It is a full day set aside for students, teachers, and staff in Jordan School District to prioritize their health and wellness at home and in school. The second annual Health and Wellness Day is Friday, February 10 and while there will be no school for students that day, they are invited to participate in the Wellness Quest with family and friends.
On this episode of the Supercast, we explain what the Wellness Quest is and how something called the “SELFIE’” model is at the heart of the Wellness Quest curriculum.
Audio Transcription
Anthony Godfrey:
Hello and welcome to the Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. It is a full day set aside for students, teachers, and staff in Jordan School District to prioritize their health and wellness at home and in school. The second annual Health and Wellness Day is Friday, February 10th. And while there will be no in-person school for students that day, they are invited to participate in a Wellness Quest with family and friends. On this episode of the Supercast, we explain what the Wellness Quest is and how something called the "SELFIE" model is at the heart of the Wellness Quest curriculum.
We're here in our little studio talking to Casey Pehrson, the school psychologist at Herriman High School. Casey, thanks for joining us.
Casey Pehrson:
Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
Anthony Godfrey:
Health and Wellness Day is coming up. It's our second annual Health and Wellness Day, which is set aside to focus on the health and wellness of our staff members, our parents, and our students educated with Jordan School District. And we're just excited for that day and we want to really talk about how we can each focus more on our own personal health. Casey, you've developed a program called the “SELFIE" Method that you've presented over 150 times. You presented it to our administrators in our opening conference and it's an acronym that reminds us of all the things we ought to be doing to help keep ourselves healthy. So can you go through the acronym? Tell us a little bit about where it started and tell us about yourself as well.
Casey Pehrson:
Yeah, so as was mentioned, my name's Casey Pehrson. I'm the school psychologist and I'm at Herriman High School. And this is my eighth year at Herriman High but my ninth year in Jordan School District, so I've also worked at East Lake Elementary and South Hills Middle School. So the "SELFIE" method is an acronym that was actually kind of developed based on experience at all three levels of education. So in elementary, middle school, and high school. But in "SELFIE" the ‘S’ stands for sleep, the ‘E’ is for exercise, ‘L’ is for light, ‘F’ is for fun, ‘I’ is for interaction and ‘E’ is for eating right. And these are kind of elements of self-care. But really, I call it your ticket to thrive because when you do these things you feel better. But a lot of times these things fall to the bottom of the list. We don't take time for them.
Anthony Godfrey:
Yeah, they're at the bottom of my list I'm afraid.
Casey Pehrson:
You’re not the only one.
Anthony Godfrey:
They need to move up. They need to move up. So that's why we're here. Let's talk about let's just work our way through the list. Let's start with sleep.
Casey Pehrson:
Yeah, so sleep. We as a society, we stink at sleep. We're really bad at it. And we tend to stink at sleep in one of three distinct ways. So the number one way that we all stink at sleep is we don't get enough. So if you're not getting enough sleep at night, you're in the majority because that's a lot of us. So for elementary-age kids, they need 9 to 11 hours of sleep per night. For adolescents, they need 8 to 10. That's the window. Research shows that 9.25 hours of sleep is optimal for most teens. And then adults we need 7 to 8. Research leans us a little more towards 7, but 7 to 8 is about the window. So if you're not getting enough, you're in the majority. So the number one way that we stink at sleep is we don't get enough.
The number two way that we stink at sleep is some of us try to splice it. My high school students are really good at this. Where they'll come home from school and they're so exhausted after the school day that they'll crash into a two-and-a-half-hour power nap. And I'm here to bust that myth. There's no such thing as a two-and-a-half-hour power nap. It sounds like I'm against naps though. I'm not against naps. I'm pro nap. Go nap. But you gotta do the power nap right. So in order to actually be a power nap, it needs to be 25 minutes or under, that's your power nap zone. If you're taking a two-and-a-half-hour nap, it's gonna actually exhaust you and steal from your nighttime sleep. Some of my students are doing this so they're falling asleep after school for two and a half hours and then they can't fall asleep for the night until 3:00 AM and a vicious cycle ensues. So splicing your sleep doesn't work. You need to get all of your sleep in one go.
Anthony Godfrey:
I've never heard that term for it. I've heard it termed falling asleep on the couch while you're doing email and letting your iPad fall to the floor.
Casey Pehrson:
That's it too, yes.
Anthony Godfrey:
That’s what we call it around my house.
Casey Pehrson:
That makes sense.
