Depending where you live, autumn may be in coming along nicely.  Here in the Bay Area we continue to have balmy summer weather but it is just starting to feel like the seasons are changing.  

As the weather cools down, what are some self-care activities that you gravitate towards in autumn?  Take some time this fall to enjoy the changing seasons and nurture your mental, emotional, and physical health.  Here are some small ways to enjoy fall.

• Sip hot tea
• Take a stroll and really notice the changing leaves, the colors, and the crispness in the air
• Decorate your space to bring autumn indoors
• Make spiced apple cider
• Rake the leaves
• Jump in those raked leaves
• Collect leaves on your next hike and make a collage or put them in a journal
• Read a good book
• Listen to a podcast or an audio book
• Volunteer
• Journal
• Daydream
• Take a cat nap
• Declutter one area of your house
• Donate some things that you no longer need.  
• Try a new recipe such as an autumn soup, or roast some vegetables
• Go apple picking and then make an apple pie with your favorite spices
• See if you can escape from a corn maze
• Watch your favorite movie
• Go pumpkin picking or check out the largest pumpkin grown this year
• Read ghost stories by the fire
• Go camping
• Check out a local festival
• Create a gorgeous fall wreath
• Learn a new skill
• Take a bike ride
• Learn how to knit or crochet
• Paint

Being stuck inside can make you feel bored, frustrated, and completely exhausted, which might seem contradictory if you feel you haven't done anything aside from watching Netflix and make sourdough bread.  The constraints of the pandemic can make us feel sapped and drained.  Many people are wondering what they can do to maintain or increase their energy levels, while protecting themselves and their families from contracting the virus.

The changes in our routines, our mood, multiple Zoom meetings, and being bombarded with as much news as we allow ourselves to read or listen to are all adversely affecting everyone's sleep and energy.

When you feel more stressed as most of us feel during the pandemic, you are prone to also feel more exhausted.  The body responds to stress by staying in the fight-or-flight mode, which produces more cortisol and makes you sleep more lightly.  Additionally, when under stress, we often crave denser food such as mashed potatoes or juicy hamburgers.  But all of that comfort food, also interferes with your ability to get quality sleep and therefore makes you more tired.

And when you do manage to get some quality sleep, it might be laden with nightmares during the pandemic.  The Lyon Neuroscience Research Center found a 15% increase in negative dreams like nightmares.  For people not on the front lines of healthcare and emergency response, fears of the novel coronavirus are projected into fears and threats of spiders, zombies, bugs, and shadowy figures.

The best way to increase your energy is to exercise.  Regular exercise boots your energy and improves your immune system.  There are a wide number of fitness workouts that are available online during the shelter-in-place.  In the Bay Area, we are allowed to go for a socially distant walk or run as long as you maintain at least 6-feet of social distance.  So, lace up your sneakers and go for a brisk walk for 30 minutes to get your blood flowing, reduce your stress, clear your mind, and increase your energy.  Other ideas to get your heart pumping while indoors include jumping rope, your favorite warrior yoga pose, a dance party with your children, or master the latest TikTok dances to your favorite music.  Don't forget to strength train indoors as well.  Try using household objects as weights such as the detergent bottle, milk jugs, packages of sugar or rice.  Keep the weight balanced on both sides of the body.  

Regular exercise can tire you out and make your sleep deeper and more restful, which will improve your energy over time.

Happy 2020!  It's a brand new year.  And like most people, you might have made or are going to make some new year's resolutions for 2020.  Perhaps you want to learn how to meditate, erase your debt, eat more fruits and vegetables, go on long hikes, or be mindful when talking to your spouse and children.  

We start the new year and each day with the hope of attaining these goals.  But we are often really afraid to try because we have tried so many times before and don't want to be disappointed.  Recent research suggests that 88% of people fail to stick to their resolutions to change and improve their lives.

We often fail to change our habits because our brain craves consistency and routine and tries so hard to resist change.  It can be very discouraging to try to do things differently, only to find ourselves falling back into old maladaptive patterns.

Most people believe that if we are hard on ourselves, we will be motivated to change.  But the contrary is actually true.  Showing self-compassion, being warm and supportive towards ourselves and actively soothing ourselves, helps more when we fall short of our intentions and goals.  Self-compassion leads to less anxiety, less depression, and greater peace of mind.  Most importantly, it makes us feel more motivated to make the improvements we want to make.

