Susan Crowther - Lifestyles for Learning: The Essential Guide for College Students and the People Who Love Them

Advance Praise for Lifestyles for Learning

Any parent or student who is thinking of entering college must read Lifestyles in Learning first before setting foot on any college campus. All too often colleges have become a vacation destination for students: who is in Division 1 for sports, who has the best gourmet food or the latest technology. Susan has melded her deep and profound background in nutrition and health, her keen humor, and her experience and knowledge of teaching college students who learn differently, to create a masterpiece of information that puts all the pieces together to teach us what it takes to learn, from the latest in our understanding of brain functioning to what we choose to think about. The successful college student will want to put this on their reading list. I know it's going to become a text for my students.

Kathy DAlessio

M.Ed., Academic Advisor, Landmark College

Going to college is a lot easier than being in college. Susie Crowther has written a delightful book that unravels the college experience. It is smart, witty, and thoughtful. As tasty as junk food but healthy as bean sprouts.

James W. Pennebaker

Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin; Author, The Secret Life of Pronouns

In Lifestyles for Learning , Susan Crowther elucidates the science and art of lifestyle choices for young adults entering the cultural minefield of todays college campus. With humor and refreshing honesty, Ms. Crowther shares her personal tribulations and decades of teaching experience as she takes us through key influences on learning and success: nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress. For anyone facing learning challenges, her message resonates with the best that positive psychology has to offer: that each of us has control over the choices we make, the kind of life we aspire to lead, and the degree of success we earn.

Jim Baucom

Professor of Education, Landmark College

Crowther breaks down the process of learning into an accessible and digestible process, and provides an excellent overview of the circumstances necessary for optimal learning to occur. Lifestyles for Learning validates what higher education professionals have long suspected, that academic success requires far more than cognitive intelligence. Crowther brings to the forefront what most educators already know intuitively, that students need to be in balance (physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychological) to truly thrive in college. Higher education professionals finally have a resource that honors this intuition with science. The authors ultimate goal is simple: help students become better learners, regardless of starting point or life circumstances. Lifestyles for Learning should be required reading for anyone wanting to better support students as they navigate the collegiate journey.

Nova Schauss

Academic Advisor & Student Success Specialist

I love love love the book and want to read it cover to cover and then backwards like the demonic messages on the Beatles white album. Perfect tome for the non-traditional student. It will be Invaluable. Make sure it is required reading for all of your courses.

Joan McArthur

Authors college BFF

Lifestyles for Learning is a must read for all college freshmen and their parents. This savvy book identifies the multiple areas of stress that every new college student will encounter, and the often most overlooked remedycreativity. Ms. Crowther explains how todays students are pressured to make career decisions based on old beliefs about financial success and future employment trends, when current research in psycho-neuroscience indicates that happiness and career satisfaction is more easily achieved when such decisions are made from the passions of the heart. Based on case studies and personal experience, she provides concrete examples that demonstrate how the pathway to the heart cannot be accessed through the mind alone. Through illustrations and exercises, she shows how the arts, particularly a regular practice of visual journalingjournaling with words and imagescan be the most direct pathway to the vast well of personal wisdom each of us possess. When students learn early on how to tap into this place of inner knowing that only the heart and soul can reveal, they will begin to re-define their life purpose based on what matters most to them.

Barbara Ganim

Author of Art and Healing: Using Expressive Art to Heal Your Body, Mind and Spirit; and co-author of Visual Journaling: Going Deeper than Words

Copyright 2015 by Susan Crowther

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Julie Fallone.

Cover photo by Susan Crowther. Interior and cover art by Julie Fallone.

Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-392-1

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-858-2

Dedication

For Lucas

Be the chessboard, son.

Foreword

From the earliest years of childhood, we prepare students for the academics of college. Yet, students head for campus unaware of potential threats to their well-being. With more demands on their time, sleep becomes an inconvenience, leading to reliance on caffeine and sugar to push through fatigue. Drinking and drugs are interwoven into college social life, making it difficult for a student to know if they (or their friends) are being social or becoming dependent. Many students silently struggle with depression, unaware of how to ask for help. In a relatively short time, a student's life can become unstable. Brain science informs us that young adult brains are vulnerable - actively rewiring, unplugging old connections and rebuilding new ones. The abrupt changes in lifestyle are stressful and divert brain activity to survival rather than learning.

It's no wonder that many look back on their college years and ask, what could I have done differently?

As I think back to my own college experience, I recall years of stress, sleep deprivation, and and burnout. Now, as an integrative physician with a focus on nutrition and brain health, I see young people experiencing the same pressures. What has changed? We desperately need a new way to help students navigate college years.

Susies book, Lifestyles for Learning , offers a completely revolutionary approach, guiding students to the understanding that their whole beingsoul, body, and mindwill be affected by the college experience. After all, students are more than their brains. She guides students to defend their opportunity to learn by choosing to nourish their health. Crowther reframes brain science, creating a narrative that helps students see that the emergence of self-responsibility is parallel to the brains natural process of reorganizing itself. As self-motivated young adults, they can anticipate and better understand the challenges of college life and thrive as they engage fully in all that college has to offer.