Student Well-being in Online Learning

Image generated by ChatGPT; the image represents Martin Seligman’s PERMA+ theory of Positive Psychology.

Though there are exceptions, for most adolescents, full-time online learning during the Covid pandemic has been tough. It's not only been tough for learning, but also from the perspective of mental health and overall wellness.

My school has fared better than many in the world during this pandemic year, but after opening in a hybrid online / in-person format in September and then fully in-person in January, we were, unfortunately, forced to return back to all online at the start of April. This means that my students are currently well into their second month of full online learning, and will finish this school year (through to the end of June) in this way. Over the past week, as I've been checking in on students, I've begun to sense a pattern. Most of them stayed pretty strong for the first month, but some are now starting to feel the fatigue of learning via a screen, being stuck at home, losing their daily routines, and being socially isolated. This fatigue impacts their ability to learn, but I've been most aware, in my conversations with students recently, that it's also impacting their general sense of personal well-being.

I've had the opportunity this semester to teach a PE class called "Personal Well-Being." In preparing for the class, and while teaching it, I've been reading widely about the science around human well-being. Many of these studies come from, what has been coined, the field of positive psychology. In the field, different terms get used such as happiness, joy, contentment, life-satisfaction, flourishing or wellness. Sometimes the language used -- even the term "positive" psychology -- can give the impression that this work is just pseudoscientific "self help" literature, but actually, the research done in positive psychology over the past few decades is quite robust. It includes some very compelling scientific studies that bring together insights from the social sciences together with the developing insights from brain research. There are many very rigorous, controlled, double-blind research experiments that are informing this growing understanding of human well-being. The term "positive" in positive psychology is not meant to denote shallow, optimistic, health & wealth sort of thinking. Rather, it represents a perspective that the field of psychology should not just be focused on identifying and alleviating psychological disorders; rather, it should also be focused on the development of individual and societal human flourishing.

In the rest of this post, I have my students specifically in mind as I write. I want to outline a few scientific, research-based strategies for improving well-being. These are strategies that one can pick and choose from and implement pretty quickly and easily. Studies demonstrate that these strategies can provide a pretty immediate boost in one's sense of well-being, and, when put into regular practice, can provide long-term well-being benefits. I would encourage my students -- but it's applicable to many of us adults as well -- to experiment with a few of these strategies in the coming weeks. Some of them will require a little creative thinking to implement when you're stuck at home, but others can be carried out from anywhere at anytime.

Some of these strategies will seem very common-sensical. Some are generally recognized human virtues, others come from pretty basic health knowledge; many of these ideas were taught to us by parents from an early age. What's interesting about this field of positive psychology is the reinforcement, through scientific, empirical studies, that these virtues are not just "the right thing to do," and practices like getting some exercise and sleep do not just make us physically healthier; rather, these practices actually have measurable benefits for mental health, overall personal well-being, and our level of happiness and life-satisfaction.

I've gathered the strategies below based on a course taught by Dr. Laurie Santos of Yale University. She offers the course in the psychology department for undergrads at Yale and it is also available for free on Coursera. It's called "The Science of Well-Being." The list below is not an exhaustive one of all tested well-being strategies, but I've selected them as a starting point and as those that seem most relevant for my high school students. I've also recently read books by two other key people in the field, work that is drawn upon by Dr. Santos in her course. These include Sonja Lyubomirsky and her book, The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life you Want and Martin Seligman, considered one of the founders of positive psychology, and one of his books, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being. I'm providing only a brief outline of some strategies below, but I'd encourage the reader to look at the scientific evidence and rationale for their efficacy by checking out Dr. Santos' course, or the work of Lyubomirksy or Seligman. Unless otherwise cited, what I've outlined below comes from Dr. Santos' course. I also read a lovely book recently called The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World. It's compiled by Douglas Abrams and involves personal reflections and conversations between Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, intermixed with some of the scientific research around human well-being.

