Having a consistent sleep pattern, I believe, is extremely important for not only an athlete but a student, a person in a full-time job- essentially anybody. Having a solid consistent sleep pattern allows your body to rest and heal and you can wake up feeling refreshed and ready for the day. As an athlete I value sleep. As I said, it allows my body to rest and to really nourish itself and hopefully get ready for the next day. Getting at least 8 to 9 hours of sleep and getting a very consistent sleep pattern at night has been very important in my life.

I think the biggest thing with diet is consistency. I think having a well-balanced diet will not only impact your short-term lifestyle but your long-term lifestyle. We need to be focusing on what we're putting into our bodies. I truly believe it doesn't have a short-term effect. What is it going to look like 5 to 10 years down the road and how is your body going to be using all the intake?

So at the start of the pandemic, the world was essentially shutting down so I figured with all this downtime that I had it would be a phenomenal challenge for me to do a mini-marathon. I feel like I've always been in pretty good shape but what I hate the most is long-distance running. So what better way to challenge myself than to train for five weeks and then run a half marathon? The sense of accomplishment when I reached that 13.1 miles… and knew that I was done! Looking back at all the 5/6 week grind that I put in just by myself was rewarding. This kinda sparked the running bug for me because of the inner intrinsic motivation that I had, but also just feeling a sense of accomplishment. So with that being said, I believe it's important to set small goals, medium goals, and big goals. It doesn't matter how big they are, what matters is that you're setting a goal for yourself and going through the journey, grind, and commitment, and ultimately reaching your goal.

So I think the take-home today is:

1. Having a very consistent sleep pattern is extremely important.
2. Eating well, having a very well-balanced diet. Not getting into the pantry every night getting that Twinkie, on the weekdays let's eat green beans, let's eat the hearty vegetables, let's go white chicken.
3. Physical activity. At least getting out on the intramural fields or whatever you want to do 2 or 3 times a week.
4. Set small medium or large goals for yourself and keep trying to accomplish those goals. I promise it will make you feel so much better about yourself and will hopefully give you much more confidence, I know it did for me.

So I challenge you to do all of those. But that being said, what I would tell my players on the University of Miami men's tennis team right now is: that the key to being successful and happy in life is having these attributes and just having a well-balanced lifestyle. I believe it will contribute to your personal and, hopefully, your professional careers. Just go out there and rock and roll.

Chloe: Welcome to the BH WELL video blog. I'm Chloe Robertson, your host. BH WELL stands for Behavioral Health Wellness Environments for Living and Learning. Today on the blog we have with us Marc Woods who is the assistant chief nurse executive for behavioral health at UK Healthcare. Hi Marc, thank you for joining us today. 

Our first question for you is, why is it important to address suicide prevention? 

Marc: Chloe we're in the midst of a national mental health crisis with regards to suicide. We know that suicide is the 10th leading cause of death for all adults. But for college students, that increases to the second leading cause of death. We know that a lot of this is because students typically in that age group don't take care of themselves the way that they could or should. They are also entering a stage of their life where they may be experiencing some drug experimentation, also first time in their lives they've been away from their family. So there are a lot of new social interactions that are put upon them, so they have a lot of stressors that we're not so sure that they're always prepared to be able to handle. 

Chloe: Why is there so much stigma around suicide and prevention discussion? 

Marc: So mental illness and behavioral health, for the most part, has quite a bit of stigma attached to it, It has always has. And suicide is no different. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't make efforts to try to combat that stigma but it's just one of those things that's attached to behavioral health and people aren't always sure how to handle someone they think may be suicidal. It's one thing to know that a person's behaviors have changed, or they may be experiencing sadness, or they may even voice certain things that kind of let you know that they're not doing so well. The average person may not feel comfortable with talking about suicide and asking about suicide. 

Chloe: What are some risk factors for suicide and people with behavioral health challenges?

Marc: There's lots of different risk factors: previous suicide attempts, or having a history of behavioral health certainly puts someone at a higher risk for suicidal ideations or suicidal thoughts. We also know that certain groups of people experience suicidal ideation at much higher rates. We know that our LGBTQ community and our young males are actually at higher risk for higher rates of suicide. 

Chloe: Could you talk a little bit about the Columbia Lighthouse Project and why UK Healthcare adopted this approach? 

Marc: Absolutely. So one of the things that the literature tells us is that persons who actually commit suicide or have a successful suicide they, oftentimes about 50% of the time, have seen a health care provider within the last one to three months. Unfortunately that health care provider hasn't always been a behavioral health care provider. And so the concept is that those persons are oftentimes coming into contact with health care clinicians and so if we were to screen for suicide we may be able to treat someone. Maybe they didn't come there for suicidal ideations, maybe something else, but if we're screening for it we can kind of identify it and then connect that person to services. We chose the Columbia Suicide Severity Screen for a number of reasons; the main reason was that anybody can use it. It's widely accepted, lots of institutions use it and it's three to six very simple questions and after that it allows us to kind of triage the level of risk that patient is in from low to moderate to high and then give the appropriate level of interventions for the level of risk.

Chloe: That's a very important project. Can you talk some about how simply asking someone if they're contemplating suicide can make a difference?

Marc: It’s the most important part. So what we have to get comfortable with is saying the word suicide. Asking have you ever thought of killing yourself? If a person is interested in learning more about that and they're not a health care clinician they can go and look at the Columbia and literally just ask those three to six questions. We don't ask them simply because we might feel like the person is going to be at higher risk for committing suicide or maybe they weren't thinking about it before but now they are. That’s one of the fallacies that's just simply not true. Lots of studies have shown that we don't increase a persons’ suicidal ideations simply by having that conversation. It's the single most important thing that we can do for a loved one is to be able to have that comfort and that communication line where we can ask, “are you suicidal?,” “have you had thoughts of hurting herself?” 

Chloe: Well thank you so much for sharing this important information with us today and thank you also for your time.

Marc: Absolutely. 

If you're interested in learning more about BH WELL and the Behavioral Health Wellness Environments for Living and Learning, check out our website at https://www.uky.edu/bhwell/. Thanks for tuning into the BH WELL blog where behavioral health is our priority. See you next time.

Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK

www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org