Wellbeing on The Farm [Skills Training for Emotional Problem Solving in College and Beyond]

4 credits · Undergraduate

This course teaches skills to cultivate wellbeing and resilience in the face of common stressors and difficulties. Resilience is not only about your ability to adapt positively in the face of adverse or challenging circumstances (survive), but also about learning the skills, strategies, and routines that help you live a fulfilling and successful life (thrive). PSYC 151: Wellbeing on The Farm goes beyond traditional self-care by training students to apply systematic, evidence-based inquiry methods to the daily social realities of life at Stanford - including academic stress, social life, residential communities, and team sports. Drawing on behavioral science research, the curriculum adapts the core modules of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) - Mindfulness, Distress Tolerance, Emotion Regulation, and Interpersonal Effectiveness - by stripping away clinical components to create a universal resiliency curriculum. Students will examine how these skills function as tools for navigating group dynamics and campus culture. By treating their lived experiences as a primary data set, students use quantitative and qualitative empirical methods to analyze patterns in human behavior and institutional structures. The course equips students with a framework for understanding wellbeing as a set of shared social interactions. Our goal is for students to develop a personalized resilience toolbox grounded in a critical appraisal of social scientific evidence, enabling them to both survive and thrive within the Stanford ecosystem and beyond.