Here are three steps to achieve your resolutions.

1. Forgive yourself

The first step to making lasting change is to forgive yourself for having failed in the past. It’s okay; it’s normal, even. You did the best you could with the skills you had. Take a deep breath and soothe yourself like you might soothe or talk to a good friend.   Use kind, reassuring words to ease yourself out of a stress response. Remind yourself that few people are successful the first time they try to change their routines. Explain to yourself that feeling bad about your behavior will not increase your future success.

2. Aim for an inherently rewarding target

The second step is to set the right resolution, whether that’s a big audacious goal, a new habit you’d like to get into, or a bad habit you’d like to break.

To begin, you might want to:

• Lose weight
• Get in shape or establish an exercise habit
• Spend more time with your friends

It’s important to figure out WHY you want to do this thing that you haven’t been doing so far. You might have a whole laundry list of reasons for wanting to do what you want to do, and that’s great. But right now, I want you to think of the single most compelling way that you’ll benefit from achieving your goal.

Chances are, you’ve come up with a super logical reason for, say, losing weight or exercising, like that it will lower your blood pressure.

Here’s the thing: Even though we all like to think of ourselves as rational people, logic doesn’t motivate us nearly as much as our emotions do. Why? Because we approach what feels good and avoid what feels bad.

This means that we tend to stick with behavior changes for longer when we aim for something that feels good. Doing something because we feel like we should do it doesn’t feel good. It feels like we’re being forced. It’s stressful, and stress makes us seek comfort, often in the very form of behavior that we are trying to avoid.

So, ask yourself in your heart of hearts, how do you really want to feel? Identify a WHY for your resolution that will motivate you over the long haul.

Maybe you want to lose weight, for example, and so you plan to cut baked goods out of your diet, which happen to be your favorite foods. How will that make you feel?

At first, you might feel great, because you’ve just made a healthy decision for yourself. But if you don’t cheat on your diet, you’ll likely soon feel deprived. And if you do begin to cheat on your diet, you’ll probably feel anxious and guilty. Both of these feeling states are not motivating and uncomfortable, which will make it easy for you to give up on your diet.

But maybe the reason that you want to lose weight is so that you feel healthy and strong. Feeling stronger and healthier are very motivating feeling states, which will make it much easier for you to keep your new habit.

With this in mind, rethink your goal or resolution: Restate it for yourself in terms of how you want to feel.  For example:

• “I forbid myself to eat baked goods” could become → “I want to feel healthy and strong.”
• “I have to get more sleep” could become → “I want to feel well-rested and energetic.”
• “I should spend more time with friends” could become → “I want to feel loving and connected.”

3. Refine your resolution

​What actions and behaviors have led you to feel what you want to feel in the past?

Maybe you tend to feel well-rested and energetic when you go to bed before 10 p.m. Perhaps you tend to feel healthy and strong when you go for a hike. Maybe you feel loving and connected when you spend one-on-one time with your sister.

The important thing here is that it is something that you already have experience with; we human beings tend to be truly terrible at predicting how something will make us feel. But we do well to use our own experience to predict how we’ll feel in the future.

Here’s an example of how we frequently go wrong: Say we'd like to feel stronger this upcoming year. This calls for a get-in-shape habit. So, what would be a good way to get in shape? We could train for a marathon! Fun! Ambitious! But before we start researching destination marathons (because why not make it a vacation, too?), we'd do well to stop and ask: How do we feel when we are training for a long run? 

On the other hand, I can think of two activities that DO make me feel stronger:

• Taking long hikes
• High-intensity exercise classes where I sweat a lot

Your “why” for your goal needs to be a rewarding feeling that you experience when you are doing your resolution or, at the very least, immediately after you do it. A daily hike must genuinely make you feel energized, for example, if that is the feeling you are after. 

From here, refine your resolution one more time. Make sure that your resolution reflects a really specific behavior, so that you know if you are succeeding or not. For example, resolve to take three hikes per week after work on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays instead of resolving to “go for more hikes.”

Finally, do a little reality check. Setting unrealistic resolutions is a sure path to failure. If it’s just not realistic for you to, say, leave work an hour early on Tuesdays and Thursdays so that you can do your hike, please don’t make that your resolution.

