Healthy Faculty Days 2017: Commit to being fit!
What if you could sleep like a baby? What if you could leave stress behind? What if you could give yourself the gift of an active lifestyle? These are the questions we asked ourselves in preparation for the Healthy Faculty Days 2017.
From theory to practice
What if you could sleep like a baby? What if you could leave stress behind? What if you could give yourself the gift of an active lifestyle? These are the questions we asked ourselves in the course “Health Promotion and Disease Prevention” by Winifred Gebhardt and Madelief Bertens. As psychology students we are used to thinking about theoretical matters. However, during this course we could finally translate theory into practice. This new freedom we were given in the workshop enabled us to use our own creativity to link scientific results with daily life. But maybe we should start by introducing ourselves: Marleen, Simone, Ann-Christin, and Viktoria of the Health and Medical Psychology Master’s. At the moment we are preparing for the Healthy Faculty Days 2017, and in this blog we would like to share our experiences.
Workshops
Every year the students of this course prepare a workshop on a specific topic with the aim of making the lives of Faculty staff and fellow students more healthy. The final workshops, prepared in just eight weeks, are presented on the Healthy Faculty Days. This year’s Healthy Faculty Days are October 26 and 27.
Awareness
After choosing the topic, each group presented their weekly progress and received interactive and constructive feedback from the others. The strength of this way of working is that we receive critical and honest feedback from both the teacher and the students. It was fascinating to experience that even over the first few weeks we all became more aware of these topics and included them in our own lifestyle. For example, due to the “sleep group” Viki adapted her sleep hygiene by staying away from her computer and mobile phone for at least two hours before she goes to bed. Marleen became more aware of her procrastinating behavior and starting picking up on typical procrastinating behaviors at an early stage. If she starts cleaning, for instance, she now recognizes that as a sign there’s probably something else she should be doing at that moment and acts on that! Ann-Christin and Simone implemented short breaks in their daily routines to do little exercises because they experienced an increase in their focus and productivity. In the end, we all became more aware of our health behavior and, for example, are more likely to take the stairs now instead of the elevator, or to go outside during our lunch breaks to stretch our legs.
Even in this short period of time our ideas of change had great effects on our lives. That’s why we’re really looking forward to providing that experience to our workshop participants. If you notice our footsteps on the floor, remember to follow in our footsteps and drop in to one of our workshops.
"Even the small improvements matter."