Increasing Emotional Well-Being in PMHNP Graduate Students by Promoting Self-Care Behaviors Through Wild 5 Wellness

Background: College students experience more depression and anxiety than their age-matched peers. Their poor emotional well-being may be due to high levels of stress and low levels of self- care. Self-care is consistent, daily behaviors such as exercise, good nutrition, and adequate sleep that are restorative and help maintain good emotional and physical health. Researchers suggest that daily self-care is an effective method to build resilience and recuperate the body's ability to manage stress. Unfortunately, self-care is not common among college students. WILD 5 Wellness is an evidence-based curriculum that has effectively taught self-care to diverse populations. However, only one study corroborates the efficacy of WILD 5 Wellness with college students, and there are no studies investigating its effectiveness with graduate students. This project introduced WILD 5 Wellness to a small cohort of graduate students at the University of Utah with the hope of increasing their frequency of daily self-care, thereby enabling them to manage stress better and enjoy increased well-being. Methods: In this quality improvement initiative, the investigator introduced a 30-day trial of WILD 5 Wellness to 15 graduate students in their 1st-semester of the psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner doctoral program at the University of Utah. During the trial, participants attempted to perform the daily self-care behaviors of exercise, good nutrition, mindfulness, sleep hygiene, and social connectedness. To measure how the program influenced participants' frequency of self-care, participants completed pre-and post-trial Likert Scale questionnaires where a McNemar Test was analyzed for degree of change and statistical significance. The program's influence on participant well-being was determined by acquiring pre-and post-trial wellness scores on the Hero Wellness Scale and validating statistical significance with a Paired t- test. The investigator utilized additional questionnaires to evaluate beliefs on self-care and gather feedback on different elements of the project, including the pre-trial educational presentation and WILD 5 Wellness. Results: After completing WILD 5 Wellness, participants reported a 40% increase in exercise, a 53.4% increase in mindfulness and a 11.2% increase in wellness on the HERO Wellness Scale. Approximately 47 percent (n=7) of participants claimed to be satisfied with WILD 5 Wellness, while only 26.7% (n=4) participants considered the program feasible in graduate school. Reasons for low feasibility involved feeling overwhelmed by the program and not having sufficient time to complete all program elements. Suggestions to increase feasibility included staggering the start times of each of the five self-care behaviors and reducing the number of daily forms to complete. Conclusion: This project demonstrates preliminary evidence for graduate students' use of WILD 5 Wellness for daily self-care and increased well-being. However, modifications may be needed to improve the program's feasibility to accommodate already demanding lifestyles. Future projects with larger sample sizes must substantiate the project's findings and investigate what modifications may be most beneficial.