If you are now aiming for a target that is specific, realistic, and inherently rewarding (because you know it is going to make you feel good), you are all set to accomplish those 2020 resolutions!

Ah, middle school. Though your child may barely be entering puberty and may still be a pre-teen, the transition to middle school is a big step on the road to maturity. A big, scary step. Regardless of what specific grade marks the beginning of junior high or middle school in your community, your child will be both excited and afraid. Researchers have found that students anticipating the move to middle school worry about three aspects of the change: logistical, social, and academic. Your child with learning or attention difficulties shares the same worries as their peers, and may be afraid the change will be even harder for them.

While you won’t be able to calm your child’s fears completely, with some advance planning and open discussions you can substantially ease their mind. The first step is understanding what may worry your child.

Logistical Concerns

When researchers asked kids what aspect of moving to middle school most concerned them, the top answers related to how things at the new school worked (Akos, 2002). How would they find the right classroom? What happened if they were tardy? Where was the cafeteria? What about the bathrooms?

Middle school is a much more complex environment than grade school. The campus is larger, there are more students, and instead of one teacher and one classroom, your child will have a separate instructor and classroom, for each subject or block of subjects (e.g., language arts/social studies or math/science). It’s no wonder kids worry about finding their way in this new world.

For your student with learning or attention problems, understanding the rules and procedures of the new school may be even more important. The challenge of navigating multiple transitions between classes and organizing books and materials for every subject may be all she can handle in the first few weeks.

Here are some strategies for helping your child make a smoother transition to middle school:

• Explore the school’s website with your child. Search for announcements, schedules, and events.
• Accompany your child on campus tours and orientations offered to parents and incoming students. The better you understand the school layout and rules, the more you can help your child.
• Get a map of the campus and take your child to explore. Pick a time after school in the spring or in the days just before school starts in the fall. Be sure to check in with the school office to get an okay for your explorations.
• Include a couple of your child’s friends on campus treks. They can boost each other’s memory about where things are when school starts.
• Take advantage of summer programs — academic or recreational — offered at the new school for incoming students. Your child will get the feel for the campus in a much more relaxed atmosphere.
• If you can, get a copy of your child’s class schedule and mark the location of their locker and each classroom and bathroom on the school map. Tape both of these inside their binder and locker.  If your child has trouble reading maps, walk the route between classes with them — more than once, if necessary — and note landmarks that your child can use to navigate.
• Find out the length of the passing period between classes. Time it out for your child. Demonstrate how far they can walk in that amount of time.
• Get a copy of the student handbook. Review rules and requirements — especially the school’s code of conduct, which describes consequences for violations of the most important rules. Ask the school staff questions about anything that is unclear.
• Buy your child a lock for her locker several weeks before school starts to give them plenty of time to practice opening and closing it. (Note: Consider whether a combination or keyed lock is best for your child.)  In some schools, this will not be feasible as the lockers come with built-in locks.  Your child might feel anxious dealing with a lock, especially a combination lock, for the first time.
• Make sure your child has an easy-to-read wristwatch so they can quickly see if they need to hurry to be on time to class. 

Social Fears

Another area of worry for students moving to middle school is the social scene. Will I see anyone I know? Will it be hard to make friends? Will I have to eat lunch alone? Are the older kids bullies?
​
Your child is moving from the top of the elementary school heap to the bottom rung of the middle school social ladder.  They may have heard that the older students tease or bully the younger ones. They know for sure that they and their best friends are unlikely to be in every single class together, and, even worse, there may be classes where they don’t know anyone at all on the first day. And if your child with learning or attention problems struggles to make friends anyway, then this all adds up to a potential social nightmare.

Remember that, in addition to changing schools, your child is entering adolescence, a stage when kids start to rely much more on peers and pull away from parents. This is a time when being part of a group is very important and being perceived as different can be devastating. It’s not surprising that finding friends in the new school is a top priority.

The good news is that the more varied social environment also offers many opportunities to meet people. Being in multiple classes each day means your student is surrounded by more potential friends. The better news is that, once students are settled into middle school, they report that friendships and the social scene are among the best things about school (Akos, 2002: Forgan, 2000).

