“Health is Wealth”, that’s for all...and for a student wealth is his studies. So you can see how health matters for studies. For good learning, good lifestyle, good career and overall good living, good health is the most important factor for students. By health I mean both the physical and mental health of the student.
For students, both mental fitness and physical fitness are important for his performances in studies and academic career. In this article, I am trying to draw a sketch on the ways for a student to keep holistically healthy both in mind and in body. Every student does not enjoy the same time engagements, same workload, same responsibilities, and same surrounding conditions, but one thing is absolutely and essentially common...that is they all are students. And being common as the identity of students, the necessity of health and its proper maintenance is also essential for optimum learning and academic performances by every student.
Mental Health or Physical Health?
The comparison is pretty vain as both are different though interlinked, and both are no less important. For students, as it seems, mental health is a bit more important and critical than physical health, that should not anyhow demean or devalue the importance or necessity of good physical health.
Studies are mainly pursuit of mind, done with our mind and also for the development of mind to make us more intelligent, mature and responsible people. So mind is the equipment for studies or education, that must be maintained at the best possible form and quality as long as possible even beyond the student life.
Mental health being closely interlinked with physical health, there is no scope to think about the one without thinking about the other. In the question of fitness also they both work in very intricate and integrated ways, so to keep one good we have to keep the other also good.
I have seen many students, who are aspiring high and ambitious with their academic career, but too much neglecting their health, sometimes both the physical and mental. But only one dimensional development in school studies and nothing else in life does not make a good and successful human being in the long run.
So, with studies and career development, all students must be enough careful and motivated to keep the other domains of his life not only just in a “going on” mode or “maintenance mode”. Actually “growth mode” is the most important option for the student life. So that trend should be applicable for the mental as well as physical health both.
Taking care of physical health is a bit easier than mental health, especially in current times. Though physical health is very much dependent on mental health (and vice versa), still, there are other sides of it as well like nutrition, rest and sleep, exercise and so on. And good physical health is always a booster for mental health. In this article I will discuss more on the physical sides of our physical health and less on the mental sides. There are some other articles where I discussed the mental health issues of students like student anxiety and depression, etc.
The Most Important Factors of Health for Students
There are a huge number of factors that can affect our health, both physical and mental. Not all are possible to discuss in a typical article of a blog. So at first I am trying to pick the most important of the factors. You can consider this as the “first list” among the many factors. I have plans to give another one in the name of the “second list” as well in this article. But first let us deal with the first list and see how much we can work towards the direction of this first list.
The first one in the first list is Sleep. Yes nutrition could have been in the first place also, but after all I have the option to choose only one for the first place. So after quite a bit of tug-of-war between sleep and nutrition, for some reasons I chose sleep for the first place. Let us see why.
Sleep
Sleep is essential for anyone. But for the students, it’s sometimes perhaps even more important than the studies itself. Ok, many will be feeling surprised but that’s what is the truth.
When you are a student your hours of studies are obviously very important. But it is not the hour when actually our brain learns and grows. There is a very popular concept among sportsmen, specially bodybuilders and weight lifters as well martial artists. They say that the actual development does not take place in the gym. It is sleep when the body and mind grows according to what they worked on in the gym that day.
The same applies good with the students as well. Whatever they learn for the whole day in their classes and study sessions, all are just stored in the temporary or short-term memory. This short-term memory can be erased or just vanish at any point of time. But until and unless we can put whatever information we got into our long term memory, there will be actually no learning, no information processing and knowledge synthesis and no experience creation.
And this is what exactly sleep does in the first place. It takes the data from the short-term memory and writes it to your long-term or permanent memory. Maybe some or much of the data will be lost already by the completion of the process, but whatever remains goes into your long-term memory for future recall and use.
This is just one very important function of sleep for a student. There are a lot more, from mental growth and wellbeing to physical growth and wellbeing.
As a student, you are supposed to need at least 7 to 8 hours of sleep everyday. I would like to add one more point in this regard, that is only quantity of sleep is not the thing that you must keep watch on. The quality of the sleep is also what matters a lot. Good quality or deep sleep is much better and more effective than a very brittle and intermittent sleep.
Sleep is a very natural thing to us just like hunger etc. as thus is supposed to come most naturally every night. But in this world full of complexities and unhealthy lifestyles, sometimes the most natural thing to become the most scarce one. And sleep can become scarce more easily than many other natural things.
Here I share some tips that can help you to have a little better sleep. But if you think that you are really having less sleep every night and that continues even after following these tips then you should take it seriously and try to treat it to cure as soon as possible. Even you may need to consult your doctor for the same.
