internships to develop mentor relationships and future career connections.
• Attend career and internship fairs organized by the Career Development Center, and scroll internship listings regularly.

Environmental well-being is, at its core, about respect. It is about living a lifestyle that is respectful of and responsible for our surroundings, which includes not just our outdoor environments, but also our indoor environments. A sense of environmental well-being encourages us to take care of this lonely planet of ours, as well as all the beings on it. It means that our interactions with nature and with our personal environments feel good, supportive, respectful, and protected.

We all need sacred spaces to feel well in our environments. This includes sacred indoor spaces -- a home where we feel safe, for example -- as well as sacred outdoor spaces -- in the mountains, by the ocean, under a forest canopy, even out on the quad.

To care for the outdoor environment, it's sometimes easier to start by caring for the indoor environment, that is, we might try to modify some of our indoor behaviors. We could:

• conserve water
• limit our pollution
• limit our trash
• recycle and compost more
• reuse and repair, rather than buy new
• just buy less to begin with
• eat more plant-based foods and fewer animal-based foods
• choose wind or solar energy
• if you must buy, buy items with less or no packaging
• turn off lights
• walk, bicycle, or use public transit instead of using a car or Uber, and so on.

There are many environmentally conscious practices you can adopt. Each time you adopt one of these practices, your relationship with the environment improves.

Moving to the outdoor environment, you might more deeply engage your environmental well-being by forming a group to pick up litter, volunteering with environmental organizations, taking up gardening as hobby, and spending as much time as you can outdoors.

On-Campus Resources for Environmental Well-Being

• Join the LEAF Club (Lasell Environmental Action Force).
• Donate to Lasell Leftovers, including clothing, school supplies, and so much more.
• Celebrate Earth Day, which is April 22 every year.
• Borrow from Brennan Library Rachel Carson's canonical book, Silent Spring, what started the environmental movement in the US

Financial well-being is about our relationship with money... something that's surprisingly complex. We'll be adding resources soon.

On-Campus Resources for Financial Well-Being

• Exciting stuff to come, including money workshops!

Spiritual well-being is about connections to entities larger than ourselves. What spiritual well-being means is as varied as is the human species. We are pulling together resources about developing spiritual well-being at Lasell, and will update this page shortly.

On-Campus Resources for Spiritual Well-Being

• Join the Gratitude Space, a weekly online gathering of the Lasell community [more on Fall's schedule soon]