The Brain Spa, open everyday from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. in Touchstone Project office, gives the community an opportunity to learn about stress management, to relax and even to provide psychoeducation.

The Brain Spa is open to students and the public. It offers various activities to promote relaxation, including biofeedback. The biofeedback monitors heart rate and respiration, and it makes people aware of their breathing and calms them down.

There are also therapy lights, Play-Doh, coloring and stress balls. People are also free to come in and relax on the couches.

Bethany Leavitt, a fourth-year student, is working in the Brain Spa to get her field experience and to do peer outreach.

The goal of the Touchstone Project office is to de-stigmatize counseling services and change the uncomfortable feelings toward seeing a counselor, according to Leavitt.

Every Thursday there will be a workshop from 12:15 p.m. to 12:45 p.m. in the Touchstone Project office on various topics, as part of the Brain Spa. On Thursday, Feb. 6, the workshop’s topic was silencing one’s inner critic.

According to Charles McKay, a graduate assistant and staff member at the Touchstone office, it is not possible to completely silence the inner critic, however, a person can learn distance from it.

The more a person tries to silence his or her inner critic, the more it will try to speak out until the person cannot ignore it anymore.

In the workshop, people were asked to draw one of the objects in the room, but you could not look down while you were drawing. Once finished, participants could not look at their drawings and reflected on how it felt drawing and not being able to look.

The participants said overall they felt frustrated they could not look at their paper since they wanted to make their drawing good. There was an underlying fear of not making the drawing good enough, or of it not being up to a certain standard.

The question was then: Why do we want this drawing to be so good? Where does this desire for quality come from? The answer is that we want to be able to show off the drawing and not be ashamed of it. When that quality standard is not met, it is fuel for self-criticism.

On a daily basis, people are living with feeling like they are not good enough, according to McKay. There is always a battle with the inner critic.

The next part of the workshop was drawing another object in the room, and, just like before, participants could not look at their paper while drawing.

After the second time drawing, the participants felt less attached to the drawings overall because they were appreciating the object they were drawing, rather than focusing on making the drawing good.

The workshop’s goal was to try and put the self-critic in place and to show that while it does have its function, it does not need to be on overdrive, constantly picking things apart.

“It is important to recognize that the self-critic has a function,” McKay said. “It helps us do things and achieve things — but when there is excess of the self-critic, problems occur.”

People may think relaxing once and a while is enough, but students need to schedule frequent time and space to take care of themselves, especially during the stressful years of college. If it is not already in their itinerary, people will not follow through and will cut relaxation off of their priority list.

“College isn’t good at teaching us how to manage your life and enjoy life without burning out, and that’s what we teach,” McKay said.