Some things that you can do to ease the social transition:

• Encourage your child to join sports teams, clubs, or other extracurricular activities.
• Ease any loneliness in the early weeks of school by helping your child arrange weekend social activities with neighborhood, church, or grade school friends.
• Encourage your child to join group conversations. Discuss how to join in without interrupting, to add something relevant to conversation in progress, etc.
• Talk about traits that make a good friend (such as being a good listener).
• Talk about social skills. Discuss how words and actions can affect other people.
• Practice skills needed for difficult social situations.
• Remind your child to make eye contact when speaking or listening.

Academic Concerns

Though most students worry more about the logistical and social aspects of middle school before they get there, once settled in, academic concerns rise to the surface. Will the classes be too difficult? Will there be too much homework? Are the teachers hard graders?

It’s quite typical for students’ academic performance to drop upon entering middle school. Along with everything else that’s going on – roller coaster emotions, physical changes, and social upheaval – your child is also coping with harder classes, more homework, and a whole new set of academic expectations. Middle school teachers don’t form the close bonds with students that your child enjoyed in grade school. There is less small group and personalized instruction. Teachers expect students to take charge of assignments and projects with less day-to-day guidance.

For a student with learning or attention difficulties, these changes can come as quite a shock. Teachers may vary in their willingness to understand and accommodate your child’s learning needs. Organization and time management demands rise to a new level. Though it can seem overwhelming, keep reminding your child that they can manage these changes successfully, though it will take time and practice.

Some tips to help ease their academic concerns:

• If your child has an Individualized Education Program (IEP), meet with the middle school IEP team no later than the spring before your child enters the new school. Discuss the qualities of the “ideal” teacher for your child to help ensure the best placements.
• Meet with teachers early in the school year. Give them a profile of your child’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Encourage teachers to continue using strategies that have worked for your child in the past, such as writing homework assignments on the board, or assigning your child a “homework buddy” they can contact if they forget what assignments they have. If the school has a homework hotline, make sure your child knows how to use it.
• Help your child with time management skills. Work together on a schedule for study time, break time, chores, etc.
• Work out an organizational system with your child. Acknowledge and make allowances for their worry and anxiety; at first, they may need to carry everything for all classes all the time in order to feel prepared.
• Avoid overreacting to grades. Making sure your child gets a handle on how to meet the demands of the new school is the critical factor in the early weeks.
• Stay connected to your child’s school work. Try to teach your student to work more independently while supporting them enough to give and boost their confidence.
• Go to back-to-school night, open houses, parent-teacher conferences and other events where you can connect with your child’s teachers.
• Help your child be their own advocate. Encourage them to discuss problems and solutions with teachers on their own, but be ready to step in and help as needed.

The best way to help your child through this transition is to keep a positive attitude about middle school. You may remember how clueless, awkward, and self-conscious you felt at that age. Empathize with your child and normalize their experience. Reassure them that they will become more comfortable and confident with time. Remind your child that the school and the teachers want them to be successful and that they have what it takes to make it all work.

Most students make the adjustment to the routines and demands of middle school within a couple months. If your child is still struggling as fall gives way to winter, then a meeting with their counselor may be in order. Together, you, your student and the counselor can pinpoint specific trouble spots and brainstorm ways to get things on track.

Try to give your tween plenty of information about how things will work in middle school, but be careful not to overload them. Be proactive in sharing information with them while also encouraging them to ask questions.  The more they know up front, the more comfortable they will be on the first day, and beyond.

References

• Akos, Patrick. “Student perceptions of the transition from elementary to middle school.” Professional School Counseling, June 2002; 5(5):339-45
• Forgan, James W. “Adolescents with and without LD make the transition to middle school.” Journal of Learning Disabilities 2000; 33(1):33-43

The weather is warming up, warmer days are here, flowers are starting to bloom.  You know what this means?  Spring has sprung!  

Here are 50 ways to celebrate the spring season today!

