How to Lead a Healthy Lifestyle While Being a College Student

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If you are a college student, you may understand that a healthy lifestyle depends on values, worldview, social, and moral experience. However, the values may not always support that lifestyle.  Realistically, any student is responsible for their own thoughts and actions and those may not always be considered “healthy”.

College students are typically involved in multiple groups which allows them to influence that healthy lifestyle. To be that example is admirable as many college students do not make wise choices.

The responsibility of living a healthy lifestyle is formed in a student as a part of general cultural development, manifested in features of behavior, and the ability to develop as a person in accordance with your own ideas about a spiritually, morally, and physically fulfilled life.

As a college student, you might feel too stressed out due to the overload with your assignments which causes you to start neglecting your health, just give yourself a break and relax. You can always address experts who will give you essay or thesis writing help at any time.

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, not just the absence of disease.

There are three main components in health:

• Physical health is a state of the body, in which the integral indicators of the main physiological systems of the body are within the physiological norm and adequately changed by human interaction with the environment.
• Mental health is the intellectual, emotional, and conscious-minded interaction with the social environment, which is adequate for the given society.
• Social health is the structure of information patterns, which provides normal moral and ethical manifestations of the individual and depends on the level of nutrition, living conditions, working and recreation conditions.

A healthy lifestyle is a way of life aimed at preserving health, preventing diseases, and strengthening the human body as a whole.

The main components of a healthy lifestyle include:

• work and rest modes;
• sleeping habits;
• eating habits;
• physical activity;
• sanitation, hygiene, training, tempering;
• prevention of bad habits;
• interpersonal communication;
• psychophysical regulation of the body;

Work and rest modes should be individual, i.e. it should correspond to the specific conditions, health condition, level of work capacity, personal interests, and inclinations of the student.

It is important to know that the mode of work and rest is directly related to the processes of adaptation. If a person’s adaptation resources are exhausted, they begin to experience discomfort, fatigue, predisposition to diseases.

Sleep habits

Sleep is a form of daily rest. For a student, 7.5-8 hours of sleep should be considered the normal amount. Hours dedicated to sleep should not be considered as a kind of spare time, which can be often used for other purposes.

Continuous lack of sleep can lead to decreased performance, fatigue, irritability. Recent studies even show the correlation between the amount of sleep and the risk of having Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.

Eating habits 

Rational nutrition is physiologically adequate consumption of food by people, taking into account their gender, age, kind of work, and other factors.

Food is based on the following bases: achieving energy balance, and the setting of the correct proportion between the main nutrients – proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals.

It is necessary to satisfy the body’s need for water.

Physical activity

The use of physical activity is one of the mandatory factors of a healthy lifestyle for students. A large number of people engaged in intellectual work have limited motor activity. This is inherent to students as well.

Therefore, the most important task arises which is to determine the optimal, as well as the minimum and maximum possible regimes of physical activity.

Sanitation, hygiene 

Hygiene is mandatory for every educated person. Hygiene of the body is important for healthy skin which performs the following functions: protection of the internal environment of the body, excretion of metabolic products from the body, heat regulation, etc.

Harmful habits prevention

Important risk factors for many diseases include the use of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs. Each of them not only systematically, but sometimes even with single-use causes serious problems in the activity of the body, due to which they are called “harmful”, and their constant use is called “bad habits”.

There is no doubt that “bad habits” have a negative impact on the health of students.

Every year, thousands of students find themselves struggling with addiction. While many are able to overcome their Substance Abuse Among College Students, others find themselves caught in a cycle of abuse that can be difficult to break free from.

If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, there are resources available to help. There are many treatment programs that can provide support and guidance throughout the recovery process. Additionally, there are online support groups and forums that can offer advice and understanding. Substance abuse is a serious issue, but it is one that you can overcome with help and support.

Interpersonal communication

One of the components of a healthy lifestyle is communication. Interpersonal communication includes the knowledge system, norms, values, and behavior patterns accepted in the society where the individual lives, which are organically implemented by him in business and emotional communication.

Psycho-physiological body regulation

Inability to adequately react to stressful situations disturbs a person’s mental state. Such disorders often lead to the development of many diseases, which also affect students.

Prevention of stress disruption is provided by regular physical activity, which has an anti-stress effect, reducing anxiety and depression.

One of the available ways to regulate the mental state is mental self-regulation through autogenic training. Breathing exercises play an important role in the system of autogenic training.

We should pay more attention to the formation of a healthy lifestyle for students. It is necessary to encourage students to preserve and strengthen their health, to promote and support a culture of healthy lifestyles among young people, to cultivate a kind of “fashion” for health, to introduce into the educational process the knowledge aimed at forming a healthy lifestyle from a very early age.

Well-organized promotion of medical and hygienic knowledge contributes to the reduction of disease and helps to bring up a healthy and physically strong generation. It should play a crucial role in the educational process to foster students’ attitudes toward health as the main human value.

*This article is based on personal suggestions and/or experiences and is for informational purposes only. This should not be used as professional advice. Please consult a professional where applicable.