University enshrines healthy living
Program puts emphasis on better wellness choices for students
BURLINGTON, Vt. — Pledges by post-secondary students to eschew drugs and alcohol are old hat. Now they’re meditating, working out, practising yoga, eating healthfully, and at least one school, the University of Vermont, it has become a bona fide lifestyle.
In UVM’s Wellness Environment, known as WE, students live in a new, big substance-free dorm, take a required class in what affects the health of their brains and bodies, and are given incentives to stay healthy like access to a free gym membership, nutrition and fitness coaches and an app that tracks their activities.
“We created an environment where we believe if we offer young people healthy foods, healthy choices, they’ll make them. We reward those things, and we don’t encourage the negative things, so the rule in the environment is no alcohol, no drugs, and the students follow it,” said Dr. Jim Hudziak, the chief of child psychiatry at the UVM’s Larner College of Medicine, who founded the WE program.
It goes beyond the wellness and substance-free residential halls found at some colleges.
“It looks at them (students) as an individual, which is really important obviously for health and wellness, but then it’s also making changes to their community,” said David Arnold, of the Washington-based NASPA, Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. “So combining those two things together as well as working broader with faculty is actually a very, very impressive implementation of that process.”
At the start of a recent class, Healthy Brains, Healthy Bodies, the auditorium full of students stood with eyes closed for a few minutes of meditation. Then Hudziak, who tosses a brain-shaped football to students in the auditorium before class, discussed neuroscience topics including how traumatic or stressful experiences in childhood can affect physical and mental health.
And there’s no tolerance for alcohol or drugs in the dorm. If you’re caught with either in the environment, you’re thrown out, Hudziak said.
“I’m a genetic neuroscientist and child psychiatrist who wanted to end what I thought and saw was very damaging cultures in university settings, and I thought using neuroscience and behaviour change science rather than sort of lecturing and setting standards of behaviour would work,” he said.
Through the app, students earn coins for healthy choices that can be used to buy WE paraphernalia — socks, sweat shirts, hats. They’re also encouraged to mentor kids in the community as one of the four pillars on which the program is based: fitness, mindfulness nutrition and relationships.