Wellness by Design: Supporting Holistic Student Development

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Episode Transcript

[Music Intro]

Brian Trainer, Host: Welcome to Trends + Tensions in Architecture and Design, presented by BHDP, where we discuss Trends in Architectural and Interior design and the competing priorities or Tensions that arise from integrating new ideas into existing organizations, enterprises, and institutions. In this episode, “Wellness by Design: Supporting Holistic Student Development,” we are joined by Jamie Baxter, Assistant VP of Health & Wellness at Xavier University, Scott Reitano, Principal of Reitano Design Group, and AJ Medina, Higher Education Client Leader at BHDP. I am your host, Brian Trainer, senior strategist for BHDP. Let’s get started.

So we're talking today about trends in health and wellness in higher education. And we have some special guests. So first up is Jamie. Jamie, tell us who you are and what do you do? 

Jamie Baxter: Yeah. So, thank you so much for having me on today. My name's Jamie Baxter. I am the Assistant Vice President of Health and Wellness at Xavier University in Cincinnati, OH. And really, what that looks like for my role is supporting the health and well-being initiatives that are there for students, so our resources, services, and programs that benefit the well-being needs of students.

Brian: Thank you, Jamie. Welcome. And Scott, who are you and what do you do?

Scott Reitano: A lot of people ask that same question, actually, Brian. I'm Scott Reitano, and I’m happy to be here. I'm the principal with Reitano Design Group, and we design commercial food service spaces across multiple markets, from healthcare to higher ed to primary ed to workplace dining, but really have a focus on creating environments that at least provide opportunities for healthy eating.

Brian: And AJ, remind people who you are and what you do. 

AJ Medina: Yeah. So, I'm AJ Medina, higher education client leader here at BHDP Architecture. Really excited to be back and present some new research and findings that affect one of the most important parts of campus, and that's the well-being of students.

Brian: I love it. Let's jump in. Like I said at the beginning, we're talking about trends in health and wellness in higher education, so what does that encompass and why is it important? 

Jamie: Yeah. I can jump in and just share that I think trends are important to know and to highlight because they represent the stories and the lives of the people that we serve, in this case, our young adult students who are coming into college.

So it helps us understand a national or international narrative, a more local narrative, and then helps us best deliver on some of the promises that we've made to these incoming students to get a return on what they're hoping for. College is not inexpensive, as we all know, and we wanna serve these students well and serve them with what they need, and I think that's why it's very important to know these trends.

AJ: One of the things I like is focusing on the trend because that lets us make incremental changes. As Jamie said, higher education is a significant investment, not just by those attending, but by those that help finance the institution, our donors, our state governments, et cetera, national grants. And we don't wanna wake up one day and just be surprised that the world changed overnight, because it didn't change overnight. It's that we got behind on the small incremental changes. So the more that we can talk about what can we do from a day-to-day standpoint, will help us keep on top of serving the community.

Brian: Perfect. We wanna look at health and wellness a little bit holistically, and I wanted to start with something. So how does social media impact mental and physical health? 

Jamie: This is a big one, and I think this is an area, speaking of a trend, that the research is out there. We don't have to question anymore. Does social media actually impact our health and well-being? The answer is a very conclusive yes: it does, based on the research of Jonathan Haidt and many others in this space. I think one of the big things about the influence of social media, it has changed the emotional dependency on a device for our social interactions, and it's also changed the validation loop that we get from social experiences.

It has fundamentally attempted to alter and shape the way that we see our interactions and the way we experience human interaction. The comparison trap is probably one of the biggest impacts of social media on all of us. We're not excluded from that, but the impact of that on a young, developing mind where they're really trying to gauge who they are in the world based on who they interact with is a big part of that. It's an undeniable impact. 

Scott: It's the most impactful thing this generation has ever walked through. But as parents trying to figure out what's the line, "Hey, I need to join Snapchat because my whole team's on it," when they're in high school, or what's the vehicle of that? But that comparison, what is the phrase? Comparison is the thief of joy. And social media has created a world where they'll tell you that's a connection. And we also have an epidemic of loneliness amongst our college kids. Never have I seen so many closed doors in a residence hall as we have today. The social ability to carry on a conversation and to step outside that room to show initiative is a lot tougher today than it has been in the past.

