By Julia Duggan
Staff Writer
Despite online serving as the academic and social arenas for the fall semester, the College held its annual Thrive Wellness Week virtually. It was held on Instagram and featured a lot of different ways to promote healthy habits.
“We are incredibly happy with the engagement and response from our wellness week,” said Mayuri Reddy, a junior biology major and a Health and Wellness peer educator. “We were originally a little sad that we wouldn’t be able to organize an in-person event, because a lot of the activities we normally had don’t translate onto an online platform. However, we managed to make it work and we of course couldn’t have done it without the wonderful content that our co-sponsors created.”
This year the topics were arranged on a wheel to help show that everything should be managed equally, and that one can easily pivot between topics. The topics this year were spiritual, emotional, intellectual, physical, social, environmental and financial.
“I think it works well for our current situation,” said Gianna Fuls-Hopkins, a junior biology major who attended the event. “I really like how they brought all different groups and organizations together onto their stories with the videos and the visuals.”
Starting off the event, a printable document of Roscoe was sent to every student at the College. In the email, students were encouraged to print out the photo, color it and then send a photo of the finished product to be featured on the Thrive Wellness Instagram account. With the week over, several students’ art can be found scattered on the Instagram account from throughout the week.
When the topic of spirituality was featured, New Jersey Christian Fellowship, a student organization, came to join in the conversation.
“We believe that at the center of spiritual health is embracing your purpose in life while surrounding yourself with a loving, supportive community,” the Instagram account stated.
In addition to featuring student organizations, there were prize giveaways ranging from reusable water bottles to books that promote a certain topic. Each giveaway connected to a specific topic on a wheel, and the reusable water bottles were connected to physical wellness, while Sudoku books were connected to intellectual wellness.
“I am always looking for new ways to improve my mental health and also look for tips for other aspects of health that I don’t always think of,” said Fuls-Hopkins.
Each day of the event also included a Zoom presentation featuring a specific topic on the wheel to offer explanations and advice on how to improve well-being. The spiritual presentation was about choosing love over fear.
For the physical health day, the Health and Wellness peer educators sent in videos demonstrating and challenging all who visited to simple workout routines.
For example, one completed 10 pushups. Peer educators also sent in their own videos of creative ways to destress after a long day. These included arts and crafts projects. One even went into detail on knitting small yarn bunnies in an easy video for beginners to follow.
Another refreshing theme presented throughout the week was ways to stay healthy during a pandemic. Several posts and stories were related to meditation and for helping to carve out small little things to help make each day a little more bearable. While the pandemic did not appear on the wellness wheel, there are several helpful tips for anyone regarding living through a pandemic on the page. There is a little of everything so anyone can find something to help improve their health.
“I personally have been taking the parts that I enjoy and the most and then implement that into my routine. I even screenshotted some of the recipes,” said Fuls-Hopkins.
“I even got direct messages from a couple people telling me how they enjoyed the content and some of my friends from other schools messaged me about the content I was sharing, which shows how our wellness week not only reached our community but others as well,” Reddy said.