The Great Outdoors

1. Plant something green
2. See the cherry blossoms
3. Have a picnic at the park
4. Find the first crocuses and snowdrops
5. Jog outside
6. Take a hike
7. Play softball
8. Ride a bike
9. Sit outside at a café
10. Visit a farm to see the animals
11. Walk on a deserted beach
12. Play a round of golf
13. Go horseback riding

Nostalgic

1. Fly a kite
2. Look for four-leaf clovers
3. Jump in puddles
4. Get dirt under your fingernails
5. Blow bubbles
6. Climb a tree
7. Find a playground and swing on the swings
8. Feed the ducks at a pond
9. Wade in a creek
10. Draw pictures on the sidewalk with chalk
11. Skip stones across a pond
12. Plan a spring break vacation

Eat and Drink

1. Roast a bunch of asparagus
2. Steam whole artichokes and eat them leaf by leaf
3. Bake cupcakes with pink (or lavender or yellow or baby blue) frosting
4. Eat a ripe apricot
5. Visit the farmers’ market and buy spinach and sugar snap peas
6. Pick strawberries
7. Eat jellybeans
8. Buy a package of Peeps
9. Mix up a pitcher of margaritas

Just Because

1. Listen to the rain
2. Watch bumblebees at work in a garden
3. Notice the trees budding
4. Spot a rainbow
5. Listen to the birds singing
6. Go bare-legged
7. Feel the sun on your face
8. Leave your windows open to catch a spring breeze
9. Pet a bunny
10. See all the Oscar-winning movies
11. Send someone other than your mom a Mother’s Day card
12. Wear open-toed shoes
13. Buy a fun umbrella
14. Visit the zoo
15. Decorate your home with fresh tulips and daffodils
16. Get caught in a spring shower

         Can you remember who your best friend was in seventh grade? If you are having difficulty, it could be because relationships at that age are often short-lived. Half of them do not last a year. The friendships that do last can be predicted based on demographic and behavioral similarities.

     There is a lot of change during middle school, and that change makes it hard to maintain friendships.  As kids move from one academic track to another, join or leave sports teams, or take up new extracurricular hobbies, the opportunities to interact with friends wax and wane. Middle school is also a time when growing personal autonomy first allows children the chance to pick their friends and invest—or not—in those relationships.

     A study conducted at Florida Atlantic University tracked 573 seventh-grade dyadic friendships until they ended or until 12th grade. Popularity, aggression and academic success emerged as important behavioral traits of friendships.  The more similar two friends were in these traits, the longer a relationship lasted. 
​
     This quick turnover in middle school friendships is nothing to be worried about unless a child has trouble making friends.  Adults who want to help those children might emphasize that finding peers who are similar in personality and academic interests are central to creating lasting relationships.  

Many people feel as if they're adrift in the world. They work hard, but they don't seem to get anywhere worthwhile.  A key reason that they feel this way is that they haven't spent enough time thinking about what they want from life, and haven't set formal goals for themselves.

How to Set a Goal

First consider what you want to achieve, and then commit to it. Set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound) goals that motivate you and write them down to make them feel tangible. Then plan the steps you must take to realize your goal, and cross off each one as you work through them.

Goal setting is a powerful process for thinking about your ideal future, and for motivating yourself to turn your vision of this future into reality.

The process of setting goals helps you choose where you want to go in life. By knowing precisely what you want to achieve, you know where you have to concentrate your efforts. You'll also quickly spot the distractions that can, so easily, lead you astray.

Starting to Set Personal Goals

You set your goals on a number of levels:

• First you create your "big picture" of what you want to do with your life (or over, for instance, the next 10 years), and identify the large-scale goals that you want to achieve.
• Then, you break these down into the smaller and smaller targets that you must hit to reach your lifetime goals.
• Finally, once you have your plan, you start working on it to achieve these goals.

This is why we start the process of setting goals by looking at your lifetime goals. Then, we work down to the things that you can do in, say, the next five years, then next year, next month, next week, and today, to start moving towards them.

Setting Lifetime Goals

The first step in setting personal goals is to consider what you want to achieve in your lifetime (or at least, by a significant and distant age in the future). Setting lifetime goals gives you the overall perspective that shapes all other aspects of your decision making.

To give a broad, balanced coverage of all important areas in your life, here are some ideas for setting goals in multiple categories:

• Career – What level do you want to reach in your career, or what do you want to achieve?
• Financial – How much do you want to earn, by what stage? How is this related to your career goals?
• Education – Is there any knowledge you want to acquire in particular? What information and skills will you need to have in order to achieve other goals?
• Family – Do you want to be a parent? If so, how are you going to be a good parent? How do you want to be seen by a partner or by members of your extended family?
• Artistic – Do you want to achieve any artistic goals?
• Attitude – Is any part of your mindset holding you back? Is there any part of the way that you behave that upsets you? (If so, set a goal to improve your behavior or find a solution to the problem.)
• Physical – Are there any athletic goals that you want to achieve, or do you want good health into old age? What steps are you going to take to achieve this?
• Pleasure – How do you want to enjoy yourself?
• Public Service – Do you want to make the world a better place? If so, how?

