Special Episode 4 - Faculty Wellness and Well-being Week: A Conversation with Dr. Mollie Stambler

Welcome back to the CFI Faculty Lounge Podcast, where we explore the ideas, experiences, and challenges shaping academic life. In this Faculty Wellness and Well-being Week (FWWW) episode, host Dr. Eric Magrum speaks with Dr. Mollie Stambler, assistant professor at James Madison University, about health and wellness rhetorics, institutional wellness programs, and why community-focused approaches matter. 

In this episode, Dr. Stambler shares: 

-Her personal journey with wellness, weight, and chronic illness 
- Concerns about employee wellness programs focused more on cost reduction than care 
- Why terms like “wellness” need to be redefined through more inclusive, human and community-centered lenses 
- JMU’s Okanagan Charter 
- Ideas for shifting institutional priorities to reduce faculty burnout and support holistic well-being 
-Faculty workloads and balance 
 

Tune in for a thoughtful and critical reflection on how universities can move beyond check-the-box wellness and work toward true, community-centered health. 

Transcript

Sometimes, I talk to students in my class about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and self-actualization is at the top of that. Our model of wellness in this country doesn't make room for the ice cream that you want to eat on the couch at night after you've had a bad day. Words really matter and they really have a real impact on people and bodies and places in the world.

Welcome to the CFI Faculty Lounge Podcast, an outlet created for continuous learning and actual insights for faculty. I'm your host, Eric Magrum, inviting you to join us in conversation with dedicated educators who share their experiences, challenges, and effective solutions. Today, I'm excited to welcome Dr. Mollie Stambler, an assistant professor within the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication here at James Madison University.

Today, we have a special episode, and Mollie conducts research and specializes in health and wellness rhetorics as well as workplace wellness, which is what we've tuned in to learn about today. So we're going to have a conversation about wellness because this podcast episode is for Faculty Wellness Week. So, welcome, Mollie, and thank you for being here with us today.

Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

So, to start things off, can you share a little bit about your background and your interest in Faculty Wellness and Wellbeing, and how that came to be, and then how you came to study this subject, because this is an area that you study quite extensively.

Yes. I think that this has sort of been a lifelong thing for me. I've always loved food, and like so many people, I've also always struggled with my weight, and at different points in my life, I've struggled with chronic illness and invisible disability, and I've spent a lot of time as a young adult trying to work with health care professionals and all sorts of different kinds of practitioners to try to figure out, like, what's wrong with me, and what's the best way to take care of it?

What does eating and exercise look like for me personally, right? In terms of supporting my health, and then not long after starting my first full-time job, which was at a university, not JMU, I experienced my first employee wellness program, and at first I was really excited. I was like, oh, this is great.

This is going to be stuff that's going to help support me in my job, and it's going to make everything better. And what I discovered actually was kind of the opposite. One of the first things that I wanted to participate in was a wellness assessment.

And at that institution, the wellness assessment was kind of like what you would get at a wellness check with your doctor. So it was blood work, checking your cholesterol, checking your weight and height for your BMI. And I thought, well, I'm already working really closely with my health care professionals.

I shouldn't need to do this again. I can just have my doctor say, thumbs up. We did this.

And the wellness program was like, no, we need all of your stats. We need your doctor to fill out this form and tell us what all of your numbers are. And I was like, why?

Why do they need that? And it felt a little invasive to me. And so I started thinking, you know, I'm already doing this with my doctors.

I don't really know how I feel about having my employer know what my cholesterol is and doing this in the workplace. And so I sort of took a step back. Many years later, when I started my PhD program, I went back to school to study rhetoric, which I should say what that is.

Yes, thank you. Rhetoric is a lot of things to a lot of people. It's a discipline that's been around for thousands of years.

And oftentimes people use the word rhetoric is like, we'll get that rhetoric out of here or something. You know, it's kind of a bad word. But what I think of rhetoric as is the way that we make meaning with language and practice, embodied practice with things like clothing and signs, symbols.

I draw from a lot of scholars who look at rhetoric as meaning making. And so when I went back to school, I went to school for rhetoric and technical communication, which is communicating complex information to different audiences. And as I was studying, I became interested in the rhetoric of health and medicine, which is really asking questions about in health situations, who decides what's persuasive to who when, how do things become persuasive or compelling to different audiences, and how can we communicate the best way.

