Breathe

For many college students, it isn’t the intense class schedule that becomes the most difficult transition to handle. It’s the balancing act they manage between being a student, working to stay a student and enjoying the few free hours they call a social life.

At the University of South Dakota, the first few weeks – really the next four years – become the ultimate test of time management. In the face of mounting stress from a tight schedule and a potentially tighter budget, ways to find balance of the mind and body can take forms unbeknownst to the average USD student.

As students struggle to find time to sleep and eat at normal hours, exercise seems a far cry from college’s top priorities. But for long-time yoga enthusiast and Wellness Center instructor, Rita Powell, if you can find balance with your body, you can find balance in your life.

For Powell, she had always felt a release through sports growing up. But it wasn’t until she pursued priesthood that she wanted to see how non-athletes could feel the same mind-body transcendence that occurs from physical experiences. Studying with a group called International Yoga Therapy, Powell embraced the Hindu scriptural base that she now brings to her yoga class at the Wellness Center.

Does this mean yoga will erase your depression entirely? No. But as Powell said, yoga is an outlet to feeling grounded in this world.

“We are told that the body and spirit are two separate things,” Powell said. “But if you look at the basis of Hindu, they are one in the same. One saying is ‘If the body is stiff and inflexible, the spirit is stiff and inflexible.”

There are obvious physical benefits from yoga: flexibility, strength and better balance. But it is not like if someone is upset, they can just go into a downward facing dog and everything resolves itself. Powell said the mental effects from yoga are focusing on practices that can be taken for granted, like breathing.

Breathing technique is a fundamental part to each yoga session, Powell said, and it is an aspect she brings into her own life. Being the mother of two young children, and having the ability of mindful breathing stimulates the relaxation response, which is the opposite of the fight-or-flight response normally associated with stress triggers.

Matt Sutera, a first-year USD graduate student, started taking classes three or four years ago on a whim with some friends, but he said it is now a necessary part of his life as a student.

“The main thing is it helps relax and focus me, so when I hit the books, I am prepared to actually get something done,” Sutera said. “It also helps me dissociate for maybe an hour or so from the stress I’m under, which I think every student needs.”

Sutera said yoga may not be everyone’s go-to, but every student needs that one activity that let’s their mind decompress from the pressures of student life.

Students with mental health needs are seeing an increase in colleges across the nation, as a 2010 national survey shows that nearly half of students going to counseling centers are dealing with serious mental health issues, which is more than double the rate a decade ago.

For students unaware of possible options on campus to balance their mental health, USD offers a student counseling center, located in the Cook House at the southeast side of campus. There, enrolled students can attend confidential individual, group and couples counseling, as well as crisis intervention and education services among others.

The need for college mental health resourc-

es is undisputed in the U.S., as a 2010 New York Times article reported 46 percent of college students said they felt “things were hopeless” at least once during the past year, stated a 2009 survey by the American College Health Association.

In that report, almost a third of students said they had been so depressed that their lives became difficult to function.

“When students are stressed, the body doesn’t know the difference between if they are being chased by a lion or if they are about to take a big test,” said Becky Wolff, an assistant professor in the School of Health Sciences. “They are wired for fight-or-flight, which releases a cascade of chemicals.”

Nearly 1,400 biochemicals are released by a single stress trigger, Wolff said. Among these chemicals is stress hormone, cortisol, which is secreted by the adrenal gland and takes 8 to 9 hours to go back to a normal level.

In short spurts, cortisol can be critical to survival, but with those in a depression, cortisol levels do not decrease. Chronic levels of this hormone is similar to what it feels like to take too much medication, Wolff said. People with high levels of cortisol may be retaining water and feel puffy and bloated.

How each person deals with these chronic levels is up to them. Some prefer exercise, breathing exercises or mindful meditation. Wolff said that she wants to see more self-help ideas brought to campus like she saw at the University of Southern Illinois, which offered students a healing touch program, which is energy therapy that focuses on balancing your physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well-being.

“I want to see a healthcare blend between western and eastern treatments. I mean if you are deathly ill, go to the doctor, not the nearest yoga studio,” said Wolff. “But I think there is a lot to say about your body speaking for the subconscious mind.”