Beside sleep, these factors are also very essential for your holistic good health and good academic performance. These factors or rules are not too easy to follow, usually, but if they can be followed then there will be obvious benefits in health and performance. Let us go into those tips and see how they will affect your sleep and holistic wellbeing.
Stress and anxiety are perhaps the greatest enemy of sleep. Where there is stress and anxiety then there is the highest probability of sleep deprivation which may amount upto the level of insomnia, a medical condition of chronic sleep disorder.
Depression is also a great source of problems related to sleep. But depression acts differently than stress and anxiety. Sometimes you can even find people sleeping much more than necessarily in the state of depression. In infrequent and mild depression sleeping more for a few days can do good and reduce the level of depression. But if the depression becomes long-term or chronic, then only a little more sleep cannot solve the problem. Then one may need to be medically treated for the same.
Dehydration can lead to sleep disturbance. I am putting this factor at the second point because our country is basically a hot country with maximum days of summer. So intake of the right quantity of water or proper hydration is one of the most critical issues for our holistic wellbeing, including good sleep.
In summer one adult with average or normal health should ideally try to drink more than 4 litres of water, and can drink around 3 litres in winter. A little more will do no harm but a little less can leave one dehydrated and that also without the knowledge of it (it is usually not needed and also not advised to drink more than 6 litres per day). Actually our body usually does not generate any major symptoms for mild dehydration. But still even mild dehydration can also create some adverse effects when that dehydration will continue for days and weeks.
Electronic screens are comparatively a new addition to our daily lifestyle. But within this short time it has created more different types of problems and lifestyle defects than perhaps anything else in our life. I am not going here into different mental and psychological issues created due to the advent of telecommunication and computing electronics and devices, you can find discussions on that in other articles in the blog.
But when the question is about sleep, then electronic screens disturb that in more than one different way. Some can be more direct and more apparent than some other. The most direct is perhaps the stress generated on our eyes from the electronic screens to the anxiety disorder or distraction disorder that can generate from the different varieties of electronic devices of our daily living.
From television to computer and smartphone, they come equipped with a glaring electronic display screen that can affect the eye and interfere with the natural sleep. So it is often recommended to turn off or turn away from all the electronic screens at least one to two hours before going to bed at night.
We all eat our daily food and nothing new or special in it. But still we all are not with the same health. Well, there can be many conditions associated with that difference of health from person to person. The reasons can be related to miscellaneous lifestyle issues, sometimes can be some disease or medical issues or it can be genetic influence also.
But the most commonly occurring difference lies in the food habit and many health issues can be traced back to that fooding habit and lifestyle. Even in the cases of viral attacks like Corona or Dengue also, the difference of food habits and associated health internals matter a lot. Rest, stress and other issues also count as usual. That’s why we see that one person gets infected so seriously whereas another person, although exposed to almost the same environment, is better immune than the one who is infected. Even the levels of infection and resultant of the infection also varies case to case depending on the respective inner health conditions and immunity factors.
Only eating is not sufficient. And these days we are more inclined to fast food and junk food. So the overall situation of nutrition is very grim. There are two types or categories of cases. One that cannot afford nutritious food like some poor families in the urban sector and many below poverty level families in various rural sectors. They suffer from malnutrition due to poverty. The other category are those who can afford good and nutritious foods and also spend a lot of money for food everyday, but their choice of food is so bad that they also remain malnutritioned.
The above two pictures are giving us some idea on the severity of malnutrition in our country and also globally. But according to me, these statistics are not sufficient or determinative but just indicative in nature. Actually the normal way to measure the malnutrition is the bodyweight of the concerned student or person. And then it is monitored that if that bodyweight is the desired or right one according to the height-weight-age chart then that person or student is not malnutritioned. Only if the person is underweight then that person’s head is counted within the malnutritioned group.
But this way of determining nutrition is not exactly accurate or beyond flaws. The bodyweight is not the exact marker or index of nutrition. I know plenty of people with the right bodyweight or in many cases even a little bit more than the right level, but still they are severely malnutritioned. Actually bodyweight depends on many factors, like the lean-mass weight, fat or obese weight, water-content weight and bone-mass. So bodyweight cannot be the sole maker of the true malnutrition level of a person or child or student. But it can give us some hint or indication that the person is getting food or not and is starving.
So even the malnutrition count of our country is already quite high, but over that the true count of malnutrition is bound to be far higher than what appears in the above statistics.
