BU Today: Can you talk about your new position and what some of your goals are?

Carrie Landa: This is about how we engage students in all the different facets of wellbeing—emotional, social, physical, environmental, and professional wellbeing. The words wellbeing and wellness are used interchangeably. I like the word wellbeing because it’s about being—being is a state we are in as human beings. We are not human doings. I think my undergraduate psychology professor said that my first year of college and it just stuck with me—and always reminds me about how we need to pause and figure out what makes us feel well.

There are different ways in which we cultivate things in our life that make us feel good. And those things that make us feel good allow us to be better in the things that we have to do, like our professional space, our intellectual space. The intention behind this new initiative is to centralize and streamline how we are promoting this across our campus, both through programming and new curriculum. The hope is by centralizing resources and programs, students will see that there’s actually a lot more at the institution that they can benefit from than they realize.

This is a multipronged approach to health and wellness. One part of it is teaching students the skills they need to thrive and flourish and building some of this into the curriculum. The other part is building on the success of the Wellbeing Project, a wellness initiative BU launched in 2019 upon the recommendation of the University-wide mental health task force, which I cochaired with Katharine Mooney [SPH’12], the director of wellness and prevention services. 

Many of the skills we’re talking about transcend being in college. I think that’s also an important piece of this. When you go out into the world, whether you’re an executive or a lawyer or a writer or a musician or a physician, you need these skills.

BU Today: Have students changed? Have their problems changed?

Carrie Landa: I’ve been in college health for 20 years. It is vastly different than it was even five years ago. I am not a sociologist, I can’t say what did it. I think many things contribute to it. I do think social media has a role. I think that the world we’re living in has a role. People have such different ways of having dialogue today. It’s all changed, but does that mean our skills have caught up with that? We have such a different competitive landscape. Students are paying $80,000 a year to go to college, and they’re worried that they’re not going to come out top of their class and get a job. All these things contribute in different ways.

There’s this huge generational deficit. That is not the fault of the students. It’s just the nature of the world that we live in. Students and young adults don’t learn the same skills that I—and I’m in my 40s—learned when I was in college or when I was traveling and didn’t have a cell phone at my fingertips. These students have other skills that blow us out of the water, but some of the fundamental skills that we really need to thrive can be bolstered.

BU Today: Can you talk more about what particular skills you think can be strengthened?

Carrie Landa: Communication skills are really important—how to have discourse and conversation when there’s a difference of opinion. How to have self-compassion, and a little bit more self-kindness, which is so hard when we’re living in this world of comparing yourself to everybody else on social media. 

The hope is that we’re going to work with the schools and colleges, both undergraduate and graduate, to integrate some of these things into the academic curriculum. For an engineering student who knows how to do computational science or math, it’s just as important to be able to navigate interactions with other people that are going to be challenging, or to navigate failures and setbacks. It’s about how to have a growth mindset. 

BU Today: What is a growth mindset?

Carrie Landa: Growth mindset is when you can look at something—an interaction or an opportunity—that did not go the way you wanted to, whether it’s a failure, or less-than-perfect in your mind, and you still take something away from it. You still recognize that there was value in what you learned. 
 
So when we talk about doing an experiment and the data comes in and it doesn’t support your hypothesis, that’s just as important as when your hypothesis is supported, because it’s still giving you important information. When someone gives you feedback about something that might not be as positive as it could be, but it’s telling you where you can grow or where you can make changes to be better—how do we take that in as something that’s positive versus something that makes us feel like a failure or that undoes us? 

The big picture here is to support students and, hopefully, by doing all of this work through a prevention lens, we’re teaching students how to get ahead of struggling with these things, whether it’s social anxiety or that when they fail an exam, it undoes them in some way. These skills teach students how to handle things in a more positive way.

BU Today: What about loneliness? We keep hearing that students are struggling with loneliness—more so now because of the pandemic and the isolation that comes with social distancing.

Carrie Landa: I think social media exacerbates that feeling. Having a million friends and followers isn’t the same as having really close people in your life. The pandemic has blown that open in a different way. Because now we are not only emotionally disconnected from people, we’re also physically disconnected. And now that we’re back, we have masks on that don’t allow you to see that kind smile of the person you might sit next to in class.

BU Today: What are some ways students can feel connected? 

Carrie Landa: I think the University offers great opportunities to engage, but I think it’s overwhelming and intimidating to step out because we’ve all been so sequestered for the past year. We’re kind of out of practice. Finding one thing to get yourself out there—whether it’s talking with someone in class, finding someone to go to the dining hall or study hours with, joining a club, or reaching out to your resident advisor or to someone in your student affairs department to find out how to engage—is a really good first step.

BU Today: Did this new position and emphasis on wellbeing come out of the pandemic? 

Carrie Landa: No. But I think the pandemic highlighted the need for it. Some of this is about self-care and about having things in life that you’re passionate about and that fuel you, because you can’t do the things that are hard if you’re not feeling fueled on the other side. How do we encourage students to find those spaces on campus and in their community?

I think part of it is that students don’t necessarily think, “Oh, volunteering to do a cleanup on the Charles this weekend, this is promoting my wellbeing.” But we want to help them understand how that does promote wellbeing.

BU Today: What are some of the things that contribute to your own sense of wellbeing?

Carrie Landa: Being around people who I love and feeling connected to friends and family is really important. Traveling and seeing other places really inspires me. I love cooking and I love doing things that I’m passionate about. That’s why this is so exciting for me. As a psychologist, I care about how people feel. Yes, what job people get out of college is really important. But you can get a great job and still be unhappy. That’s not winning.

I feel like, as a clinician, this idea that everything has become about mental health, and that everyone needs clinical intervention is misguided, because I think there’s so much more that can contribute to how well a person can feel. Community is one of the most important parts, having a sense of belonging is one of the most important parts.