Day #1 (5/9)

 Day #1, 5/9

Day one is in the books! It was a perfect spring day to get us started and it looks like the weather will continue to be great this week. My project has changed around quite a bit since I first planned it back in January but I’m really excited with the direction I’m heading. After a hand injury in baseball, I’m limited in the physical fitness and lifting component of my project because I can’t really grip anything with my right hand. This forced me to adjust my plans but I think this could actually help my project in the long term. I started off my day in the library planning out the direction of my project and trying to figure out what I really want to accomplish in the next two weeks. I want to focus on mental health issues from a few different angles, and through my research a reoccurring question I had was, why is mental health declining consistently throughout the world? This is obviously a question that our whole generation will struggle to answer and solve over many years, but it really got me thinking. Realizing that this is the reality our society will live with led me to think about not how we can stop this growth in mental health issues, but how we can deal with it on a personal level and try to avoid those feelings. I hope to find routines and practices that could help individuals on a day-to-day basis, I hope to try out many of these activities on my own and see how my mood and mindset are affected. I currently have so many ideas for the direction of my project and my first day was just trying to get those ideas down onto paper and begin to make a more direct plan. After spending a few hours researching and brainstorming, I felt pretty cooped up on a sunny day and headed out for my first hike. I went up and over the ski hill and explored the backside of the hill a bit, ending up hiking around 6 miles in total. It wasn’t very physically challenging but I really enjoyed being out in the woods by myself and it allowed me to think on my own and reflect. I was feeling anxious about my project before heading out and was getting worried about how I would do all of this on my own in the next two weeks but the hike really reset and relaxed me. It was a good feeling that just reinforced the reasoning for why I was doing this project and showed me how important these daily activities are for mental health. My goal is to do something each day for my mind(journaling), body(hiking/exercise), and something that I enjoy every day (baseball). These three goals paired with a healthy lifestyle that involve consistency in my sleep schedule and a balanced diet will be key parts of my project that are focused on helping my mind and body connection. I also watched a few ted talks regarding mental health as well as anxiety, they really helped me get thinking about the project. In the evening, I wanted to keep working on my project and decided I would look for a movie about mental health. I went through a few lists of the best movies focused on mental health and Silver Linings Playbook was #1 on a few lists and I hadn’t seen before. I only watched the first hour but some of the messages from the movie are really important to my project even though they are more focused on mental illnesses. A quote that stuck with me came from the main character who just spent 9 months in a mental hospital, he said, “We often get caught up in the negativity, and it’s poison to our lives”. This simply reminded me not to get frustrated when something goes wrong and that when anything negative happens, there is always a silver lining. This is something I need reminding of and I think it’s always true no matter how negative a situation may seem. It reminded me of when I received a major and I felt like it was the worst thing in the world that could happen, but looking back it was a turning point for me and without that incident, I would have had a very different 12 months with much worse grades. Overall it was an interesting start to my senior project and I’m really looking forward to where the next two weeks take me. 

Hours: 5

Total Hours: 5 

Blog written: 9 am on 5/10