A big reason for your mental health declining is due to stress of school or personal life reasons. It could be hard for you to have a balance between the two especially when you have a million things going on. You need a good mentality to get through school and life because that can lead to the dangers of other things that you shouldn’t have to get to. This is why studies recommend exercising, exercising can lead to a better path to your mental health that you will not only exceed your health but your school lives too. In this blog, you will be informed of different ways exercise will help you and your mental health whether you choose to want to better your health is up to you.

Step One - Your Mood

As a student with bad mental health, you aren’t always in a good mood because of all the negativity and stress running through your head.

Student Nurse Ashley Puga says, “Exercising has helped me a lot with my mood with how I start the day. With a good workout before I go to bed or when I start to do homework. I always feel more good and energized to get stuff done. I’m able to focus on my studies which helps me get good grades.” As a student herself, Puga has experienced how exercising changed her mood that it escalated into her school life and made her become a better student. Puga also says, “One big advice I give is to make sure you’re patient with yourself when exercising. The goal is to feel better after you're done so everything in your life goes as great as you feel.”

Step Two - Your Motivation & Goals

Bolingbrook Trainer Tonia Ward says, “The one thing that exercising did for me, was teach me how to keep goals and stay motivated. I would have never thought that exercising was going to be the one thing that helped my mental health or made me see that I wanted to be a physical trainer. As I got deeper and deeper into the world of exercising, I realized how setting goals for myself was as important”.

It’s probably really hard to set goals for yourself and stay motivated to those goals especially with you already being unmotivated. Exercising is a good way to make sure you stay motivated with your goals because when working out, you’ll notice little by little how much you want to improve in the things you’re doing with your routine. A good goal setting tool is to  make sure you are setting goals that are comfortable to your liking. If you aren’t comfortable then you won’t succeed. That’s one big thing Ward brings up is comfortability. If you aren’t comfortable with what you’re doing or the goals you set, then things won’t change. You can keep those goals written down in the notes app of your phone, a notebook, a  journal, or a planner. Keep little notes of what you could work on or what made you feel good about that work out that day. Try working out with a friend, working out with a friend can not only boosts your mentality, it also puts you in a position where you are supported and that gives you more motivation to work out everyday. You’ll see your mentality improving because you can see that you’re making improvements everyday and that is making you feel good.

Feeling good is important, so remember not to be so hard on yourself especially on days where you don’t reach your goals or decide you don’t want to continue working out that day. As long as you believe in yourself and the goals you made for yourself, just know that your goals will never disappear. The other good thing about that is even though you don’t achieve one thing today, you can alway achieve it the next day. You're in competition with nobody but yourself, this will mentally help you  because you have a hard time remembering that bad moments don’t mean you had a bad day and tomorrow is a new day and you can start again.

Step Three - Your School/Life Balance

Professional Trainer in Bolingbrook Nicole Ringlstetter says, “One big thing I’ve learned in my fitness journey is knowing the balance between exercising and my mental health. Before I even knew it I took things too far and not creating balance which led to me and my mental health declining.”

As humans, we all need a balance in our lives with everything in life. Even as students, we need that same balance with our school work, activities, etc. Reading this you’re probably wondering as to why this is the last step and why it’s mentioned at the end. Well with staying in a good mood, setting goals, and staying motivated, you need balance. When you hear the word balance, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Balance might look different for everyone, especially when it comes to balancing everything in your life at once, but you must also learn how much of it is okay to balance at the same time. When exercising you need to understand when enough is enough. The reason you started doing this in the first place is to improve your mental health. So if you’re going overboard, that is just going to mess up the whole point in why you started this journey in the first place. When thinking about your mood, don’t exercise when you’re in a bad mood or aren’t up to it because at the end of the day it’s going to mess with your mood even more.

If you don't balance between your mood and exercise then good results won’t come out. In the end you’ll just be destroying your mental health even more. When setting goals for the day for your work out don’t over do it. What that means is do what makes you comfortable in that moment and don’t try to do more than you can that day. If you don’t balance your mental health between setting your goals and staying motivated then it’s just going to mess you up. How? You being angry at yourself that you didn’t reach that goal or you telling yourself that you could’ve done more is just going to mess with your motivation to even continue. Knowing balance will also help you because you will have to balance your exercise routine into your school life. You’re going to want time for both so you’re not being hard on yourself if you didn’t get your school work done that day or you didn’t get a workout in either. You have to remember that you only know how you’re feeling and you can only set your goals to go along with how much you can handle. At the end of the day you have to remember you’re only human, learning balance will help with your mental health because you’ll learn how to balance your emotions with what’s going on with your life. See? It really comes into place when you’re patient with the process.

Some Tips & Advice:

• Remember everyone’s journey’s are different when it comes to exercising. Don’t be upset when your journey doesn’t look like someone else’s or if exercising is not for you. 

• Some things might work for you that might work for others and things that work for others might not work for you. That’s how the journey works. 

• Everything comes with time and that means the improvement of your mental health. 

• Remember to be nice and patient with yourself, these steps aren’t the only steps to a good health and mental journey but every story starts somewhere and yours can start with these three if you just put your mind up to it.

I hope these steps will help you on your journey to not only a great start to fitness but also a better mentality. If you do choose to start this, remember you’re not alone and you got this! I believe you!

Stress is the main concern when it comes to you going to college because of all the responsibility that’s been put on your guys' laps. This affects your academic grades, the activities that you may participate in, and finally the relationships you have with yourself and other people around you. This might stress you out because you want to improve yourself but your mental health won’t let you. There has been some research done on different breathing exercises you can do to start. Refer to the picture on the right for some tips. Using exercising to enhance your mood improvement is a good first step. Ally Wolloch, a writer and college student at Lewis University, says, “A regularly scheduled exercise routine can increase self-confidence, improve your mood and lower symptoms of mild depression and anxiety. Exercise can also help your body fight off stress by imitating the physical effects of stress such as the fight or flight response”. Now that you have started adding exercise into your routine, that good feeling boost is starting to go through your body, making you feel more motivated and happy and less upset and stressed out .This will improve a your mental state because you're seeing that an improvement of your mood is helping you to do better in your classes, activities, and with the relationships with yourself and the people around you. This will lead to less stress later in the future when you start to see improvement.

“Exercise not only changes in your body, it changes your mind, your attitude, and your mood.”