I remember having a conversation in the hallway with a graduate student colleague of mine who came up to me and said, Oh, Mollie, did you see that Weight Watchers just rebranded themselves? This was about 2018. They're now Wellness That Works.

And that just stuck with me. I was like, Weight Watchers. I'd been in Weight Watchers.

I didn't think of Weight Watchers as wellness. I thought of Weight Watchers as weight loss. Wellness is something else.

And I know we'll talk more about what that is later. But because of that, and because the Employee Wellness Program at my institution included Weight Watchers, I started looking at the Employee Wellness Program and Weight Watchers and thinking about what meaning making is happening here where my institution is saying wellness is enrolling in Weight Watchers. And so I started looking at Employee Wellness Program discourse and history and employee lived experience with those things.

Did they ever, did you ever get an answer why they needed your statistics?

No, they wouldn't. They wouldn't give me an answer to it. I did discover that about some seven or eight years later, they started letting doctors sign a form that just said that you had done the thing.

But at the time that I ran into that, they wanted all of the numbers. My research shows that most employee wellness programs that I've been able to look at have, as a primary goal, reducing the institutional costs of health insurance. So when I go to the doctor and somebody has to pay the other part that's not my co-pay, if our institutions are the ones providing the health insurance, then they're the ones that are paying that other part of the health insurance.

And so, institutions have a vested interest in having healthier employees so that they can reduce those costs. What I discovered at that institution specifically was that because they were providing the health insurance, they have all of your health insurance data, and they were also pulling data from the wellness program so that they could do return on investment and cost benefit analyses. So it was, people are doing this for the wellness program, and we can see that they're having less doctor's appointments.

We can see that their diagnoses are changing, and so the wellness program is having an effect.

That was my initial first other question, if you will. But I also appreciate you sharing your own struggles with that, because I think that's really important, because this is an individual conversation, because I think a lot of people have differing views on what a wellness program is. And because I think, I'll share this now on the podcast, because when we first talked about wellness programs, my initial thought is like, okay, how do we eat two to three fruits and vegetables a day, and then how do we get 150 minutes of activity throughout the week, and what can I do, if you will, as opposed to seeing it from other people's perspective.

So I think that's really going to be where the conversation goes throughout the entirety of this podcast, is really trying to understand how different folks view, or how it can be viewed from different angles, if you will.

Yeah.

So based on your research, can you provide us with an operational definition of wellness and well-being?

No. I know that's not what you were expecting me to say.

And that's okay.

But I'll tell you why I can't. And it's really connected to what you were just saying. I can't provide an operational definition of wellness and well-being because there isn't one, for a variety of reasons.

I think it is super individual. What wellness is to you and what your wellness looks like is going to be really different than mine. It's going to be really different than every other person's.

And also, there's this element where the word wellness itself has been co-opted and used on so many things. I mean, there's a wellness brand of dog food. You know, I go to the doctor.

Yes, there's wellness is on everything. I go to the doctor and it's like wellness checkups. Target labels things by products that support wellness.

My vitamin company is a wellness company now. Everything is about wellness. And so in a lot of ways, the word has become really slippery and has lost meaning.

One of the questions that I asked folks in my research was, what does wellness mean to you? And I got such a range of answers to that question from like very thorough explanations of like, I balance my spiritual and social and physical and mental health and all of the different dimensions of wellness to people just saying BS. It's a buzzword.

It's not a word that means anything to me. And so I think it's really, really hard to provide one definition of it. In fact, one of the things that I sort of have identified in my research is that when folks do provide a definition of wellness, it's often a very westernized kind of biomedicalized definition.

It focuses on having certain markers of physical health and sort of certain priorities around the types of things that you do and you eat and you are basically. And I think, actually, that that's part of the disconnect that I found in my research between employees and employee wellness programs, because wellness means so many different things to so many different people in so many different contexts. Employee wellness programs have one specific version of wellness generally that they're trying to operationalize on the ground, and it really is connected to that health insurance reduction.

So there's a larger focus on physical markers of health that would contribute to things like going to the doctor. But employees talk about all sorts of other things. And they talk about ways that they make wellness work for themselves.

And I think one of the things that I heard the most is people talking about thinking about wellness as a way that's bigger than them. It's not just my wellness, it's how is my family well, how is my community well, how is my world well, how is my environment well. And I don't feel like most of the time employee wellness programs are thinking like that.

They're thinking about individual level wellness. And I want to think about community level wellness. I want to think about what it would look like if our communities, if we were working on making our communities well instead of individuals in them.