Savoring

Savoring is the act of stepping outside of a moment or experience to deliberately reflect on it and appreciate it while doing it. It's about pausing, even if for just a moment, to take in and appreciate the current moment. It could be about pausing during a meal to very slowly and consciously take in the taste and texture of a bite. It could be turning your face to the early morning sun when you first step outside and pausing to enjoy its warmth. It could be briefly noting the tail-wagging excitement of your dog when you arrive back at home. Savoring often involves consciously engaging one or more of the five senses as you experience something, but it could also involve just taking in the experience itself more holistically, or pausing while hanging out with a friend to reflect on how you enjoy that person's company.

In addition to forcing you to appreciate the good things -- and often the little things -- of your life, the act of savoring pulls you out of your own head and momentarily focuses your attention on the current moment. A study by Mathew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that, on average, our minds are wandering 46.9% of the time. Wandering in this case refers to thinking about something other than the here and now. Their study also found that this lack of focus on the here and now tends to contribute to unhappiness. In fact, the title of their article in Science was "A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind." People who make a habit of practicing savoring tend to more often break from their distracted or ruminating thoughts and take the current moment less for granted, which contributes to greater well-being.

Gratitude

The idea of gratitude is not unlike the wisdom of my grandmother who used to say that we must "count our blessings." In fact, this is exactly what this practice of gratitude is all about and it can even help to literally count the things for which you're grateful. It may have developed as a survival technique in our evolutionary past and, in terms of basic survival, it may have done us well as a species, but our tendency to dwell on the problems and challenges in our lives as compared to that which is going well, is a problem for our mental health as modern humans. Research shows that the act of keeping a gratitude journal, in which one stops for a few moments at the end of each day to list 3 things for which he or she is grateful from that day, can have a positive impact on one's sense of well-being.

Another strategy related to gratitude is called the gratitude letter. This strategy connects the value of gratitude together with the following strategies of acts of kindness and social connection. The strategy involves sitting down and writing a short letter to someone specific in your life for whom you are grateful. It's often more personal to write this letter by hand, as it shows greater intention and thought. The letter does not need to be long, but it should be as specific as possible and focus on a distinct action or characteristic of that person for which you are grateful. Just writing this letter is not sufficient for this strategy. Once you've written it, you need to arrange to visit that person and when you visit, read the letter out loud to him or her. Your attitude of gratitude, together with your words of kindness will strengthen your social connection with that person and together can powerfully boost your sense of well-being (and probably that of the recipient of your letter as well).

Acts of Kindness

Simply doing an intentional kind act for someone else can provide a boost to your own well-being. People who carry on this practice of intentional kind actions report long-term increases in their sense of well-being. Some have theorized that positive emotions from acting kindly towards another person are due to our evolutionary development as a social species. Based on this theory, the evolutionary success of the human species is in part due to the fact that humans care for each other in families, communities and other social networks. This beneficial trait of caring for another human being has been hard-wired into the emotional reward system of our brains, and therefore we receive an emotional benefit when we do a kind act for another. Acts of kindness also trigger a positive knock-on effect by reinforcing social connections with other people, which, as we'll see below, is another important aspect of overall well-being.

Research shows that the key is to do these acts very intentionally. Most humans, almost unconsciously, do kind acts for others on a semi-regular basis. Just reflecting on the kind acts that you did unconsciously during the day does not provide much well-being benefit. Of course you should not stop doing these, but the point is that you should do more than what you normally and naturally do and do it very intentionally. Stop, pause and think, "What intentional act of kindness can I do today for someone close to me, or even for a complete stranger?" And then do it. Research shows that just doing a few additional and intentional acts of kindness for others one day per week has a powerful well-being effect.