Anthony Godfrey:
And then you wake up, you're up for a while and then you try to get back to sleep and the sleep is disrupted. So that makes a lot of sense. And if you take a short nap, like a 20-minute nap, 25-minute nap, then you don't get pulled down into the abyss that I get pulled into if I nap or fall asleep. It's really hard to recover from that and your night's kind of shot.
Casey Pehrson:
Exactly. The number three way that we stink at sleep is sometimes we get too much. And there's kind of a law of diminishing returns with sleep. It's like Goldilocks, you wanna get the just right amount. If you get too much, you're gonna start negating some of your benefits of sleep. So that just right zone is what we're seeking.
Anthony Godfrey:
Now let me ask you about this. I've read over the years, I seem to recall, that you can actually catch up on sleep a little bit over a weekend. So I have been really open to my 13-year-old sleeping pretty late on a Saturday morning when it's possible. Is that true? Can you kind of catch up and make up a little bit for lost time?
Casey Pehrson:
Not a ton. To some extent you can, ultimately though sleep hygiene's important, and in order to achieve that, you kind of need to go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time every day to get your body in that sort of natural circadian rhythm.
Anthony Godfrey:
That's it Thomas, you're not sleeping in anymore. It's over. Game's over.
Casey Pehrson:
You can still sleep in on the weekends.
Anthony Godfrey:
Okay, okay. Next. What's the ‘E’?
Casey Pehrson:
So exercise. And there's actually a magic of exercise. You're gonna release endorphins in your body and the best way to describe what endorphins do, they make you feel good. And the best way to get those going in your system is to move your body. We have to make kind of active, conscious choices to put exercise in our day. A lot of the research that I've done, it's talked about how our ancestors they had physical exercise built into their day. It was part of their livelihood. All their jobs involved movement. And so it wasn't really a choice for them. They had to, as part of their survival, they had to go move. We don’t. Like a lot of my work, I do, you know, sitting in a chair talking with people or a lot of people have jobs where they're in front of computer screens and they don't move. And so we've gotta make a little more of a conscious active effort and choice to plug exercise into the day.
Anthony Godfrey:
Sure, and finding the time for that is difficult. Is there an optimal time to exercise during the day or is it really a personal choice?
Casey Pehrson:
It depends on what you're trying to do. So for weight loss you're gonna wanna exercise first thing in the morning on an empty stomach. For just general like mood-boosting it doesn't matter as much the time of day. So yeah, it depends on what you're trying to do.
Anthony Godfrey:
And I would guess that you ought to just start somewhere.
Casey Pehrson:
Yeah, exactly.
Anthony Godfrey:
Try to stretch it beyond, say walking back and forth from your car to the office.
Casey Pehrson:
Yeah, and building it into what you're already doing as part of your day is crucial. So yeah, even the little things like parking a little further away, those little things can add up.
Anthony Godfrey:
Talk to me about ‘L’.
Casey Pehrson:
So the ‘L’ is for light and that's sunlight exposure. And so what gets activated through sunlight exposure is vitamin D, but vitamin D is not a great name for it. Vitamin D isn't even a vitamin, it's a hormone and you have enough of it in you, but it doesn't wake up to do its jobs in you until the sun wakes it up. So in the summertime, super straightforward, 10 to 15 minutes of direct sunlight and vitamin D wakes up and it does all of its jobs in your body and in your brain. It has a bunch of jobs in your body and brain, in your blood, in your immune system, in your heart, in your brain in your bones. Vitamin D has a lot of responsibilities, but it can't do those while it's asleep, while it's dormant. So wintertime we get knocked flat backward here, especially in Utah, you've probably heard the winter blues or seasonal affective disorder, which is aptly acronymed SAD because that's how we feel a lot of times in the wintertime.
Seasonal affective disorder. A lot of that has to do with our lack of sunlight. So the workarounds, how do we get that vitamin D into our system? It's still possible through the clouds and the inversion and the yuck that's outside. But it takes twice as long in the wintertime than it does in the summertime. So 20 to 30 minutes instead of 10 to 15. Ain't nobody got time for that and ain't nobody wanna stand out in the cold for that. So workarounds for winter, you can ingest vitamin D, meaning you can eat it. There are certain vitamin D-fortified foods and a lot of people, they actually get prescribed a vitamin D supplement because a lot of us are running around vitamin D deficient in the winter time.