There's a senator, a late senator from Minnesota, where I lived for a really long time, named Paul Wellstone, who famously said, we all do better when we all do better. And that, I just, I think about that like almost every day, honestly. And I think it's so true.

And I think it connects in some ways to, there's, I don't know if you know, at JMU, they adopted, we're at health promoting campus now, and they adopted the Okanagan Charter.

I was not aware of this.

It's a cool thing. This just happened, I think, in the spring last year. And so JMU is working to infuse health throughout all aspects of the campus, which is very cool.

And one of the things that the Okanagan Charter focuses on is the idea of health or wellness at the person, place and planet level. And I have now been thinking about that a lot as well, because I think it connects to, you know, we all do better when we all do better, in some really important ways.

So I just, I'm just reflecting on my own thoughts, because I absolutely, I think, fall within that. If you had asked me to define wellness, I think I would come up with something very much along the lines of the biometric testing and where my levels in response to population levels and scales and whatnot. I wouldn't necessarily think of some of the other dimensions of wellness.

So I think I would absolutely think of more of the physical. I do come from a very physical science and the science of how the body adapts to physical stimuli, so that would make sense. But I want to come back to community wellness and then specifically the person, place and planet, because I think that's really I think that's really powerful and I think our listeners would do well to learn more about that.

Yeah, I think I think about ways that we could operationalize community wellness and what it might look like. And so I think instead of saying to an individual person, did you know that you should eat this many fruits and vegetables a day? Which in my research, I found everybody knows that already.

And a lot of times people are a little like not, you know, they feel talked down to when they get that information that they've already learned. I think we could think about things like, instead of what could I, how could I eat better? What nutritional choices could I make that would be better for me?

We could think about things like, how can we bring food access into areas of our communities where there is no food access? The institution that is the main one in my study has a farmers market that they do on campus, which is cool, right? Once a week, they bring local farmers.

A lot of these folks are immigrant farmers. They bring them onto campus with their products and they sell them to the community, but there's a food desert like a mile from campus. And a lot of the lower-income employees at that institution live in that neighborhood.

If the farmers market was there, where there is already a center, by the way, of the university, that could bring fresh food into a neighborhood where there aren't any fresh fruits and vegetables available. It would still benefit the employees who live in that neighborhood and it would help raise the community up in a really meaningful way. I think, because food is kind of one of my focuses within wellness programming, I think about how the way we talk about nutrition could foreground issues of things like cultural norms and local foods versus foods that have been shipped halfway around the world.

And that leads us to an environmental impacts of our farming and food production habits. I think about, again, things like food deserts. I think about ways we could improve access to health care and address other contributors to health disparities.

Our employees live in these communities, and if we're helping them and their friends and their families, and there's no way we're not going to help them, right?

Yeah, back to the we all do better when we all do better. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about food deserts?

And I'm going to preface this by saying, my take, before I think I learned a little bit more about what a food desert is, I was like, there's no food deserts in the United States of America. And then I really started thinking about it, and I thought, maybe there is. So could you speak to that a little bit?

Yeah, I know I mentioned a food desert in an urban area. So a food desert is, I'm going to mess up the definition a little bit, so listeners, don't hold me to this. But a food desert is a geographical area where folks don't have access to like fresh fruits and vegetables and fresh meats.

You would maybe only have fast food or packaged food available. And this happens in a lot of urban areas, but it happens in rural areas as well, which I think is important because we're sitting in a rural area in Virginia to a large extent. I've spent a lot of time driving around this country and driving through rural states like Oklahoma and Arkansas and Kansas and Iowa.

And I've driven through so many real small towns, like the one that I grew up in, that don't have a grocery store. And the only place that folks can buy groceries is at the Dollar General, which is sort of by design. Dollar General is a little bit predatory that way.

But if you've never shopped for food at a Dollar General, I can tell you that all they have is packaged food, preprocessed packaged food. There's no fresh produce. There's no fresh vegetables or fruit.

There's no fresh meat. There's nothing like that. And so tons and tons and tons of people in this country don't have access to healthy, what we would think of as healthy food.

And yet, those people are still being told that it's their individual eating choices, perhaps, that are the reason why they're overweight or something like that, or their health is poor. And so if we could look at a way to address food deserts, that would be really fantastic. But does that help answer your question?

Yeah, it does. And I do want to ask specifically the predatory nature of Dollar General.

Yeah.