Spend some time brainstorming these things, and then select one or more goals in each category that best reflect what you want to do. Then consider trimming again so that you have a small number of really significant goals that you can focus on.

Setting Smaller Goals

Once you have set your lifetime goals, set a five-year plan of smaller goals that you need to complete if you are to reach your lifetime plan.  Then create a one-year plan, six-month plan, and a one-month plan of progressively smaller goals that you should reach to achieve your lifetime goals. Each of these should be based on the previous plan.
Then create a daily list of things that you should do today to work towards your lifetime goals.

At an early stage, your smaller goals might be to read books and gather information on the achievement of your higher level goals. This will help you to improve the quality and realism of your goal setting.

Finally review your plans, and make sure that they fit the way in which you want to live your life.

Staying on Course

Once you've decided on your first set of goals, keep the process going by reviewing and updating your list on a daily basis.
Periodically review the longer term plans, and modify them to reflect your changing priorities and experience.

SMART Goals

A useful way of making goals more powerful is to use the SMART  mnemonic. While there are plenty of variants (some of which I've included in parenthesis), SMART usually stands for:

• S – Specific (or Significant)
• M – Measurable (or Meaningful)
• A – Attainable (or Action-Oriented)
• R – Relevant (or Rewarding)
• T – Time-bound (or Trackable)

For example, instead of having "to sail around the world" as a goal, it's more powerful to use the SMART goal "To have completed my trip around the world by December 31, 2027." Obviously, this will only be attainable if a lot of preparation has been completed beforehand!

Further Tips for Setting Your Goals

The following broad guidelines will help you to set effective, achievable goals:

• State each goal as a positive statement 
• Be precise: Set precise goals, putting in dates, times and amounts so that you can measure achievement. If you do this, you'll know exactly when you have achieved the goal, and can take complete satisfaction from having achieved it.
• Set priorities – When you have several goals, give each a priority. This helps you to avoid feeling overwhelmed by having too many goals, and helps to direct your attention to the most important ones.
• Write goals down – This crystallizes them and gives them more force.
• Keep operational goals small – Keep the low-level goals that you're working towards small and achievable. If a goal is too large, then it can seem that you are not making progress towards it. Keeping goals small and incremental gives more opportunities for reward.
• Set performance goals, not outcome goals – You should take care to set goals over which you have as much control as possible. It can be quite dispiriting to fail to achieve a personal goal for reasons beyond your control!  In business, these reasons could be bad business environments or unexpected effects of government policy. In sport, they could include poor judging, bad weather, injury, or just plain bad luck.
• Set realistic goals – It's important to set goals that you can achieve. All sorts of people (for example, employers, parents, media, or society) can set unrealistic goals for you. They will often do this in ignorance of your own desires and ambitions.
  It's also possible to set goals that are too difficult because you might not appreciate either the obstacles in the way, or understand quite how much skill you need to develop to achieve a particular level of performance.

Achieving Goals

When you've achieved a goal, take the time to enjoy the satisfaction of having done so. Absorb the implications of the goal achievement, and observe the progress that you've made towards other goals.

If the goal was a significant one, reward yourself appropriately. All of this helps you build the self-confidence you deserve.

With the experience of having achieved this goal, review the rest of your goal plans:

• If you achieved the goal too easily, make your next goal harder.
• If the goal took a dispiriting length of time to achieve, make the next goal a little easier.
• If you learned something that would lead you to change other goals, do so.
• If you noticed a deficit in your skills despite achieving the goal, decide whether to set goals to fix this.

The answer may or may not surprise you, but a messy kitchen might, in fact, ruin your diet.  We have all been there.  A week's worth of dirty plates, cups, and unwashed pots and pans are in the sink, the kitchen table has mail and bills strewn everywhere, and the fruit bowl has fruit that has seen better days.  This chaotic environment can be enough to make someone overeat.  

