Maintaining Your OWN Mental Health

Students are not the only ones who need mental health help – sometimes, we need to also care for ourselves. Educators who act as student advocates and who are constantly trying to contact at-risk students may experience unique detriments to their mental health. In this section, we will briefly discuss staying confident in the face of rejection, responding with patience to rude students, and finally, reaching out for help when we feel overburdened or burnt out in this helping profession.

Dealing with Rejection

As coaches, one of our biggest hurdles to overcome is actually getting in contact with a student. We spend hours of our time crafting a perfectly-worded email, just for it to go unopened. This can feel like rejection. You may have thoughts like, “Was my email not eye-catching or worded well enough? Do other coaches have more success than me?” or, “Do they not view me and my position seriously?” Additionally, you may finally reach a student to schedule a meeting, and they no-show the meeting without warning. This can be a frustrating experience, especially when one student repetitively ghosts meetings and emails. Although it is easy to fall into a pattern of self-doubt, there are a few key things to remember when you feel rejected.

Firstly, many at-risk students have difficulty with reading and following through with their emails. A huge factor at play when a student doesn’t respond is whether or not they are thorough with attending to their university email. It is likely that your contact request was lost in a sea of unopened email, or even sent to a spam folder. Furthermore, students receive several emails daily, and it can be hard to quickly know which email requires reading and a response. It is highly possible that they assumed your email was a generic alert sent from the university.

Secondly, the at-risk student population is significantly more likely to struggle with following through with appointments and deadlines. Their failure to attend your meetings is more likely a reflection of poor time-management skills, a lack of keeping a calendar, and/or a tendency to avoid difficult conversations surrounding their academics.

Finally, the students you are trying to reach may be in a difficult situation, or even on academic probation. For many, that is an unnerving and uncomfortable position to be in. Contact requests may feel threatening, and even someone who labels themselves a “coach” may feel intimidating to an at-risk student. They may worry that if they meet with us in-person, we may chastise them, or remind them of their dire situation.

In summary, there are many techniques we coaches may use to increase engagement, but we must remind ourselves that a lack of engagement does not inherently reflect poorly on us. Try your best, but at the end of the day, don’t internalize it as a failure!

Responding to Rude Students

In some cases, getting students into our office isn’t the issue. Instead, just like any person-facing job, we sometimes come across students who are less than kind in their demeanor. For example, I once encouraged an at-risk student to come meet with me during office hours to discuss getting her grades back on track. After ignoring my first attempt, she responded to my second attempt insinuating that the end of her semester was “too busy” to meet for 20 minutes, and that meeting me would be a waste of her time. The shock I felt was indescribable, because I had never had a student react so poorly to my offer to help. At the time, I took this slight personally. Were my meetings a waste of students’ time? Were my attempts to help a burden? I wanted to explain to her that I was likely more busy than she was, as if it were a competition.

The answer is: no. No, my meetings are not a waste of time, and no, they are not a burden to students. Although it is tempting to stoop to their level and lash back at students who choose a rude response, that often only worsens tensions. Rather, it is sometimes helpful to take a deep breath and choose to respond with firm kindness, instead. When these moments arise, it’s important to remember our ultimate goal: to help students. Part of that goal requires action on a student’s part, and if they are unwilling to take that action, there is nothing much we can do. Yelling at a student, shaming them for their behavior, or making tensions worse will likely not help the student. Of course, that’s not to say that you should let them walk all over you. Explaining why their response is inappropriate in a neutral tone and reiterating that you’re still there to help if they change their mind allows you to reaffirm your position while also keeping the door open. As mentioned above, sometimes students who lash out may be experiencing other stressors in their life, and they do not know how to appropriately manage that stress, so it comes out in other ways.

If you’ve ever noticed that you tend to focus on negative moments with students and forget the many positive moments, you are not alone. The human proclivity to pay more attention to and more readily remember negative experiences is called negativity bias (Rozin & Royzman, 2001). The strong salience of negative experiences allows us to easily keep track of events that are upsetting, or may even threaten our well-being, so that we can avoid them in the future. While this is, in a sense, adaptive for survival, it often can do more harm than good. Whether it’s negative one-on-one interactions, negative student reviews, or remembering a small mistake you made while speaking, these moments often stand out in our mind. To combat negativity bias, for every negative experience that sticks in the mind, try to focus on three positive experiences you also had. If you are someone who likes to write, also consider journaling these positive experiences to better commit them to memory, or even talk about them with a friend or colleague.

Carrying the Burden

It is easy to feel weighed down by the burden of helping students. A recurring theme of this chapter is acknowledging that sometimes students disclose upsetting experiences to us, and it is completely valid to have negative emotions in response to learning about these experiences. Hearing what our students are going through can be particularly painful when it feels as if we are unable to help them (due to our position or a lack of expertise).

When you start to feel the weight of caring for your students, remember that you are not alone. Don’t be afraid to lean on other colleagues and the community. Talking about it with others (while keeping your student and their stories 100% confidential and safe) can both normalize experiencing these negative emotions, as well as give you an outlet to express how you are feeling. Additionally, just like we would encourage our students to speak to a therapist when things become too difficult to deal with alone, we should advocate for ourselves in the same way.

Unit Review

We have explored mental health from a myriad of sides: how we can support our students’ mental health, how we can support ourselves, and how we can access and share mental health resources. We encourage you to strike that balance between softness and firmness. As you move forward in your education career and you inevitably encounter a mental health conversation, you can pull up on the tenets discussed here: set your boundaries, lead with kindness, know your resources, check in frequently, and care for yourself, too. And remember, when things get difficult, lean on the support of others, and don’t be afraid to ask for help!

References

Rozin, P., & Royzman, E. B. (2001). Negativity bias, negativity dominance, and contagion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5(4), 296–320. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0504_2