- Eating a healthy, well-balanced meal can help a football fan in college regulate stress levels.
- Although many like to gamble on football, it’s incredibly important to do so responsibly.
- You can exercise, spend quality time with friends and family, and get 8 hours of sleep to reduce stress.
Football season brings a lot of joy to college students but also a lot of stress. That could be worrisome when they already have exams, student loans, jobs, and other issues to worry about. Feeling anxious about your favorite team’s big game can put more stress on your mental health than you may think. Some people can handle it well or even enjoy having this stress, as opposed to stress about their more serious issues.That said, a college student’s mental health is incredibly important, especially during football season. I’ll be providing you with some effective methods to help reduce your stress and anxiety levels below.
Eat a Healthy, Well-Balanced Diet
College student mental health not only suffers due to the workload of classes but also because of inadequate diets. No one ever raves about their on-campus dining experience, and that’s not simply because the food is sometimes questionable. Oftentimes, the food may be downright unhealthy, and all that grease does wonders for increasing your stress. For college students, healthy eating can seem like the last priority on their minds. Common barriers to healthy eating were time constraints, unhealthy snacking, convenience of high-calorie food, stress, high prices of healthy food, and easy access to junk food. And those may be the lucky students. A reported one-third of students on college campuses are food insecure and can’t afford regular meals, let alone healthy ones. So, if you can afford a healthy, well-balanced diet, it’s a great way to boost your mental health. Minimizing your intake of processed foods and drinks high in sugar are two ways to automatically make your diet more well-balanced. Consuming the recommended daily amount of fruits and vegetables for your age and sex is also important for your overall health, including stress management. If you don’t eat enough fruits and veggies, you run the risk of running low on healthy vitamins and nutrients that help manage your mood and keep yourself healthy during football season.
Gaming and Betting on Football
For many college students, enjoying the football season extends far beyond simply watching the games. A lot of them will play fantasy football, gamble real money on NFL or college games, play Madden with their friends or competitively, and more.These can all be helpful distractions to college students. Instead of worrying about their bigger problems, like GPA, scholarships, or meeting assignment deadlines, they relax by diving further into their love for football. However, if just watching football can add a little amount of stress, these practices add even more. Again, many people enjoy it but might not realize that adding stress onto their already full load can worsen things. Instead of relaxing like they should when they aren’t in class, they can shift their stress from school to football. That means that basically from the moment they wake up until they go to sleep, they have a significant amount of stress. Over the course of the football season, that could put a lot of pressure on college student’s mental health. If they are old enough to gamble, that could also create issues. Mental stress can be taxing enough, but adding to financial problems makes it even worse.Sure, you can gamble as a college student if you are of legal age if you enjoy it. Just be sure to gamble responsibly so it doesn’t put more pressure on your mental health.
Train Like a Football Player
Of course, the average college student is not imagining having to make it to their 8 a.m. classes after a high-intensity, early-morning training session, and that’s fair. While gaming and betting on football may get the heart racing, it doesn’t do a lot for your cardiovascular health — or your stress. According to a study published by Frontiers in Psychology, university students who engage in at least two days of regular aerobic activity significantly reduced overall stress and decreased self-reported depression. This study shows you don’t have to train like a football player to improve your overall mental health and reduce stress. Aerobic activity includes walking or jogging, cycling, and playing a sport, such as a friendly game of football with your classmates. One of the best advantages of college life includes all the opportunities to be social and active. By joining a club or organization that focuses on physical fitness, such as an on-campus recreational league, you can improve your social relationships and decrease your stress at the same time.
Purchase a Sun Lamp
While football season is any college student’s “most wonderful time of the year,” it also entails the coming of the fall and winter months. While those lucky enough to live far enough Southwest not to feel the winter chill, those not so fortunate see a dramatic increase in sunlight and warm weather, leading to a major deficiency in an important vitamin: Vitamin D. A deficiency in vitamin D can lead to a greater increase in many different symptoms and syndromes, such as seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Symptoms of SAD include feeling hopeless, increased depression, stress, and more. This is where a sun lamp comes in. Sun lamps emit ultraviolet rays, which mimic the rays of sunlight and can boost both your vitamin D levels and mood. They have been proven to treat conditions caused by a deficiency of sunlight, such as SAD. You can purchase a small sun lamp for your desk or buy a standing one to put beside your bed. It has been reported that using the sun lamp in the morning is the most effective way to boost your mood and alleviate stress. However, you should be aware of the risks involved. Just like sitting outside in the sunlight increases your risk of skin cancer, so does sitting under a sun lamp. Because a sun lamp uses UV rays to simulate sunlight, it also carries the same risk, which is something to consider when deciding whether or not to make the purchase.
Spend More Quality Time with Family and Friends
It can be easy to consider your university life separate from your family life, especially if you live on campus. For many college students, living on campus is their first taste of freedom, and it is easy to focus all your energy on class and social events on campus. While focusing on school and enjoying campus life is certainly not a bad thing, spending time with your family and close friends, whom you may have left at home, is one way to reduce stress and improve your mood. According to Piedmont Healthcare, spending quality time with your family can reduce stress, improve overall well-being, improve cardiovascular health through reducing stress, and even lengthen your life. Seeking comfort in your family and friends may reduce your impulse to cope with stress through negative actions such as drinking, smoking, and other reckless behavior, which can ultimately increase stress and wreak havoc on your psychological well being. Finding time to enjoy your new campus life while also visiting or calling home for quality time with family is one way to improve overall college student mental health.
Get Adequate Rest and Sleep
Staying up late to finish a term paper, watching the final quarter of the Monday night game, or finding a party somewhere on campus is typical of an average college student. However, giving yourself time to rest and get eight hours of sleep each night is extremely important to regulate your mood and stress hormones. Lack of sleep can lead to higher levels of anxiety, depression, mood swings, and frustration. Compounding the already stress-filled life of a college student with sleep deprivation will exacerbate these symptoms.
Some easy ways to improve your quality of sleep include going to bed and waking up at the same time every day, keeping your room quiet and dark, and removing electronics from the room. Blue light from cellphones and computers can interrupt the secretion of melatonin, the hormone that helps with the timing of your circadian rhythm and sleep. College student mental health is not always about taking action; sometimes, it can be about resting.
Practice Creativity
According to multiple studies, getting creative can help you destress and lower cortisol levels. Increased cortisol levels can lead to stress, weight gain, headaches, and more. Much like physical exercise, focusing on something creative, such as art, forces your mind to focus on the task before it and elevates any stress lingering in the back of your mind. Art isn’t the only creative endeavor you can partake in to help reduce stress. Other creative activities include dance, playing a musical instrument, sitting down and cranking out a creative piece of writing, and more. By delving into a creative activity, you reduce your stress and have something at the end to show for it. Overall, there are numerous ways to combat stress for college students. These can be applied to anyone throughout the year, but with the coming highs and lows of college and professional football seasons, it may pay to tap into them sooner rather than later.
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