Education

How Much Time Do Students Devote to Self-Care?

How Much Time Do Students Devote to Self-Care?

These days most students are focused on achieving academic success. They learn hard to get top grades. Consequently, learners have tight schedules because they need to attend lectures and complete their assignments. Nevertheless, most students also work part-time or full-time and have additional activities. Since many undergraduates live in a rush and eat noodles because of a lack of time to cook, healthcare specialists get concerned about the amount of time they devote to self-care. Unfortunately, there is a lack of information on this topic, so let’s dive deeper and review the problem from all sides in the post below.

Importance of Self-Care for Undergraduates

Let’s explore why it is important to spend a lot of time on self-care. The term defines a set of actions that people do to treat themselves. Self-care implies actions that improve both physical and mental health. In a nutshell, it is an umbrella term that gathers all types of activities that improve well-being. For example, people who devote themselves to self-care pay close attention to their nutrition, mental state, self-awareness, healthy sleep, or physical exercises. 

Every person has a particular set of activities that help them stay in good mental and physical condition. Self-care helps avoid illnesses in the long run. When people underestimate the importance of self-care to achieve their goals, they may experience many different issues. Burnout is one of the most widespread problems that those who work at a high-pace experience. Also, people may have headaches, which may develop in increased irritation and depression. In exceptional cases, lack of self-care may result in autoimmune disease, muscle tension, allergies, or acne. If you want to avoid any physical or mental problems, it’s recommended to devote yourself to self-care. However, how many students follow this recommendation?

Problems Students Experience

The major problem is that many students don’t consider the importance of self-care to keep their bodies and mental states in good condition. The lack of knowledge forces a lot of undergraduates to underestimate the importance of allocating time for actions that help avoid illnesses in the long run. Nevertheless, there are also a lot of other problems that put students at risk. Because of these problems, they merely don’t focus on self-care, significantly reducing the number of learners devoted to self-care.

Time-Management and Prioritization

Indeed, many undergraduates can hardly maintain a life-study balance because they are bothered by a large number of tasks to cope with. First, they need to learn by heart to grasp all the materials. Then, after lectures, they need to explore many different literature pieces to get additional knowledge and review their skills. Nevertheless, one of the biggest challenges for learners is the need to do homework. Since the quality of papers they submit affects their GPAs, they spend a lot of time researching, writing, and polishing their papers to get the top grades. Sometimes, they even reach the proessay website, a paper writing service, to get help with their assignments. Even though they invest all their spare time into creating top-grade papers, they don’t succeed in finishing them on time.

 

Besides, learners need to take care of themselves, prepare food, opt for groceries, and work part-time. The need to tackle many challenges requires learners to live quickly. Unfortunately, most of them don’t know how to prioritize properly, so they compromise on rest, nutrition, and even a healthy night’s sleep to complete all their tasks on time. All the challenges make them feel nervous. Consequently, roughly 35% of undergraduates report that they experience stress and anxiety constantly. In addition, 20% of students have sleep difficulties and depression. It’s a frightening statistic that showcases the irresponsible attitude of learners to self-care. 

Digital Addictions and Lack of Sleep

A lot of undergraduates can’t live without their devices. They spend most of their time staring at the screens of their smartphones and computers. Indeed, they invest a lot of time into achieving great academic results. However, digital devices are major time wasters. According to Statista, roughly 60% of learners spend from 1 to 4 hours a day using their mobile phones. 15% of students use their devices for more than 4 hours a day. The time wasted by exploring new trends on social media could be possibly invested into self-care. However, a lot of learners tend to prioritize entertainment. It can be considered as a sort of self-care. When students spend their idle time watching videos or playing video games, they may relax by being distracted from burdening tasks. Unfortunately, many learners develop digital addictions that force them to compromise on healthy night sleep and academic achievements. 

Summing up, there are a lot of problems that distract students from self-care. According to recent stats, only 6.6% of learners allocate time in their schedules for self-care every day. Moreover, since undergraduates have many burdening tasks and can hardly prioritize, a third of students constantly experience stress and anxiety. Moreover, one in four learners suffers from depression.