Malnutrition can be of many types, and all malnutrition does not have the same symptoms. Like just protein-malnutrition and carb-malnutrition or carbohydrate-malnutrition exhibits totally different symptoms and features. And there are more food components beside the protein and carbs.
Protein is very important for a student or any growing person. Let it be the growth of the body or the growth of the brain, protein plays a very important role. So every student should ideally keep watch on his or her protein intake.
Too high of protein can create many side-effects and health issues whereas less of protein can hinder or arrest the physical and mental growth. Students are in the stage of regular and continuous growth. And getting protein from vegetarian resources and milk food resources are always better and safer than their animal flesh counterparts. You can consult your doctor or dietician for a more comprehensive nutrition and food chart.
Malnutrition not only adversely affects your health but also directly and indirectly affects your natural sleep. The sleep is a complex physiological process and any type of malnutrition can hinder or disturb that process and thus one can get deprived from good quality sleep.
Moreover, other physiological and psychological conditions which can develop due to malnutrition can generate sleep disturbance or deprivation. Suppose you have got an immunity deficiency due to malnutrition which resulted in a viral infection with fever and headache. Most usually and naturally your illness will affect your sleep and you may even need to take painkillers and sleeping pills for getting some good sleep.
As I already said above, that malnutrition can be of many types and body weight is never a sole and true marker or index of actual malnutrition. And I say the same thing when it comes in respect of micronutrients.
Micronutrients are such elements or compounds which are essential for our body to carry out various biological processes. They are called “micro” because they are required in a very minute quantity, often in the quantity unit of milligrams and micrograms. But that does not anyhow undermine the validity or essentiality of them.
Micronutrient malnutrition is very common among us and it is also very hard to detect or determine. Just for example, if a person suffers from Vitamin A deficiency then neither body weight nor any other gross functions will reflect the same until and unless the condition becomes very severe. But due to that deficiency that person can suffer from many problems like the one with the eyesight.
For a student, his eyesight is very crucial but in the deficiency of vitamin A his eyesight may suffer and can also get damaged. Similarly deficiency of B vitamins can disturb or impair healthy functions of the nerve and brain and hinder the process of learning and academic development. You must have got an idea on how important and crucial the brain and nerves are for the students.
Similarly, there are a lot of vitamins and minerals that fall under the category of our micronutrients and most of us are also deficient in them but unknowingly. But students need to take special care for this as it is their whole life and career is at stake and anything that can anyhow hinder or damage their education or academic growth has to be anyhow prevented and protected from.
Also, most of the micronutrients participate in physiological and psychological processes which are directly or indirectly associated with your sleep process. Hence deficiency of them may trigger such conditions when you really need to worry about your sleep.
Natural sources of vitamins are always a better choice. But usually our daily choice of foods does not have that richness of nutrition. So often we need supplements for maintaining the right balance of micronutrients. A good regular multivitamin and multimineral supplement is an intelligent choice in such a situation (a regular multivitamin and multimineral supplement is the one which contains RDA or Recommended Dietary Allowance of the vitamins and minerals for daily intake).
You can consult your doctor or dietician for more information on vitamins and minerals. You can also take their help to figure out the right RDA multivitamin and multimineral supplementation for you.
This is another very important question for youngsters and students. The right drink will give you the best functioning of the body and the brain, but the wrong one will destroy them.
First I will start with the tea and coffee which are usually very common to academic people. But the reality is something different. We need to know and realise that tannin and caffeine are more like medicines for us rather than regular food or drink. They are useful and important when they will be used as a medicine to alleviate or palliate certain medical conditions.
Once in a while conditions like headache, weakness, drowsiness etc. are best treated by application of either tannin (in tea) or caffeine (in coffee). But if these symptoms become a daily occurrence for you then you have to think beyond tea and coffee and find out the exact reason for those symptoms. Reasons can be physiological or psychological and you have to target the right root to get the right result. Take the help of your doctor if you feel necessary.
When thirsty many of us choose some kind of carbonated drinks and nothing can be more harmful than that. At the end of the day, every such drink makes you internally more dehydrated and acidic which can be the root reason for many different diseases in the long run.
Many of us like to take a high energy drink whenever we feel weak or out of energy. Again nothing can be worse than this. It actually destroys your endocrine balance and can cause insulin or thyroid malfunction in the long run. High energy drinks are packed with “bad calories” or “empty calories” like glucose and/or sucrose (common sugar). They also give you a faulty metabolic programming which can become very harmful and a destroyer of your immune system which will welcome many critical diseases.
