For better mental health, get outside!

One campus resource that’s free and easy is the great outdoors. School of Kinesiology faculty member Ford Dyke, aka Dr. D, tells us what we can do to incorporate mindfulness into our daily lives, even if we just have a minute. 

If you have 15 minutes or more: Take a walk on campus or off

Dr D. loves to visit the Kreher Forest Preserve, Town Creek Park, the Arboretum and Chewacla State Park, but he says campus is also a perfectly good place to be in the presence of nature.

“Just take a walk; take a moment for yourselves away from the stimulation of LCD screens and fluorescent bulbs and WiFi signals and Bluetooth and all this stuff that is always spinning. Try to disconnect in order to reconnect, not only to yourselves, but to your home — We only get one planet, so let's try to reconnect with it and give back to it and take care of it, while taking care of ourselves as well.” 

If you have five minutes: Put your feet in the grass

Between travel, speaking engagements, teaching and coaching for Auburn Adaptive Athletics, Dr. D has to find time for mindfulness in his own life. He still spends as much time outside as he can, citing recent research on “grounding.” 

“They’ve shown that, even if it’s for less than five minutes, you’re going to take your shoes off and just place yourself into the grass and be quiet. I’ve always been a big proponent, even as a kid, that I don’t like to just say something and then not follow through with it. I don’t like to practice what I preach; I like to preach what I practice.” 

 If you have one minute: Sit quietly 

Whether it’s in the classroom, the locker room or one of his Mindfulness@Auburn training sessions, Dr. D tries to start every meeting with 60 seconds of doing absolutely nothing.

“You might notice things that you don't notice because you're always trying to go to the next thing. What's next on the to do list? What's next on the calendar? How many emails do I need to answer today?

“With all these notifications happening at once, we get kind of out of balance, and before we know it, we get burned out, and we don't know how to reclaim our energy. So, taking those 60 seconds to simply sit quietly is another resource that a lot of us miss because it's so simple.”