Students tend to pay little attention to their health, and this is for many reasons – the belief that they are still young, the notion that they have a lot to attend to, and that carefree attitude that comes with being a youth.
However, research has confirmed that students do better in school when they pay attention to their physical and mental health. A sound mind is essential for studying well, and how well you study goes a long way to influencing your success as a student. As a nursing student, for example, you always have pages of resources to study, topped with long hours of lectures and clinical practice. How do you stay on top of all this while ensuring that you maintain a sound mind and a healthy body?
This is exactly what we aim to achieve from this article. Below, you will discover tips for looking after your wellbeing and maintaining sound health while studying.
Maintain a healthy diet
Are you surprised that this is topping our list of tips for looking after your wellbeing when studying? If so, you shouldn’t be! The importance of a healthy diet for students cannot be overemphasized. Experts say that eating healthy makes learning easier.
The funny thing, however, is that students tend to think that eating healthy means eating a lot to stay full or just spacing their meals and randomly starving themselves to prevent becoming overweight. If the former is your routine, then you’re most likely taking in more junk food than healthy foods just to stay full.
A healthy diet is one that comprises enough fruits and vegetables. Fruits and vegetables supply you with essential vitamins and minerals that help to boost brain activity, keep you alert, and improve your immunity levels. Junk food, on the other hand, has little to offer your body other than helping you accumulate body fat and blood sugar, all of which are not good for your health and student function.
At the same time, when you do not eat enough, you starve your body and you starve your brain, putting it at risk of underperforming. A lack of essential nutrients will also put your immunity in a bad state.
Once in a while, sugar treats will not hurt you as a student, but ensure that you keep your body fed on a healthy diet for the most part of every week.
Exercise regularly
The wonderful benefits that exercise has for students cannot be overstated. Exercising regularly helps you concentrate better, improves your sleep pattern, and will also boost your self-esteem. When these three things are available in the right proportions, you are more likely to stay healthy as a student.
Thankfully, there are lots of exercise options you can explore as a student. For example, you can modify taking morning and evening walks by walking to and from school if your residence is not so far. You can also consider cycling or joining a dance class. Your school will most likely have a gym facility, which you can visit once a week or every two weeks to try out more rigorous activities. The good thing about being a student is the student discounts on gym memberships and other places.
Maintain a healthy school-life balance
That old adage says, ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ And that is true. As a student, it is important to be able to balance academic activities with extracurricular activities. Doing this will not only improve your academic performance as a student, but will also help you sustain a healthy state of mind.
Sometimes, students think that achieving a school-life balance is all about ticking the club checklist every weekend and having vacation tours every public holiday. In fact, we do not consider having a routine that favors just clubbing and studying to be a very healthy one. It is good to have a mix of several things – educational, recreational, creative, productive, pure fun.
Most schools try to create a balanced environment for their students by enlisting a series of extracurricular activities such as sports, student clubs and societies. Other than these, you can also treat yourself to enjoying your favorite hobbies from time to time, hanging out with friends, taking up learning a skill, and even visiting family members.
If you are a nurse furthering your career and studying from home enrolled in the online DNP program at Walsh University, you can still work out a schedule that is balanced for yourself. The online DNP offers you a convenient way to study with ample time to focus on other things. This degree will expand your advanced nursing role and prepare you to become a nurse leader. If you are working while studying, then you have the weekends and evenings to get involved in all of those fun things you love. Never forget them. It is easy to get carried away with your studies, but take breaks, do fun things, and enjoy yourself. The most important hack to learn is to maintain that healthy balance to ensure that you’re not favoring one aspect of your life over the other.
Maintaining a balance is about understanding priorities. Having fun is a good priority for healthy students, but your course is the utmost priority and so you have to devote more time to it.
Sleep well
When you sleep, you not only rest your physical body, but you also rest your brain. This is why sleeping well is essential for improving memory and concentration, and for reducing stress and anxiety.
Treating yourself to sleeping for just three or four hours a day is really not enough to get your brain to rest enough for all the tasking activities you’ve done during the day. This is why health experts recommend enough sleep (up to eight hours for adults).
You may say that this is too much time to sleep for a student who has so much to study, so many essays to write, so many community meetings to have, and so much fun to catch up with. Well, sleeping for six to seven hours a day is not bad, if you can also couple that with daytime naps of 30 to 45 minutes.
Keep in touch with family and friends
You will definitely meet a lot of people while in school, but not all of them will become close friends enough to care about your wellbeing. This is why you have your family members and close friends around. Although you may be far away from them, make the effort to keep in touch. They will usually be the best people for you to share your fears and concerns with. Besides, they will always genuinely reach out to you, asking you about your health, and reminding you to eat healthy and take your medications.
When you feel very down and concerned about your academics, your close friends in school will be there to give you support. These are people with whom you can laugh together, discuss your fears, cry together, laugh over silly mistakes, and have fun. Doing all of these things goes a long way to boosting your mental health, thereby putting you in the right frame of mind to study well and do well in your academics.
Due to the uniqueness of individual backgrounds, you may not consider your immediate family members capable of giving you the encouragement you need. Nevertheless, your school counselors, class advisors and school communities are available to cheer you on, not to mention the friends you have made in school. You will not always have the same set of people around you at all times, but you will surely have one or two people around you at any particular time.
Speak out when you need to, share your fears, ask for help, find a healthy community and immerse yourself in it.
Drink responsibly
Too much alcohol can lead to addiction problems and affect your physical and mental health. As with all cases of addiction, alcohol addiction can cause depression and anxiety, which will put your health at risk and make you unable to focus on your academics.
Conclusion
There is a lot you can do to look after your wellbeing when studying. This article has only highlighted some of them that are considered to be very important. If you develop a working routine that makes it possible to incorporate all of these with your academic activities, then you will be able to hack into physical, mental and social well-being.