Social Connection

The Harvard Study of Adult Development started in 1938. It is said to be the largest and longest ever longitudinal study of the lives of a group of adults. As of 2015, when Dr. Robert Waldinger, director of the project, presented what became a viral Ted Talk, 60 of the original 724 men enrolled in the study in 1938 were still alive and participating and the study had expanded to include the wives and children of many of the original participants. To quote Dr. Waldinger from his 2015 Ted Talk, "What are the lessons that come from tens of thousands of pages of information that we've generated on these lives? Well, the lessons aren't about wealth or fame or working harder and harder. The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period." He goes on to outline the three main findings about relationships and well-being from the study. The first is that social connections improve overall happiness, well-being and life longevity and that loneliness contributes to health decline and earlier mortality. The second finding is that the quality of close relationships is important. The study found that the best predictor at middle age that a person will live happy and fulfilled into their 80s and beyond is their level of satisfaction with their close, intimate relationships. The third finding was that good relationships not only have a protective effect on physical health, but also on cognitive health. There is a strong correlation among the elderly participants in the study between strong cognitive ability and memory and the existence of close relationships in their lives.

Studies done by Dr. Nicholas Epley on the public transportation busses and trains in Chicago show that even making a social connection with a perfect stranger during your morning or afternoon commute can have a positive impact on your sense of well-being. Though many people fear, in that environment, that greeting or striking up a conversation with a stranger will just annoy the other person, Epley's studies show that both the one who initiates the connection, and the one who receives it, benefit from a boost in their well-being. We are social beings and it seems that even social connections with strangers has a positive impact.

My hunch is that this issue of social connections is one of the key factors that contributes to a decline in a student's sense of well-being in the online learning environment. They often get trapped in a pattern of isolation, without the natural social routine of going to school every day and interacting with teachers, friends and classmates. This is an area where the student who is online and at home will need to be very intentional. Consider how you can sit and have a meaningful conversation each day with a parent or sibling or someone else in your household. Consider how you can still invite over friends and classmates even to do school together at your house. Consider how you can set up deliberate video calls to have a meaningful conversation with a friend. Though keeping in touch with friends and classmates via social media is better than nothing, I suspect the social connection impact is most powerful for well-being when these interactions are in person, or, at least, digitally face-to-face.

Exercise

The research on the positive effects of exercise on both one's physical health and one's overall well-being is indisputable. Research shows that just 30 minutes per day of moderate intensity exercise can provide a significant physical and mental health benefit. In addition to improving cardiorespiratory health and muscular-skeletal strength, when engaged in physical exercise, the body's endocrine system releases "happy hormones" such as endorphins, dopamine and serotonin, which just make you feel better and happier. Physical exercise also gives your body the opportunity to burn off some of the "stress hormones" such as adrenaline and cortisol. These are hormones that, though serving a very important role in the body's fight or flight survival response, can contribute to poor quality sleep and anxiety if left lingering in the body.

Though the research indicates that 30 minutes per day can have positive effects, for children and adolescents and their still growing minds and bodies, 30 minutes per day is not sufficient. The WHO recommends that children and adolescents from ages 5 through 17 get an average of 60 minutes per day of at least moderate intensity physical activity (moderate intensity is at the level of brisk walking, light jogging or any activity that gets the heart rate up to a similar level). The WHO also recommends that at least 3 times per week, as part of this 60 minutes per day, that children and adolescents get some amount of vigorous intensity physical activity.

Sleep

Many adolescents are chronically sleep deprived compared to their sleep needs during their teenage years. Adolescents should be consistently getting 8-10 hours of sleep per night, but many rarely get that. The effects of being chronically sleep deprived are severe on multiple fronts. It is during sleep that the body's muscular-skeletal structure has time to repair and grow and that one's immune system has the time to fight off viruses. Sleep is also important for the brain as it's during sleep that the brain processes the day's information. A lack of sleep can lead to more illness and injury, and can negatively impact cognitive development, learning and memory. Sleep deprivation also has a negative impact on neuron synapses in the prefrontal cortex and in the brain's emotion-processing regions. A sleep deprived brain is more emotional and unable to think and act rationally. A lack of sleep can cause one to be moody and impulsive; it even contributes to depression and anxiety (check out this info-graphic from Huffington Post on the effects of sleep deprivation).

