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The 4 F's: Fighting Feelings of Fraudulence and Failure (impostor syndrome)

Start by knowing the contibuting factors.

• "Impostors" frame their accomplishments and abilities negatively.
• Impostors may have been top students in high school but at university, surrounded by other excellence students, they are no longer exceptional. "As a result, Impostors often dismiss their own talents and conclude that they are student when they are not the very best" (Sakulku & Alexander, 2011).
• Impostors set impossibly high standards for themselves and if they don't meet these they "overgeneralize themselves as failures" (Sakulku & Alexander, 2011; Thompson et al., 1998).
• When they succeed, impostors attribute the outcome to luck or other external factors (Thompson et al., 1998).

So, be watchful for ways that you downplay your accomplishments. You belong here!

Mental Wellness Tip - MWEC

-Anne-Kristina Arnold

Have you Shinrin Yoku’d recently? 

Roughly translated from the Japanese as “Forest Bathing”, Shinrin Yoku is a common practice in Japan aimed at slowing down and reducing stress levels.  More than just walking in the forest, the practice involves “making contact with and taking in the atmosphere of the forest”.  I know when I’m feeling stressed, a visit to the forest to marvel at the power and beauty of nature can really help my mental state.  What is actually happening?  Is there evidence to support Shinrin Yoku as a mechanism to reduce physiological stress?

Many studies have attributed physiological responses to Shinrin Yoku, but there are few with randomized controls and large sample sizes.  In an April 2019  of research which used salivary or serum cortisol as a biomarker of stress, researchers narrowed their analysis down from 971 to 8 acceptable randomly-controlled studies. Of these, 6 showed significantly lower cortisol in the forest group compared to the control group (often matched exercise level controls in urban environments).

So, there may be an association between Shinrin Yoku and stress reduction.  The mechanism however isn’t clear.  Researchers have suggested an “anticipatory effect” – just thinking about getting out in nature may reduce the stress response.  Others suggest that mindfulness when we are in nature may be playing a part.  Others have suggested it is merely a response to reduced stimuli in nature compared to urban environments.

Either way, I’m going to continue to use a walk/hike in the forest as way to alter my mood on a stressful day.  There is a lot of nature surrounding us on Burnaby Mountain – maybe getting out for a break in the forest will be just the trick to help to reduce your stress this summer.  Get out and hug a tree or two.  Worth a try!

Mental Wellness Tip - MWEC

-Dr. Andy Hoffer

When students ask me how to best prepare for a 448 exam, I say "make sure you get enough sleep before the exam"

Giving priority to final exams inevitably means cancelling or postponing other activities. However... two activities, sleep and exercise, should not be sacrificed!  Adequate sleep and exercise are key contributors to success in preparation for exams.

At least two processes take place during sleep that are essential for optimal brain function.

1.  Recently learned information is filed from temporary to long-term memory.

The memory function of sleep, S. Diekelmann & J. Born, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11:114–126,2010.

• Sleep promotes the consolidation of declarative as well as procedural and emotional memories in a wide variety of tasks.
• Consolidation during sleep not only strengthens memory traces quantitatively but can also produce qualitative changes in memory representations. An active process of re-organization enables the formation of new associations and the extraction of generalized features. This can ease novel inferences and insights.

2.  Toxic waste is cleared out of the sleeping brain.

Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain, L. Xie, H. Kang, ..., M. Nedergaard. Science 342:373-377, 2013.

• The glymphatic system is a recently discovered macroscopic waste clearance system that utilizes a unique system of perivascular tunnels, formed by astroglial cells, to promote efficient elimination of soluble proteins and metabolites from the central nervous system.
• Besides waste elimination, the glymphatic system also facilitates  brain-wide distribution of several compounds, including glucose, lipids, amino acids, growth factors, and neuromodulators.
• Intriguingly, the glymphatic system functions mainly during sleep and is largely disengaged during wakefulness. The biological need for sleep across all species may therefore reflect that the brain must enter a state of activity that enables elimination of potentially neurotoxic waste products, including β-amyloid.

3.   In addition, exercise has been shown to independently assist in cleaning out the brain.

Voluntary running enhances glymphatic influx in awake behaving, young mice. S. von Holstein-Rathlou, N.C.Petersen, M. Nedergaard. Neuroscience Letters 662:253-258, 2018.

• Glymphatic activity in young mice was assessed after five weeks of voluntary running.
• Exercise increases glymphatic influx in awake but not in anesthetized animals.
• Glymphatic influx is enhanced in hypothalamus, ventral, and lateral cortex.

So, here is my advice:  Get enough sleep!  This time is needed by your brain for housecleaning and to organize your learning.

And, if you overslept a bit and find yourself running late... no worries...  go ahead and Sprint for it!  You will start the exam in top shape!

MENTAL WELLNESS TIP - MWEC

-Dr. Leanne Ramer

Hello fellow BPKers, Leanne here

In 2019, I have been running an overdue experiment on meditation. As a neuroscientist, I'm a late adopter: there is no question. The data are so, so compelling. If meditation was a drug, the FDA would approve it, and the inventor(s) would be rich. Check out this open access publication in Science Reports (). Using fMRI, they found that gratitude meditation is correlated with both reduced heart rate and changes in functional connectivity of neural networks associated with quality of life. Perhaps more importantly,  they found that resentment meditation increases heart rate and produces negative alterations in functional connectivity.

Before now, I have found every excuse.... I'm too busy to meditate. I'm too tired. I should use that time to work. Five minutes won't do anything.

Well: I've found that five minutes does something. I'm using an App called Insight Timer, and it has been a game changer for me. I can select the duration of my meditation, a guided topic or a selection of background music, and even a customized start and finish sound. It makes it easy. 

Instead of hitting a 10 minutes snooze button in the morning, I now hit a 10 minute meditation. Do I fall asleep sometimes? Yes. Do I think it helps anyway? Yes.

If I could tell my 22 year old self one thing, anchored in data and based on personal experience, it would be this:

Meditate. Just do it. You can't afford to skip it, and you can't afford to wait. 

MENTAL WELLNESS TIP - MWEC

-Diana Bedoya

It’s Diana from the BPK Mental Health Committee with our first monthly tip on promoting well-being.

When my life starts getting hectic, stressful and a bit overwhelming (say, right now for instance!), I turn to a nature pause to re-calibrate. We are lucky to live within a beautiful natural environment, and personally, taking some time around my favorite forests of the lower mainland and beyond provides an excellent opportunity to reset and refresh. And I always feel better and have more focused work when I leave!

I am attaching a small, but fun study of undergraduate students at McMaster who described natural places they found beneficial to their mental health. In the study, students preferred natural places that were familiar, separate from the demands and chaos of their lives, and had a variety of natural elements like trees and water. These places allowed for deeper relaxation and more meaningful reflection.

Sounds pretty great to me!