AJ: I think one of the things that's gonna be interesting to measure over time that relates to both of those is the perspective that Gen Z is social media native, right? So Facebook was invented in 2003, literally when I was a freshman in college. We've got Gen Z that is essentially social media native, right? Born in 2003, they get a device in their hands in 2006 and become social media natives right away. What will be interesting as we're coming to the tail end of Gen Z and into Gen Alpha, and Gen Alpha's gonna be something, I'm totally making up the term right now, which will be social media regulated, where social media is ever-present in their life, but highly regulated.

We can look to Australian legislation, where they're, like, fully outlawing it under a certain age. We're looking at K through 12 schools, more and more of them are requiring locking up your phone in magnetic lock devices, et cetera, to even self-regulation in some of our research and conversations with Gen Alpha where they recognize that it is detrimental to their mental health if they have too much of it.

Also detrimental to their mental health if they don't have enough of it, either, because there is a dependency on it. And so it'll be interesting to see in the next five years, will we be dialing the pendulum back a little bit on social media, where it's not so detrimental to health because society finally can normalize it, or will we be continuing to battle it as a mental health obstacle despite all the benefits that it brings?

Jamie, you mentioned to me once about, and I don't know if you are or are not allowed to talk about, an app that you're developing or has been developed on campus, which I thought that was really unique. I hadn't heard of any of our clients doing that yet. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Jamie: Yes, absolutely! So this really is about digital well-being, which a lot of universities are considering as another dimension to their well-being models. At Xavier, we would consider it woven throughout our dimension of well-being as it encompasses many areas of life. But we've partnered with a company called Fluid Focus, and their whole focus is to encourage intentional connection.

And rather than just cutting it out, it incentivizes the positive use of your phone and your apps. So you can engage in what's called a deep focus session for 23 minutes at a time, and then, collectively as a campus and as an individual, you collect coins that can be donated to a charity focused on education.

Scott: Love it. 

Jamie: And that resonates with our students. They wanna do something that's meaningful, and again, it’s just encouraging that positive reinforcement, positive behaviors, not talking about the problem all the time, but focusing more on the solution. I think that's something that a lot of people can get behind, especially when it's a community effort.

So we're intentionally looking at spaces to move into, the kind of design world where when students, staff, faculty enter into a certain space, a classroom, a library, a study space, that it will become a deep focus space, or we encourage you to take this opportunity to focus, and just giving that nudge. So they scan in on the door, it engages deep focus, and then we can capture that data, too. We did a three-month pilot this spring, and we saw a significant change in mood and reduction of the doom scrolling, and just a pathway to help us all manage this digital overload. So, it's been positive, and we plan to continue this year and do a more robust marketing campaign to get more adoption.

Brian: So Scott, your expertise is in specifically dining spaces, and when we're talking about holistic wellness, like social media is one big aspect as far as mental wellness is concerned, but also nutrition. Your health is directly related to what goes into your body. Like, how do those spaces influence wellness? What are you seeing trends-wise in that area? 

Scott: The big three are always gonna be sleep, exercise, and nutrition. Like we can package it any way you want. You can say this one over that one. But those are the three things that, man, as a human being, if you start to get those right or get your routine down for those three things, you're on the right path to start with.

Jamie: Yeah, I would just add that, I think at Xavier we use this Jesuit term “Cura Personalis” and it really means that our mission is to care for the whole person. Their academic self isn't separate from their mental health, which isn't separate from their engagement. In places like the dining hall, where you're bringing such intention to the design, it allows for connection, for conversation, for putting your anxieties at ease rather than increasing them. I think it's so important. We have regular meetings, our student affairs staff with our dining team, both to look at the flow and the design, but also that customer service or hospitality element of really giving them some of the trends that we talked about as we started in mental health and well-being trends, and what a critical role they play in real life, human-to-human connection in helping students feel at ease and like they belong. So, it matters. 

AJ: It's interesting because again, we're talking about holistic well-being. We're talking about, why does this matter? And so many people approach the dining hall, as it could be highly functional, and it needs to be highly functional. You have a serving line. You have a loading dock. You have a kitchen. You need to wash dishes. You need to meet Department of Health requirements, right? But that's the starting line, really. Scott, a lot about what you were talking about, the term I like to use is place-making, and we know that this is very important across all of higher education in various components, from our student services buildings to our residence halls, of course. 