According to a recent study published in the journal, Environment and Behavior, the researchers set out to find what impact does a disordered kitchen have on people?  We know environmental factors influence behavior and we know the influence of stress on overeating in general, but this particular question of the impact of a messy kitchen had not been studied before.  

The researchers set up two kitchens, one was cluttered and noisy and the other was neat and tidy.  They then asked 98 female undergraduate participants to complete a writing assignment in one of these two kitchens.  The writing prompts varied; some wrote about a time they felt out of control and some wrote about a time when they felt in control.  They were provided with unlimited supply of carrots, cookies, and crackers  and told they could eat as much as they desired.  

Of the participants who wrote about a time when they felt out of control, those in the chaotic kitchen consumed twice as many calories as those in the organized kitchen.  Participants who were in the messy kitchen who had thought and written about a time when they were in control, however, ate less. The in-control mindset buffered against the negative impact of the environment.  

Actively having and maintaining an in-control mindset might help to offset the demands of life, where work, life demands, children, and a busy schedule can make it hard sometimes to keep the kitchen tidy and organized.

Starting college, students usually have expectations about college life long before they actually leave home.  Some freshmen eagerly look forward to college and experiencing more freedom and adventure.  Other students may be enthusiastic about college initially, but then discover that their actual experience falls short of their expectations.  They don’t feel comfortable, happy, or secure in their new environment.  There are still other students who know that leaving home will be hard and dread the thought of saying good-bye to their friends and family, dread the idea of packing and going to college. 

​Nearly every individual encounters challenging experiences at the beginning of college that they did not anticipate.  The transition to college, a generally positive experience, can produce stress and place demands that can lead to varying emotions including sadness, loneliness, and worry.  These feelings are typical and part of the normal developmental transition to college.

Changes to Expect in the First Year of College

• Increased responsibility
• Increased personal freedom
• Managing time
• Different relationships and environments at college
• Changing relationships with friends and family at home

 
Many students welcome the freedom to make their own decisions about what they want to do each day while in college and other students struggle with this level of freedom.  Freshmen must decide when and how to study, socialize with new acquaintances, become involved in activities, exercise, manage their finances, and make time to eat and sleep. 

Students are faced, often for the first time, with the need to take more initiative to address responsibilities, such as scheduling their classes, buying personal items, making appointments to take care of health needs, asking professors and staff for help, and doing laundry. Freshmen have to adjust to new surroundings and negotiate conflicts with new roommates.

Frequent calls home from freshmen are common, especially during the first few months away at college. It may be very hard to say goodbye at the end of holiday or semester breaks. It may also be difficult to re-adjust to rules at home, such as curfews, chores or responsibilities for younger siblings. It is important to point out that parents also need to adjust during this period.

Many students leave high school boyfriends or girlfriends when they go to college. There may be disagreement about whether it is okay to make new friends or see other people. One, or both, partners may struggle with feeling lonely, sad, or jealous, especially if the other partner seems to be happier and adjusting better.

Easing the Transition:

·       Reach out to others in your dorm. You are likely to find that you are not the only one who is sad and upset. Your R.A. (Resident Adviser) is a good resource to talk to and to help you figure out how to cope. Upperclassmen may also be good people to turn to. They might want to share their experiences with you as well what they did to cope.

·     Join campus organizations and clubs that appeal to you. These activities do not have to be a perfect match for you, but can still help you to meet and interact with others who share similar interests and/or may also be looking to meet friends outside the dorm environment. It helps to get more involved!

·   Make an extra effort to take care of yourself, including making time to rest, eat balanced meals, exercise and avoid abusing alcohol or drugs. Try to develop a manageable schedule, including identifying your optimal place and time in the day to study.

·  Adjust your expectations if things are not working out as you planned. For example, your roommate might not be your best friend. You may need to initiate conversations about conflict over personal space and living habits. Try to give yourself some time to adjust. Recognize that relationships take time to develop (e.g. most students’ friendships from home formed over a period of years), and that your surroundings will become more familiar over time.

·     Seek out resources on campus that can help you address problems and get support, both academically and personally. These varied resources include your adviser, professors, your RA, and other university services such as the Counseling Center and the Student Services Center, Each of these resources will also assist in connecting you with other helpful resources on campus.