4 Signs Students May Be Neglecting Self-Care

By Julia Dunn on May 22, 2016

On fast-paced college schedules, students easily forget to take care of themselves. This lack of self-care can manifest in different areas of your life, and can significantly take away from your happiness.

Here are four signals that may indicate that more self-care is needed in your busy college student life.

1. You don’t remember the last time you weren’t feeling tired.

“You can sleep when you’re dead,” right?

Nope.

If you feel chronically exhausted and have accepted that you’ll forever be too tired for life, it looks like you’re probably sleeping too little. Sleep is so essential to success in college, as much as students try to push it aside.

If you can manage to get at least seven to eight hours of sleep a night, you’ll see a noticeable improvement in your concentration, mood, mental clarity and cheerfulness. When you’re going through the school day sleepily, you aren’t totally processing what you see and hear. This impacts performance in classes and enjoyment of activities you partake in at your university.

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Self-care can be as simple as getting enough sleep — it’s a basic human function and a critical matter to prioritize (even for extremely busy/involved students). On days in which you may need to wake up especially early, try to schedule a nap or two midday or in the evening to power you through the rest of your classes or assignments.

2. You’ve normalized being “too busy to eat.”

It can be easy to “forget” to eat when your days consist of back-to-back classes, meetings, and work shifts. However not eating isn’t going to do you any favors. You miss out on essential nutrients and energy when you skip eating. Moreover, students who rush from place to place throughout the day need to eat even more than students who do not, since they are burning calories simply from transporting themselves around campus.

Furthermore, “eating” doesn’t mean grabbing the snack-size bag of Cheez-Its from the Express Store or stockpiling doughnuts from the dining hall because they’re the most portable food option you can find. These foods aren’t food — they are food-like substances that will not fill you up and will not fuel you at all.

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Even if it means dropping involvement in one organization or two, do what you need to do to make time in the day for eating. You can’t do anything you do without nutritious food supporting your body systems. As for snacks you can take on the road, grab a banana or an orange when you need to eat while walking (not recommended either).

Avoid relying on processed foods when you’re in a pinch and your stomach starts to growl at 4:00 — always look for some type of fresh fruit or wholesome snack (trail mix, for instance) when browsing the aisles of the campus convenience store five minutes before class #3. Don’t let yourself crash by 3 p.m. because you chose a churro over a tangerine for your morning snack. Nobody should ever neglect taking time to eat for the reason that they’ve got a busy schedule!

3. Nowhere on your weekly calendar is there an empty space to relax.

It’s rare that students who work nonstop are actually okay with it. If you haven’t given yourself any downtime in awhile, or you can’t even remember the last time you hung out with a friend (a midterm study group session doesn’t count here), make an effort to plan something fun this weekend, for instance.

Image via Flickr

Even if it’s just an hour-long coffee date, an outing with a friend, a brief walk somewhere, or scrolling through Tumblr while laying lazily on your bed, a little relaxation time can go a long way. Students deserve to have fun while working on their degree or maintaining a job — it’s healthy to schedule time to mess around.

4. Your relationships with others haven’t been that great lately.

If your relationships with best friends, family, or your significant other haven’t been going well lately, it may have a connection to your self-care or lack thereof. People you normally see or talk to frequently will likely let you know if they are worried you’re not taking good care of yourself, and if you normally spend a lot of time with those close to you, it’s a valid concern to assess why you may not be seeing them much anymore.

Becoming too bogged down with school or work can impact your relationships quite easily, and you wouldn’t want to damage those ties to the people you love.

Image via Flickr.com

These are only four scenarios that tell you information about how strong your self-care game is, but there may be other signs as well. Feeling stressed out for any reason is likely the easiest way to tell that some extra self-love is in order.

Note that if you are experiencing more extreme cases of stress or you don’t know how to implement self-care practices into your own life, your university’s Counseling and Psychological Services department is there to help.

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