I get them confused. That's well documented in various research outlets and what not. But also even...

So food desert doesn't mean there's no food.

Right.

But it does mean or could mean for the listener, it could mean that there's a convenience store right down there, but everything in that convenience store really isn't going to be awesome for us from a biometric health perspective. And then, I could only imagine, even... And someone could argue, well, there's one five miles down the road.

Are you going to drive instead of two minutes, are you going to drive 15 minutes to go get food? And the answer most likely is going to be no.

I mean, even asking the question, are you going to drive further assumes that you have a car.

That's true.

And that you can afford the gas and that you can get the groceries home again. I know many, many, many people who don't have access to transportation, who have to do something like take public transit or an Uber to the grocery store. And that gets really expensive.

It's very, very expensive to be poor in this country.

And I could then imagine a scenario where, okay, if let's say I have a car and I can go to Dollar General or some other, I don't want to keep picking on Dollar General, but I could insert convenience store that doesn't have as many options. Or I could go further, but I decide to go to the more convenient store. And then I know because I'm being told by my institution, and it's not one specific institution, it's the entire higher education system.

That's what we're talking about when we talk about wellness programs. We're not singling out any institution to be clear. But that would, I know this would create more anxiety within me like, oh, I got a flyer two days ago that said two vegetables, two fruits, and this, this, and this, but I didn't get any of those.

And now I'm having anxiety about not getting the thing that I know that I'm getting because of the situation that I'm in. But the solution that you're talking about, a farmer's market may well resolve a lot of those things, or similar situations.

Yeah, I just think there are things we could do instead of spending time and money telling individuals the same thing that they hear from their doctors. I think there are ways we could spend that time and money doing things that would help our whole communities.

So a reallocation of resources is what your research found might be the most logical next step.

Yeah, I think so. And I think, I think too about all of the things that affect our wellness. I know I said food is my big thing, but I think about all of the things that affect our wellness outside of that.

You mentioned feeling anxiety that you couldn't buy the fruits or vegetables. If you were that person, imagine if you also couldn't feed them to your kids.

True.

And the amount of anxiety you would feel there. And then your employer is telling you this. And there's a power differential there that's important to pay attention to.

Things like having universal health care would solve so many things. Or making voting day a national holiday. There are so many things.

I know you're like, how does this have to do with wellness? Because sometimes I talk to students in my class about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and self-actualization is at the top of that. If we really want to be well, we need to be fully self-actualized in every possible way.

I think all of these things in our communities affect our health. And to bring it back to food, one of my mentors in her book on wellness said, our model of wellness in this country doesn't make room for the ice cream that you want to eat on the couch at night after you've had a bad day. And I love that because we often think, oh, ice cream, oh, that's a bad food, that's an unhealthy food or something.

We want to characterize it in some moral valuation way. But you know what? Mental health is really important, too.

And sometimes that pint of ice cream on the couch is the best wellness thing you can do.

Yeah, so many thoughts running through my head. And I'm not going to lie to you, I'm struggling. And as you're saying these things, I'm struggling to really challenge my own beliefs in this.

Because there's this part of me, and I'm going to be very clear in that I come from a more individualistic approach. And but I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, it would be dishonest for me not to say other people have different hurdles than I'm going to have. And I'll give an example.

The way I grew up, we had vegetables and fruits, we very rarely had fruits and vegetables at the dinner table. And then so that's a, I just learned that's what dinner is. And a lot of time it was more meat and potatoes sort of thing.

And like the fruits are, okay, that's a canned fruit, or that's a canned vegetable. Again, there was almost never both. From what I remember, my brother's going to listen to this and be like, you're full of crap.

But the idea there is, that's what I learned was a sound dinner because that's what my parents did. Now, if I was brought up in a household where we go to the insert very convenient store and we go get the cheapest thing possible, that now becomes, that is a sound dinner. And that's going to be really hard to break that habit as opposed to somebody who grew up with, hey, we have dinner and there is a protein, there is a starch, there's a fruit, there's a vegetable, and there's water or whatever you choose to drink.

Those are going to be very different situations. And it would be dishonest of me not to say those two trajectories from a health perspective. I don't know that I could sit here and say that there's not a very different trajectory for both of those populations.

I think it's tricky, I do. Without getting into the scientific research. Yeah, I think it's tricky.