But the goal of all of that is that we can track. There are so many studies, so many studies out there that show us when students spend more time on campus, regardless of where it is on campus, the GPAs go up, the retention rates go up, the graduation rates go up. That's just flat-out fact at this point in time in higher ed. And if we can get a commuter student to eat on campus with their friends or to bring their lunch but still feel welcome in the dining hall and eat with their on-campus friends, the studying is going to go up, and the graduation and retention rates are going to go up. 

I do wanna go back to one thing, though. On the eating specifically, do you find that students are becoming more and more hyper-focused, less hyper-focused on what they eat, or a different kind of focus? 

Jamie: Yes, absolutely. This is a trend that we're definitely seeing, and COVID did not help with this. Didn't help with a lot of things, most things, and all things. A lot of mental health diagnoses and disorders during COVID, we saw an incline, and since we've seen a bit of plateauing in terms of the severity of some of those symptoms, which is good news, even though I would say we still have to pay very close attention to the mental health and well-being. It's still a considerable and mainstream issue for these students. Disordered eating and eating disorders have been something that we've seen on the rise. And there are some different categories there of how we look at that. So to be very clinical, I'm trained as a clinician, and that's my background and wheelhouse. We would look at a diagnostic manual called the DSM-5-TR. If you meet the criteria for a mental health diagnosis, it's found there. So an eating disorder basically spells out what criteria you'd meet for diagnoses such as anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder. And there's a new disorder that is now included called ARFID, Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder.

Now this is new, and it really has to do more with anxiety and sensitivity, food sensitivity or fear of food, less to do with body image or body dysmorphia. So that's an interesting one, Scott. I'm sure in your world, you're addressing allergies, sensitivities, and fears of food. 

Scott: Yeah.

Jamie: So that is absolutely on the rise, I would say. And then you have a whole third category. So, you have the clinical, sort of the ones we know about, anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating. You have ARFID, a newer restrictive disorder. And then you have what we would call disordered eating or unhealthy patterns around food. And back to social media, that has not helped with this dynamic as well. We see about 30% of college students impacted by disordered eating, and that could look a variety of different ways, and of course, there's a spectrum of severity there. But really, this is under-eating or over-eating at times, eating very unhealthy foods at all hours of the day and night, going back to the grazing, or over-exercising due to improper food intake, being a punishment for how I manage my food intake.

So that's something I think we have a lot of work to do on the prevention side of things, on the psychoeducation part of things, and that plays into our dining options, services, and all of that, too. 

AJ: The other stat that floors me related to food and our students is nationally, 25% of students, one in four basically, food insecurity. They don't know where their next meal is coming from. That stat generally does not vary much by institution size. So just because somebody is going to a Big Ten school versus a community college, it deviates some, but not as much as one would expect. We've found that matters so much to our students' learning, right? It's very hard to learn, not just when you're hungry and you don't have the physical fuel for it, but when so much of your brain capacity is taken up by, "Where am I gonna find my next meal?”

Which is why I love that there are so many projects that we're involved in where we're talking about food pantries becoming such a high focus to remove as much of the financial burden, at least from a connotation standpoint, from our students so that they can continue to focus on learning. It's probably one of my favorite trends: it builds on something negative, but higher education is trying to remove that obstacle.

Jamie: I love that you all are involved in that!

Scott: Yep. 

Jamie: That is so important for our student population. We call it “The Store” on our campus, and, as you said, so many students and their families have really given everything they have just to get there and make it work, and sometimes that's on a minimal meal plan.

And so making sure that we have key partnerships within our city, within our community, to properly stock our store with some healthy options and some necessities like feminine hygiene products and basic essentials for their basic needs. And it's so important that we pay attention to those spaces as well, make them welcoming, make them accessible, a bit anonymous, so there's not a spotlight you're going in there and utilizing the space. So, I love that you named that, AJ. 

Brian: Why is this the university's problem to solve? Or should I say, even better, why has Xavier decided that this is something they wanna tackle? 