Anthony Godfrey:
I never thought about vitamin D as being activated by the sun. I knew we needed to do it and get a little sunshine every day. I didn't realize the full impact of winter and the long list of responsibilities that vitamin D has.
Stay with us when we come back more on the "SELFIE" method. Find out how the ’F’, ‘I’ and ‘E’ can help improve a student's personal health and wellness.
Break:
Hello, I'm Sandy Riesgraf, Director of Communications for Jordan School District, and we want to invite you to connect with us. So many exciting things are happening in your child's school, your neighbor's school, in every school here, every day. Don't miss out on following the fun or simply staying informed when there's important information we need to share. Join us at jordandistrict.org, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @jordandistrict. We can't wait to connect.
Anthony Godfrey:
All right, let's get to ‘F’.
Casey Pehrson:
The ‘F’ is for fun and we need fun. We need relaxation, we need laughter, we need to be able to enjoy. Fun fact is in Portugal they just passed a law where employers can get fined for bugging their employees outside of work hours. So, and this is actually, it's really bad for us to be on all the time, right? And that's kind of what modern-day jobs have become. And so we need to be able to take that time to separate actually, and relax, laugh, enjoy, just be in the moment instead of being on all the time in work mode.
Anthony Godfrey:
So part of fun is separating from work and really having a life separate from that, even for a few moments or for an hour or just for a small stretch of time. I also heard recently that even if you aren't looking at your phone but it's right near you, you still have a connection to it that prevents as strong a connection to the people and events around you.
Casey Pehrson:
Absolutely. Yeah. When those phones are around, they can create a barrier toward human connection.
Anthony Godfrey:
My phone listener is in my shirt pocket right over my heart as we speak and I'm getting my alerts the whole time so I know exactly what you're talking about. I'm very connected to my phone. So just fun that disconnects us from work and allows us to connect with the people around us.
Casey Pehrson:
That's right.
Anthony Godfrey:
Okay, take me through ‘I’.
Casey Pehrson:
And that actually is a great segue into ‘I’, which is for interaction. And we need each other. We are social animals and I've learned to be careful how I talk about this with students because some students have called me out and they say, Casey, ‘when you talk about phones, you sound like an old person complaining.’ And I'm like, ‘oh, I don't wanna sound like that.’ So I try to tell them in a way that doesn't offend anybody. And so far this has been the rule of thumb that hasn't offended anybody. So I tell students, ‘Hey, if you interact with other humans in real life, in real-time, you use your texting and social media as a supplement to that, then you're okay. But if you never interact with humans in real life, in real-time, you use your texting and social media as a replacement to real-life social interaction it's not gonna do what it's supposed to.’ So the us being social animals, it's actually science. When you are in the presence of other human beings having a caring, connected, cooperative experience with other humans, your body actually rewards you for it. It releases a chemical called oxytocin. And oxytocin it makes you feel good. You get that from being with other people, having caring, connected, cooperative experiences, not through text and not through social media.
Anthony Godfrey:
I've never heard it put quite that way, and I really like that. So as long as your primary interactions are in person, then having secondary interactions online is still healthy as long as you keep it in check and it's a supplement or a support to the real-world interactions with other humans.
Casey Pehrson:
Absolutely. Yes. Nailed it.
Anthony Godfrey:
So, so far, as long as we're interacting with others, we've got the oxytocin, we get little sunlight, we're activating the vitamin D, and then we exercise and we get those endorphins flowing. Our body is saying, thank you very much for taking a "SELFIE".
Casey Pehrson:
That's exactly right.
Anthony Godfrey:
All right, let's talk about ‘E’.
Casey Pehrson:
Yeah. So ‘E’ is for eating right.
Anthony Godfrey:
Eating right, yes.
Casey Pehrson:
We need to be very careful about what we're putting in our bodies and keep in mind our food is our fuel. So a lot of times I'll ask my students, I'll ask 'em, ‘did you eat breakfast?’ And you can imagine the answer that I get 85% of the time. It's no. 10% of the time my students are like, yeah, I had a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup and a Gatorade. And I'm like, oh, how do you feel? And they're like, great. And I'm like wait till 10 when that sugar kind of runs out of your system and dumps you off. So we're trying to sustain ourselves on things that aren't designed to sustain us. So we gotta, it's not like if somebody told me, Casey, you can't ever have ice cream again. I'd be like, then no more happiness. Like that would be a terrible thing for me. But we've gotta like kind of balance things out and pay attention to remembering your food is your fuel. And so that's what's gonna fuel you through your day.