I think that from what I've read, some of the health risks that are associated with dietary choices are overly correlative. I'm not saying that there's not science there that's important. I think sometimes the science gets operationalized in the public sphere in a way that doesn't make a lot of space for things like cultural traditions and personal food ways and regional differences in food availability and other things like that.

And so it does get a little bit complicated, but I think that what's important there is that wellness is something that's different to everybody, right? I also, when you said, you know, you grew up and dinners were this way, I had a similar thing. Like, I think we all do.

We learn food as a vocabulary, as a language in a lot of ways from our parents, from our societies, and from our schools. And so, I remember learning dinner was one thing from my parents. I also remember learning about the food pyramid because that's how old I am.

I know it's the my plate now. And I don't know if you remember learning about that in school. Oh, yeah.

So, this is where I say, like, I feel like people already know a lot of the things that we try to tell them. There's a theory in science communication, it's called the deficit model. And it's a critiqued deficit model.

So, a lot of science communication assumes that people simply don't know something. And if they knew something, then obviously they would make different choices. And so, I think a lot of times we communicate this nutrition information from that deficit model.

Like, well, obviously, you don't know that you should eat some fruits and vegetables. And if you did know, then you would certainly make different choices. But I think the tricky part there is the choice part.

Because if we circle back to things like food deserts and different access to foods, it may not always be somebody's individual choice. Like, I might, if I live in that small town in Oklahoma, and all I have is a dollar store to go to, I might not be able to choose fresh vegetables. I might not be able to choose non-packaged foods or non-sugary drinks.

If I'm on SNAP, I might not be able to choose certain items at the grocery store. It just gets really complicated, because I think people don't have as much choice as we would like them to have, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I'm going to ask perhaps a crass question, but I really want to explore the space a bit. So, to the individual that might be sitting here and thinking, okay, Mollie said choice. Okay, so it's a choice to go to those convenient locations.

They can choose to go to that further away location, so they can choose to go use their money at those places. And if they walk there, they would even be getting more benefit. So they're walking there, they're getting the better nutrient-dense, etc.,

nutrient-dense food. What would you say to those individuals that have, that are espousing or maybe even not even saying aloud, but they're thinking these things in their mind?

I think it's just not that simple. In my research, when I was talking to employees, what I found was that a lot of times, the folks who lived in the neighborhoods that were food deserts, and this is setting aside like whole towns where there just isn't another place you can go, but living in a neighborhood that was a food desert, those were the lower income employees. Many of those people were working more than one job to try to make ends meet.

And that's kind of what I meant when I said being poor is expensive. Like time, do you have time to walk two miles? Do you have the ability to walk two miles?

How does this affect people who don't have the ability to walk two miles? What about people who have to have all of their groceries brought to them because they're disabled? Or whatever, whatever.

I think that there's a lot of privilege in assumptions that we make about how easy it would be to do certain things, if that makes sense.

Yeah, and it seems, please correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the model for wellness programs has been almost very statistically driven, meaning that, okay, what are the biggest factors that make the biggest difference for the most, the widest swath of people? So painting with a broad brush, essentially. So this is the fact, this is, and we're talking about modifiable factors.

So things that you have somewhat control over, which again, we've talked about the different iterations of control or choice. When if you live in a food desert, you have less choice than if you don't live in a food desert. But it seems like exercise and nutrition, those are probably the most model, and like things like smoking or tobacco use in other forms would be the lowest hanging fruit for wellness programs.

Is that an accurate statement?

Absolutely. In my research, I looked at one wellness program, I looked at like 40 years of history of it, and all the way back in the 70s and 80s, when the modern wellness movement was starting, and companies were all over the country, were springing up wellness programs. The physical so-called lifestyle choices that people make were the things that people were focusing on the most.

That institution did tracking of its risk factors, population level risk factors. So this is like epidemiology stuff, by using that data that we talked about. They had running over 10 years, they were tracking the risk factors.

And the number one risk factor was stress. The number two risk factor was weight. The number three risk factor was...

I can't remember now. But all of them were about like individual choice, and smoking, alcohol use, recreational drug use, all of those sorts of things are in there. And what I discovered was that, because that was what internally the wellness program was trying to prioritize, was addressing those risk factors to reduce health care costs.

That was what they were really prioritizing in their programming. So they would come out and say, wellness is really holistic, and it's really meant to be all of these dimensions. But then in the programming and the incentives, you would see that it was all about those physical markers of health.