Glucose or sucrose are at the lowest level of digestible carbohydrate and hence called “most simple carbohydrates”. Simple carbohydrates are very effective and useful during the energy crisis of your body and brain, but consumption of simple carbohydrates without a suitable amount of complex carbohydrates together with it increases your long-term health risks into many degrees. So always go for a drink that gives a happy and healthy blend of simple carbohydrates and complex carbohydrates to protect your physiology from endocrine and metabolic damages.
Choose drinks which are less synthetic and more natural in category. Like the cold drinks are synthetic beverages whereas the coconut water, fruit juice etc. are from more natural sources. And with this I would also like to add that the whole fruits are even more beneficial than the fruit juice because the pulp contains many supportive nutrients, complex carbohydrates, fibres etc. that can help the proper absorption and utilization of the carbohydrates, nutrients and vitamins present in the liquid juice.
Avoid alcohol and alcoholic beverages. Alcohol is a globally widespread popular drink, mostly as recreational and sometimes also as an energy and concentration booster. It is true that alcohol is a very powerful source of calorie and heat in our body. At severe cold temperatures alcohol can easily internally heat up the body and protect it from damages. Also alcohol has some sedative and temporary antidepressant properties which can provide immediate mood enhancement and concentration enhancement. In some medical situations also alcohol works magic to bring fast relief and recovery. In many cases it can increase the blood circulation and release nervous tensions to give relief to muscular pain and other inhibitory conditions.
All the above applications of alcohol and there are more to be added in the list, it is perhaps getting quite clear that I want to say that alcohol is a medicine and not a recreational or regular drink. It is better if we treat alcohol as medicine, and not consume it for any kind of recreational or other kind of purposes. Alcohol, when it is a part of our regular or frequent occasional drink, does more harm than benefit. Even, in case of depression and anxiety, it does give temporary palliative relief, but itself creates a more chronic depressive effect in the long run.
It also affects different organs very negatively, like the brain and central nervous system, liver, kidney and it also can affect the overall digestive and immune response system within us. So it is always better to treat alcohol as a medicine and not abuse it for any purpose other than clinical psychology or clinical physiology.
I said before that sleep is a very important thing for a student. And every student should try to sleep early and sleep more everyday. Going to bed much before midnight 12 AM is one of the best habits a student can grow in his academic life. You can try to go to bed on or before 10 PM. Get plenty of sleep, at least 7 to 8 hours everyday and with that also try to rise early.
In this world of numerous complexities and problems, we usually develop habits of sleeping late. But this habit is actually never good for your health, both psychological and physiological. Once you are on a habit it can become very hard for you to change or re-program your sleeping habits. If so, then you can slowly try to modify and re-establish your sleeping cycle. But don’t do anything with your sleep at a very short span of time, because real changes in sleep patterns are quite a long-term and time taking process with the need of lots of perseverance.
Sleeping early and sleeping plenty is a good habit that everyone should try to adopt and follow in life. The more natural one can keep his life, the less there will be different medical situations in his life and also higher will be the probabilities of better performance in life in all respect. So, just like all other good habits we all should try to keep or maintain this fundamental good habit of natural sleeping patterns in our life. And this good habit will also help us to carry on with the natural sleeping patterns throughout our life.
Again, like all the other points above, this point is very very important for not only getting good sleep but also for being a good student and also for being a better professional and overall for being a balanced and properly lifestyled human.
Nowadays, there comes many kinds of social propagandas that socialization is a very healthy kind of human interaction but actually it is just the opposite. You can easily find that most of the social leaders and stars are actually sleepless and highly depressed people in their personal life. From politicians to film stars, from popular sports stars to renowned social workers, all lead very unnatural and unhealthy lifestyles in their own life and thus usually become a warehouse of diseases.
Unusual level of social interactions inevitably generates undesired levels of mental stress and physical strains which our mind and body is not naturally equipped to handle. Hence negative and adverse reactions are most obvious and natural. And many people misunderstand or misinterpret the difference between the two terms like socialization and social responsibilities.
Socialization and social responsibilities are not anyhow similar in meaning and usually they act against each other as we see all around. That’s why in this age of extreme socialization both electronically and physically, we find societies without human faculties like love, sympathy, empathy, etc. Even the faculties like human intelligence, knowledge and understanding also are on a decreasing graph. The only thing is ever increasing is misuse of technology.
So for a better and balanced lifestyle we need to understand the difference between socialization and social responsibility. We should try to limit our socialization and optimize our social responsibilities.