By DMA Senior Katelyn Beachell

As a junior picking new classes, I chose the elective Optimistic Mindset because everyone who was in the class before me said it’s an amazing class, and it truly is. The main focus of the class is to help us become happier individually and as a whole community. It is a smaller class than most classes at DMA but from day one I knew that I felt comfortable enough to talk about my feelings with people. When I was in Mr. Shelton’s Optimist Mindset class, I never had a moment where my opinion didn’t matter. We had a lot of open discussions about our lessons and what our opinions were on the lessons. Just having this space to talk openly was very helpful. 

Each week we learned a new strategy to better our mental health and focused on integrating it into our lives. The topics that have helped me a lot are meditating, eliminating social media, working out, and social connection. Meditation has helped me find my inner peace. It has helped me calm down when I’m stressed and better focus my attention. I’ve also found that meditation helps me sleep better. 

Throughout the course, we were shown scientific research about how some things we think will make us happy don’t, while introducing many different things that do make us happier. The lessons provide ways to eliminate the things that don’t actually make us happy and replace them with new ways to make things better. I feel like this class has benefited me by showing me all different types of ways to make my mental health better. 

We also tried to help the whole school with the Community Building Agreement. It’s a document that shares the positive qualities we would like DMA to have, and by signing it, students were showing their support to make DMA a better place where we are all there for each other. I hope you consider joining this class which is very beneficial and will help you out in all different types of ways.