As mentioned above, getting daily exercise can help with sleep. Exercise can burn off the stress hormones that can keep you awake as well as cue your mind that your body is tired and wants to get rest. Technology such as TV and movie streaming, video games, phones and social media are key culprits to adolescent sleep deprivation. These technology tools can be addictive and keep teens up late at night, not to mention that the constant online connectivity and social media notifications leave teens feeling like they'll miss something important if they put down their phones even to sleep. One key piece of advice for improving sleep is to remove all technology from the bedroom at a certain point each night so that you can relax and sleep without the distractions. It's also very helpful to maintain a sleep routine. Try to go to bed and get up in the morning at relatively consistent times. This helps train your mind and body to know when it's time to sleep.

Mindful Meditation

There are many different forms of meditation practice, but one common one is called mindful meditation, or sometimes just referred to as mindfulness. The idea of mindful meditation is to practice being mentally aware (ie. mindful) of your body and thoughts, in the present, without placing any judgment on them. The purpose is to focus on the present moment, rather than having your mind distracted by negative thoughts or thoughts about circumstances you can't control. There's nothing inherently wrong with allowing your mind to wander and daydream; in fact, this ability to think abstractly and imaginatively is a key aspect that makes us human. It's also the cognitive trait that allows humans to practice empathy; we can mentally abstract and imagine the world from another's perspective. The problem is that many of us spend too much time "in our own heads." We focus too much of our mental attention replaying past circumstances, contemplating the future, or wishing we were somewhere else. All of this mind wandering distracts us from engaging in and enjoying our present time and place. Furthermore, too much mental ruminating on the past, future, or other places can contribute to anxiety. Those are all circumstances that we cannot control, but we do have some level of control over our present; we should spend more time living in the present.

The practice of mindful meditation takes some practice and some effort. The first thing that I became aware of while attempting to practice mindful meditation was just how distracted and wandering my mind truly was. There is a risk that as you become aware of your wandering mind, you can obsess over that and mentally chastise yourself during meditation for how terrible you are at doing it. This can then become a negative cycle, rather than one that is helpful. The key to mindful meditation is to strike the right balance of required effort, but without too much effort. During a mindfulness practice, inevitably your mind will still wander; in fact, if I was to be honest, my mind sometimes wanders more than it doesn't during my attempts at mindful meditation. When it does, one must gently recognize that wandering, note that wandering, and guide the mind back to the present object of attention. One will probably have to do that guiding back to attention repeatedly during the exercise, and one must surrender the feelings of frustration that can come from that and just accept it. Many mindful meditation practices use the breath as the present object of attention. Your breath is a constant and usually unconscious pattern of your present existence. Focusing on the breath -- perhaps it's rise and fall in your diaphragm or it's coolness as it passes through your nostrils -- helps to keep your mind focused on the present during the exercise.

There are lots of great mindful meditation resources online and many guided meditations on youtube or other applications. One that I've found useful is called Headspace. You can find their guided meditations via their website, their youtube channel or their Headspace phone app. Headspace has also produced a couple of guided video series for Netflix. Some purists would argue that there's an irony in using technological tools to practice meditation, and they probably have a point. At least as a beginner, however, and recognizing that I am a product of western civilization, I have found it helpful to put on my headphones and engage in a meditation exercise guided by an app on my phone.

Reduce Social Media Use

I'm throwing this one in at the end knowing that it's somewhat controversial and knowing that it will be a tough one to swallow for my high school students. I'm also aware that complaining about the effects of social media on society is a very "okay boomer" thing to do (though I'm not at all in the boomer generation, for most of my high school students, everyone over 30 is ancient). The research on the positive versus negative effects of social media is not all cut and dried. As the term suggests, social media platforms can be a place for social connections and that can be beneficial for well-being. There is evidence that some teenagers who struggle to find a social group in which to belong benefit from connecting with like-minded other teens online. In the transient international school context in which I've been working, I see the benefit of social media for maintaining friendships and social connections with friends who've moved and are spread out over the world. During the past year of global pandemic, social media and online communication tools more generally, have served a vital role in helping people to maintain social connections. In the research around savoring, some have argued that taking a picture of your savored experience and then sharing it with others via social media can deepen the savoring effects (others have argued that the picture-taking and social-media-sharing component actually distracts from savoring the moment in the here and now).

