Essential Question: How are the limitations on exercise and physical activity during the coronavirus pandemic impacting mental health?

After completing 5 weeks of senior project, I have learned a lot about myself, my working habits, and the way I learn best. I quickly learned that I benefitted from creating a schedule for myself so that I had set goals/work to accomplish each day. Since this project allowed me a lot of freedom with how I spent our time, and there wasn’t any adult to rely on to hold me accountable, I had to develop habits to keep myself on track. Sticking to a schedule was one of the most helpful habits to manage my time and keep track of the work I had completed and the work I still had left. Another habit I developed was completing my hardest work earlier in the week/day. I learned to schedule any dense research, difficult writing, etc. earlier in the week because this was when I had the most motivation to get these things done. Additionally, it took away a lot of stress later in the week knowing that I had already finished the bulk of my work. I also found that combining different types of work/learning was very beneficial for me. For example, I enjoyed reading about topics and then combining this research with interviews and experiential learning. It helped me to contextualize my research and connect it to real-life.

Although I have learned a lot throughout senior project, there are still a lot of aspects of my question/topic that I don’t know. While I have learned how exercise can have immense benefits for mental health, this has brought up many other questions that I don’t know the answers to. For example, exercise is a very broad term, so I have been trying to figure out what types of exercise, how much exercise, etc. will maximize mental health. I have realized that this is something that’s very individual, so I have focused on understanding this from my own perspective. In the first half of this project, I thought that determining a set amount of exercise time per day and scheduling what workouts I would do at the beginning of the week would help me hold myself accountable. However, at times I found that I was forcing myself to do exercises that I didn’t want to do, or for longer or shorter than I wanted.  This felt counterintuitive, as my exercise was actually causing me additional stress rather than relieving it or benefitting my mental health. So, during the second half of the project, I allowed myself to relax and be more flexible with the types and length of my workouts. I also discovered intuitive exercise through my research, and tried to incorporate this into my experiment. While this was definitely better for my mental health than having a rigid schedule, I also felt that some days I could benefit from some structure and accountability. I knew that exercising would put me in a better mood, but sometimes I needed a push to actually bring myself to do this. I also at times missed the sense of accomplishment I got when I set goals for the week and was able to achieve them. I still don’t understand which mindset when it comes to exercise will maximize my mental health, and I am hoping to find some sort of middle ground that works for me. So when thinking about my essential question, I am still unsure what forms of exercise are the best for improving mental health, especially amidst current events when the types of exercise are limited. I am also still learning how I can connect my personal findings to broader ideas that hopefully will be useful to others.