Balancing school and staying mentally and physically healthy can be hard.
Many students are working or even just going through tough times.
In 2015, the University of Georgetown did a study and it revealed that 70 percent of college students work while enrolled.
“It’s hard to stay balanced for students and faculty…but also, you know, what we think about is that there are more pieces to a person, even to those couple of areas in addition to the mental and physical. There is a variety of dimensions of wellness,” Tiffany Mathews, coordinator of wellness education at the Center for Health and Wellness said.
Colton McCracken / Equinox Staff
There are eight parts of the wellness wheel that all contribute to a person.
The wheel includes the emotional, spiritual, social, physical, occupational, intellectual, financial and environmental parts.
“All these different dimensions of wellness are the backbone on what we should be focusing on when we are thinking about taking care of ourselves,” said Mathews.
Mathews continued, “There isn’t going to be any individual who is able to have complete balance of all these different dimensions at one time.”
She explained that everyone is different when it comes to balancing themselves out.
“They’re not just a student and they are not just an emotional human being or just a physical being. They are also a spiritual being, environmental and financial being. There are all these different pieces,” Mathews said.
KSC senior Will Civitillo explained how he tries his best to go to the gym while getting his school work done.
“I usually go to the gym in the morning so I can get my school work done at night,” Civitillo said.
His nutrition major helps him keep on track.
“The gym correlates with it: healthy eating, going to the gym and school work,” Civitillo said.
Another KSC student, Joseph Dicanio, explained it’s hard to stay balanced because of needing to do homework and wanting to go to the gym.
“It’s hard to balance school and the gym because sometimes you have too much homework but still want to go to the gym and then you slack on your schoolwork because of it,” Dicanio said.
Here at KSC, there’s an assessment done through the American Health Association and its called the National College Health Assessment.
It’s a survey to assist college health providers or health educators in collecting data about students’ habits, behaviors and students’ perceptions on health topics.
According to the assessment, stress and sleep are the top two things that affect the way students perform.
Based on the results they get, the Wellness Center creates programs to help students out.
There’s Wellness Coaching, Wellness Promotion Presentation Requests, Wellness Chats and Peer Education.
The Wellness Coaching provides a variety of help.
Through this program, students can get help with nutrition, tobacco usage, sexual health and sleep.
All of this information can be found online under their page at KSC.
There are also events held here at KSC to promote and help students out.
All the events can be found on their online page through KSC at Campus Wellness Events.
Adriana Sanchez can be contacted at asanchez@kscequinox.com