Despite some of these very real benefits, there are some serious dark sides to social media, which are perhaps most potent during adolescence. First, social media platforms are designed, by intention, to be highly addictive. The whole business model of these social media platforms is to draw in the user to spend more and more time on the platform and engage more and more of life through it. On this issue, the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma is worth a watch. Because of its addictive nature, and the fact that time spend on social media is often very sedentary and pretty mindless, social media use runs counter to many of the well-being strategies listed above. Social media use takes away from natural physical exercise, and distracts from getting sufficient sleep. Social media use often promotes relatively shallow social connections as compared to spending time with someone in person. Finally, social media use often prompts mind wandering into the past, or into wishing for the lives and experiences of others, which distracts from mindfully living in the here and now.

For me, the most compelling research that points to the negative impacts of social media is around the concept of social comparison. As humans, we have very few absolute reference points; our reference points are largely social and therefore relative. By this I mean that humans tend to situate themselves in the world through social comparisons with those around them. Research around satisfaction with money, for example, shows the negative consequences of this. People tend to socially interact mostly with people in a similar income bracket as themselves. If people gain higher incomes and come into social contact with other people with higher incomes, the amount of money they perceive as important for life satisfaction increases exponentially. For example, a study discussed by Lyubomirsky, in her book that I mentioned above, involved asking people making $30 thousand per year how much money they would need to feel financially satisfied in life. The average response was around $50 thousand. Another group of people making $100 thousand per year were asked the same question and their average response was about $250 thousand. This is just one of many studies that shows how our relative reference points and social comparisons to our peers contributes to our unhappiness.

This is where we must look seriously at social media. Very rarely do people post their mundane daily lives to social media. Typically, people post the moments where they're especially insightful, or about unique experiences, or they post pictures when they're looking their best, or when they're on vacation, or out at a party with friends. Some people very intentionally curate a certain persona on social media that does not reflect their real life. Others do not do this intentionally, but it is still natural that one mostly posts when they're at their best and not during the typical moments of their day-to-day life. When it comes to putting our lives out there publicly, we are all somewhat selective about what parts of our lives we share. Because of this, when we assess the lives of others purely from their social media selves, we get a very distorted view of their reality. Everyone's life looks better than ours when we assess their life via social media; everyone looks happier, sexier, has more friends, is wealthier, and is enjoying a more glamorous life. When we apply the problem of human social comparison to this, the effects can be disastrous, especially during the very social comparison driven period of adolescence. When we judge our own lives relative to the social media lives of our peers, our lives seem miserable and that contributes to our own unhappiness. There is some research that indicates that it is also a contributing factor to the growing rates of adolescent depression and anxiety.

Probably, completely deleting all social media use is unrealistic and maybe would even have an unfavorable effect in terms of social connection and well being during this time of pandemic and online learning. However, being more conscious of your social media use is probably worth considering. Maybe you should set some time limits on your phone for your daily use of different social media platforms. Maybe you could start a bold experiment that involves you and your friends actually posting the real and ordinary aspects of your day. You need to, at least, be aware of your brain's natural tendency to relative reference points and social comparison. When viewing the lives of your peers on social media makes you feel bad, keep reminding yourself that it's not a real view of their lives. If nothing else, it's important to recognize that excessive time spent on social media is a distraction from the intentionality required to implement some of the other strategies that are shown to improve well-being.

Conclusion

It's worth mentioning at the bottom of this list of well-being strategies the work of Lyubomirsky around the importance of, what she calls, "fit." Not every strategy will have the same impact for everyone, so it's important to identify the strategies that have the best fit for you. Choose a couple that you think will help and try them; if one doesn't seem like a good fit, drop it and try something else instead. Having said that, however, even though many of these strategies seem quite simple, they will require some effort. Do not give up on a strategy until you've truly given it a try with some dedication.