Jamie: Yeah, that's a great question. I think recognizing that these are issues that are not specific to a university, these are global issues and trends that show up in every area of a young adult's life. And how could we not address them? Going back to our mission of “Cura Personalis”, of really being committed to delivering on the promise we wanna make to students to really do everything we can to meet their whole health needs, their whole health and well-being needs outside of, including their academics and beyond, both the curricular and the co-curricular experience.

And I think ultimately that leads to better outcomes. It leads to better young adults entering the workforce, better well-adjusted minds and bodies to raise their families, and contribute to a healthy society. Hopefully, it's more commitment to the long game as well. 

Scott: We could help reduce food waste and allow for more food security with a few pieces of equipment. In other words, if we haven't served the food, it hasn't been out or something like that, what are we doing with leftovers? In other words, Second Helping is the organization here in Indianapolis; they get donations from anywhere, from supermarkets to maybe a Marriott that didn't put out X amount of food.

But even in our dining halls, if we didn't use some food or something like that, can we cook it, blast chill it, and then have it available in food-pantry-type settings? Or is there a connection between food waste that, man, everybody would love us to have less food waste, and food availability, right? Are we able to make that connection for people?

AJ: The other reason why it's important to higher education is what is our job? It's to transform students' lives, right? Why are they coming here to begin with? It's to better their outlook. And for sure, a percentage of society, a significant percentage, it's what they're expected to do, and they're continuing on their way.

But for a significant portion of students, they're trying to either get out of poverty or just completely change the situation they're in, especially our non-traditional students, who are on the rise. They are trying to transform their lives, and if we can help them do that, they don't just need help academically, but they need help holistically in order to get that transformation so that two years later, four years later, six years later, their lives look completely different. Then why wouldn't we help them through that?

Scott: When those kiddos are with us, that means they're part of our community. These are our people. What can we do for them? 

Brian: So we were talking about dining spaces before, and if I had to put that down in three little bullet points, I heard choice, convenience, and connection. Is there anything that you would add to that from the dining experience? What are those benefits, or how do you improve that experience, and how does it contribute to health and wellness?

Scott: Yeah. I always talk about healthy as a part of that as well, or opportunities for healthy food. So, we always talk about enticing people to eat healthier. So, some of that is how we present the food, whether AJ wants to eat his apple that way or an apple slice or what have you. But how we present the food is part of it. The other part of that community, I think, that plays into it is when you hear the term peer pressure, a lot of times they're like, "Oh, peer pressure." Wait a minute. Sometimes there's positive peer pressure. "Oh my goodness, have you ever tried that?" How do we expand people's palate can be a part of this as well.

Brian: I have another question here. What trends are you seeing in holistic wellness, the good and the bad, and what's the impact on campuses? 

Jamie: We talked about the digital well-being trend, and I think that's huge. We're seeing that conversation is not going anywhere, and that will continue to ramp up as we learn more about how to problem-solve together, how to better manage our digital well-being.

I would say another one that's interesting to me, and I've had this question before, when folks will ask whether we are having a mental health crisis or epidemic in this country. What is going on with these young people? And I think that's such a fascinating question, and there's a lot of time we can spend on that.

That could probably be a whole podcast in and of itself. But it's interesting, one of the trends that we're seeing with this generation of college students is that they are more comfortable talking about issues related to their mental health than any generation before them. And in doing so, in talking about their own story, in advocating for their needs, they are helping us reduce the stigma around getting help and support for their mental health and well-being. I think that's incredible, the way that the needle is moving on that. So, I would say that is a very positive trend that I'm seeing, and I think it will gain momentum. 

Brian: Awesome. Thank you for that, Jamie, and thank you for your time. Scott, thank you as well. 

Scott: Oh, happy to be a part of it and just listen and learn. Thank you. 

Brian: And AJ, thanks once again. 

AJ: Absolutely. This is always fun. 

Brian: Awesome. Thank you all for joining us, and I hope you had a wonderful time. 

[Music Outro]

Brian: Thank you for joining Trends + Tensions in Architecture and Design, presented by BHDP, for this episode, “Wellness by Design: Supporting Holistic Student Development,” with Jamie Baxter of Xavier University, Scott Reitano of Reitano Design Group, and AJ Medina of BHDP. If you appreciate what you have heard, please rate, subscribe, and give us a review. I am Brian Trainer, your host, and I hope you’ll join us for another episode of Trends + Tensions to see what topics drive design.