So more of, would you be a proponent of more of a content fidelity and an alignment of holistic and then holistic, I guess holistic wellness. I'm doing a lot of gestures for the listeners who can't see me using gestures right now to formulate my ideas. So holistic wellness, but then not just having a couple of these programs that are aimed at only a couple of these elements of wellness.

Is that kind of what you're proposing or what you would think would be helpful?

I would get rid of all of the individual stuff, honestly. I really would. I would encourage, I would have a program that encouraged folks to make sure they're going to the regular appointments.

Not just medical care, like dental care is incredibly important. And I would leave those relationships to the health care providers that know you well. I just don't think it's really, personally, I just don't think it's really my employer's place to say, your cholesterol is high, you should do something about that.

I feel like that's my doctor's place, right? And largely people I talked to agreed with me on that. And so I would re-figure it entirely as a community-based wellness program.

I would ask folks to do things like volunteer in the local community and provide ideas about how their expertise, we're talking universities, we are all experts in something that could probably help the world. And so how can we leverage our expertise and our resources at a university to help the communities that we live in and model that? Because I just think that's the way the world should be and we should be taking care of our communities and trying to lift each other up.

You're not going to get any argument there. I absolutely am on board lifting people up and modeling the way. That's a huge, huge thing that I believe in.

I want to add too that when I talk to folks, I think what people said about wellness programming and participating in it was largely, especially faculty. And I'm saying this because I'm talking to you all faculty out there who are thinking, I don't have time for this stuff. That's what I heard most of the time from everybody.

It was like, oh, they want me to go to another class. Oh, I need to track my exercise. I need to go log in to the app and click some buttons or whatever.

I don't have time for that. We're all so busy. And most of us are already taking care of our individual health in some way.

I feel like getting people engaged in a community-based wellness program would be a thing that people would want to spend time on. And that would actually be value-added as opposed to feeling like, oh, another thing that I have to do to get my health insurance discount or whatever I can get out of it.

So you're not, just so I'm hearing you clearly, that you're not saying they shouldn't do these individual things. You're just saying, I think there's a better way to allocate resources from a whole-scale wellness programming. Yeah, yeah, they know the two fruits and the two vegetables, and they know don't smoke, don't use tobacco, and they know go get your exercise, whatever it is.

So they know that song and that dance. Let's not keep playing the same song and dance when nobody is, if they are going to dance to that song, they're going to dance to that song. Let's give them a new song.

Let's focus on this community wellness piece. That's essentially what, is that what you're saying?

Yes, yes. I'm nodding my head vigorously less. Yes, for the listeners.

Okay. Yeah, definitely. I think, I think that could really make a huge difference.

And it might even inspire people who feel like they don't have time for their individual wellness to take better care of themselves. I just feel like it's a waste of people's time and energy to tell people stuff they already know.

So you talked about stress and you talked about this community wellness. What do you, what would you theorize? I'm asking for speculation, to be clear.

What would you theorize would happen to stress? Because it seemed like stress was the number one. What do you think that would do to stress levels?

And again, I'm asking you to speculate.

Yeah, speculatively, I don't know. I would hope that it would help reduce stress levels. I mean, I think one thing that I would want to see in a community-based wellness program at an institutional level would be some normalizing of taking time off.

Because I feel like, I feel like as a faculty member, I don't get to be sick. I mean, I know that we can, we have time for that. I don't feel, it's very hard to take a day off.

I call in sick and, you know, a hundred students are like probably happy their class is canceled, honestly. But, you know, that affects a hundred students. One of my students calls in sick and that just affects me.

I feel like stress was the number one stress, risk factor at that institution. And everyone that I talked to said that the demands of their job were the thing that caused them the most stress, especially faculty members. As somebody who's working on tenure myself, I know this very well.

There's never enough time in the day to do all of the things that we want. I would hope that a community-based wellness program, even if somebody didn't have the time to participate, would be something that would truly be value-added, that they would be happy to have in the community and to support at the institution, as opposed to being annoyed by somebody telling them, hey, you know what you should do is try to be stressed out less. Have you tried to mend my way?

Have you considered trying a mindfulness seminar? Maybe what I need is to not be on 37 committees.

Yeah, and I guess I'm going to speculate for you a bit. I believe that when people feel a deeper sense of purpose, I believe that, I'm not saying stress just dissolves in thin air, but I think it would be mitigated to a greater extent, particularly if you feel a sense of that purpose and feel a sense of contribution to something bigger than yourself. I think that would, if I had to guess, if I, I'm not a betting man, but if I were, I would put money that that would probably mitigate some, not, maybe not to a significant extent, but I think it would lower it a little bit.