Anthony Godfrey:
As long as our primary nutrition comes from healthy foods, we don't have to cut out the secondary foods of ice cream or some other things that we really enjoy. We want to firm kind of base that we build our nutrition on, and then we can have some other things as well. Build those relationships on personal, direct, in real-life relationships and then supplement that online. So it's about where we're focused predominantly. And with sleep too. Get your sleep at night. If you need a short nap, take a short nap, but don't make a nap a main part of how you're getting rest.
Casey Pehrson:
That's a great way of saying it. Yeah.
Anthony Godfrey:
As you've talked with people over the years as you've done this training, I'm sure a lot of people come up to you afterward and tell me about some of those stories that you've heard over the years.
Casey Pehrson:
Yeah. One of my favorites, so I was, I'd been working with a student for over a year and he came in one day with his mom and he just looked different in a good way. And I called him out on it. I was like, Hey. I was like, you look brighter. I was like, you are carrying yourself different. You have just a cool energy about you right now. I was like, what's going on? I was like, what are you even doing? And he looked at his mom and his mom looked back at him and said, well, tell her. And he goes, Casey, he's like, it's my "SELFIE". I've been taking care of my "SELFIE" and it works. So things like that when people can see like, I can actually do this and feel the difference. That is so exciting. And that's the cool part about teaching this is this stuff works.
The problem with teaching this though is none of this is revelation. You're not going out of here like what? Exercise? Nobody has ever told me exercise is good for me or I didn't know nutrition mattered. We've all heard this stuff, we all know this stuff, but there's a gap between what we know and what we do and that's the problem. So we've gotta be able to bridge that gap between what we know and what we do. There's a phrase that I love. Information is not transformation. And so how do we make that information? Our transformation is sort of the quest and the challenge in "SELFIE".
Anthony Godfrey:
I was gonna mention what you have already said, and that is that none of this is a shiny new object. It's not a new 90-day challenge where you eat broccoli only from 3:00 to 3:15 every afternoon and suddenly your body changes. It's the stuff we've always known. But I think doing those things in combination and probably making just small incremental changes to start with, instead of completely trying to shift everything all at once can really make an impact. I think sometimes my own problem is that I think, you know, I'm doing fine, I'm making it, I'm, you know, I feel okay, so why am I going to invest? You know, I'm surviving. So I'm not sure that we always see how much of an improvement we could experience if we just take that first little step of committing to an improvement.
Casey Pehrson:
Absolutely. And that's another testimonial that has come in. Actually, a student said, Casey, I didn't realize I could feel better than, okay, I've been feeling okay this whole time. And that was sort of my max. I feel better than okay doing this stuff
Anthony Godfrey:
Better than okay. That's a pretty good slogan.
Casey Pehrson:
Yeah. So you mentioned the science of "SELFIE" before and I give this presentation a lot. And I have a whole, usually there's 40 minutes that's devoted to the science of "SELFIE", but I'll summarize it. So I'll spare you the 40 minutes and put it in a sentence. So "SELFIE" is science, there's your sentence. When you're doing this "SELFIE" stuff, all those things that you mentioned, the endorphins, the vitamin D the oxytocin, the vitamins and minerals from food and then others that we didn't talk about. So the glymphatic system, which is involved in your sleep and we get serotonin and dopamine and all sorts of other things that we didn't even discuss yet. All of these things do the same thing. They give you energy and they boost your mood so they make you feel better and energize you.
Anthony Godfrey:
There's a reason that it's called the "SELFIE" method instead of the "SELFIE" experiment.
Casey Pehrson:
That's right.
Anthony Godfrey:
We know it's gonna work.
Casey Pehrson:
Yeah. Oh, absolutely.
Anthony Godfrey:
You do these things, you're gonna feel better, you're gonna be better off things are gonna be easier. Your mind's gonna be clearer, connections are gonna be deeper and problems don't go away, but you're sure gonna be better equipped to handle them.
Casey Pehrson:
For sure. Yeah, and it's an acronym for your physical health, for your mental health, for your social health. And it works in all of those ways.
Anthony Godfrey:
Well, hopefully, we can all do a little better and feel a little better and have a great health and wellness week.
Casey Pehrson:
Absolutely. I’m into that.
Anthony Godfrey:
Yes, thanks very much.
Casey Pehrson:
Thank you.
Anthony Godfrey:
Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Supercast. Remember, education is the most important thing you'll do today. We'll see you out there.