Duke Graduate and Professional Student Government heard a presentation on student wellness by Tom Szigethy, associate dean and director of DuWell, during its Tuesday senate meeting.
Szigethy told the senators in attendance that the top three factors affecting academic performance for both undergraduate and graduate students are stress, anxiety and sleep. He advocated for including fun in students' schedules, which he identified as typically “the first thing that goes out the window once the stress starts climbing.”
"If you don't prioritize your wellness, nobody else in life is going to prioritize it," he said.
Szigethy emphasized the importance of finding a balance between studying and taking mental health breaks, explaining that such breaks improve not only students’ well-being but also their academic performance.
“The way our brain works is that if we work 50 minutes and take a 10 minute break, you’re going to retain more information than if you worked the full hour straight through,” he said. “That break helps your brain to incorporate all the knowledge you studied into memory.”
He pointed to breathing exercises before exams as another effective strategy, noting that studies have shown five-point grade increases for students who do breath work before a test.
Szigethy also discussed the challenge of negative self-talk among students, arguing that students should speak to themselves with the same compassion they would show a best friend.
His presentation was met with pushback from meeting attendees, who spoke about the challenges that exist in the cultures of their specific programs with regard to maintaining a balance between studying and wellness.
“On a student level, you hear often … ‘Just get through the next six weeks. If you get through the first term, you're golden,’” one attendee said. “And you hear that term after term after term.”
Szigethy acknowledged these concerns and admitted that an individual student’s attention to their personal wellness is only half of the solution.
“That's another whole half of this,” he said. “It's literally 50% … what we've been talking about, and the other [50%] is the community and the culture that you're in.”
Attendees were given a pamphlet at the end of the meeting which listed “self-care tips for the body and soul.”
In other business
The senate noted that their motion from the previous meeting, which called for Duke's administration to improve its anti-harassment response following a spam text campaign targeting minority students at Duke, has now been signed unanimously.
GPSG President Keanu Valibia shared that plans for a conversation between him and an administrative staff member regarding the resolution are “in motion.”
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.
Darragh Senchyna is a first-year graduate student in The Graduate School and a staff reporter for the news department.