I would agree. I'm sure somewhere there's research that shows that having strong communities and good support networks helps support wellness, holistically, mental health, personal well-being, reduces stress. You've got people you can rely on for things.

Yeah.

Okay.

And I think we've touched on a little bit of this, but I'm just going to throw you the fastball right down the middle, if you will. What are some of the biggest challenges faculty members face regarding their well-being today?

I really think that, as a faculty member, I really think that our biggest challenges are our workloads.

It's just how much time it takes and how many demands we have on us as faculty members. And that's not even considering all of the demands that if you have a family, that you also have kids who need to be driven to baseball or whatever you've got going on. If you're somebody with elder care responsibilities or anything else, it's like, where do I find the time to do one more thing?

And so I think that probably one of the biggest challenges or one of the biggest spaces for growth among faculty is for us to all talk about workload and what makes sense and how to say no better. That's something that was one of the first pieces of advice that I got. As a graduate student, a senior scholar came to me and said, you need to get yourself a no committee.

You need to get yourself a committee of like three people that whenever somebody comes to you and says, Mollie, here's an awesome opportunity, you can ask your no committee if you should do it or not. And their job is to tell you no so that you say no to more stuff. I have not been super great operationalizing that and implementing it in my life, but I am trying to say no to things because there are so many amazing opportunities as a faculty member and so many things we just have to do that we can't do them all.

And we have to carve out time for ourselves. And so finding a way to balance things, I think, is the biggest challenge for faculty members right now.

What's funny is in doing this podcast, that's the question. Everybody has answers for all the other questions. And to be fair, largely they're personal questions about journeys and what not.

But almost everyone starts with, yeah, this is something I'm still trying to get better at. And to be clear, I would also be in that camp. That would be the first thing I'd say.

So that aligns very much with the work-life balance or balancing out your workload with what your other responsibilities are. But getting to saying no in your no committee, I love that idea of a no committee. And I do think, talking about different individuals, you're going to have individuals that are predisposed to, maybe they have more trait conscientiousness and they're more likely to say yes, as opposed to somebody who doesn't have as much trait conscientiousness.

Maybe their default is no, unless it's a really compelling reason. And again, that's not me. I'm not indicting any of those individuals, and I'm not saying those individuals need to change.

But what I am saying is, I think we do need to empower other faculty to say no, when it's something they really don't want to do. And it's not that everything we want that we do, we need to want to do, if you will. But I do think that, as you suggested, there are so many great opportunities.

But I think it was Warren Buffett said, make a list of 25 things you want to do in your life. Circle five of them and make sure you don't do any of the other ones. Why?

Because those will take away from the top five that you actually want to go do. And so I do think it's really important for us to say no and empower those people to say no when they in fact feel like saying no. And there are absolutely times when it's, yeah, I need you to do this thing or Eric, you got to do this thing.

Speak to that a little bit.

Yeah, I think the one thing that I would want to add to that is just to be aware of how requests for doing things hit different populations differently. That's a way I can say it. There's a gendered and racialized nature to who gets asked to do stuff and who feels like they can say no and who feels like they have to say yes.

And I think there's a lot of invisible labor that goes on as well, just in academia in general, that's sort of disproportionately on certain people. There's been some research that has shown, for instance, that women identifying faculty tend to do more emotional labor working with students than male identifying faculty members. And that's not my research.

It makes me think about the ways that I see those requests happen in real life and who gets asked and who feels like they have to say yes and who feels like they have to say no, or get to say no rather.

It's been a phenomenal conversation, but I want to offer the stage to kind of say anything that we haven't gotten to that you'd really like to say or things that you think you'd like to say or to add to the conversation.

I just, as a rhetorician, I think words really matter and they really have a real impact on people and bodies and places in the world and that it's important to think really, really carefully about what we're saying when we say certain things. And so I think it's just really important to think about what wellness means to different people and ways that we can develop programming that are inclusive and truly holistic. And just to circle back to Paul Wellstone, you know, just help us all do better.

I appreciate that. And I appreciate you saying yes to this opportunity, because you certainly did not have to be here today, but it's been a pleasure having you on today, Mollie.

It's been my pleasure. This is one of the things I was excited to say yes to.

I was excited to have you on. Thank you very much, Mollie.

Thank you.