How to Use Exercise to Reduce Stress as a University Student

As a student in university, you have many things on your plate. This can be overwhelming at times, and you may slip out of healthy routines and habits that you had set in place. 

We all know the healthy habits that we need to do daily. Yet, when times get tough, we tend to fall away from these healthy routines and seek comfort as an escape from the hard times. In this article, I will be discussing how keeping a scheduled workout routine will help you decrease your stress and improve all areas of your life.

• How do we get stressed? 
• What does stress do to our bodies?
• How can exercise relieve this stress?
• How to implement exercise into your routine?

How do we get stressed? 

Every day you wake up with a certain level of stress. You can either see the stress in a positive or negative light. Positively speaking stress can be seen as good pressure. The pressure that will make you improve and strive to be better in everything that you do. Negatively, stress can be seen as bad pressure and can lead to anxiety. This anxiety makes us feel unconfident and we tend to overthink and find ourselves in an endless cycle of anxiety-ridden days.

The stress that normally affects students is the bad stress that causes anxiety and usually, this is because we have piled too much onto our plates and we feel overwhelmed. Overwhelmed by everything that’s happening and we feel the need to take a break. But what if I told you that taking a break really won’t solve anything? 

You should be trying to do other stuff that is going to help you get out of your mind and into your body. When we feel the first stages of anxiety and stress it’s easy to think that we need to take a break and sit back and not do anything about it. This is good to do in the moment but if we don’t implement a healthy routine that is going to combat it. With this anxiety, we will fall right back to where we were in the first place. I believe that setting a healthy routine of exercising every day is the first step to turning your stress into good stress and reducing the amount of anxiety in your life.

What does stress do to our bodies?

Physically stress makes our bodies curl up into a little ball and makes us feel less confident. This has really bad effects on our mental psyche. My best suggestion for getting through this stress and the point of this article is that you should go and exercise. My first reason for going and exercising surrounds the point of getting out of your mind and into your body. When we are stressed out and overwhelmed, we tend to overthink many different things and it puts us in this very anxious loop that is hard to get out of.

You may have tried listening to music or podcasts that you feel might help you in some way. These are all good approaches to relieve some stress but in general, going to the gym and doing something physical that stresses your body in a good way is going to be more beneficial for you. When we go to the gym our focus shifts, we start to focus on very primal human instincts lifting, running, and sweating. When at the gym if you find something that occupies you for an hour or two a day. You can take yourself away from all your stresses and use your energy in a positive way.

How can exercise relieve this stress?

My main reason for going to the gym is to take your anxious mind and put it into something productive that you can work on week by week. It really doesn’t matter what workout you’re doing the only things you need to focus on is. “Is this a hard activity” and Can I improve on it every week and achieve meaningful goals week by week to give myself something to be proud of?

When we start sculpting our bodies and being proud of what hard work, we’ve done. We become more confident in ourselves, and it is shown to the people around us. If you’re able to do these workouts in the morning, think of that as the hardest thing that you must do that day. And if you get into the mindset of this. Any other task that you must tackle, you know that you can do it because at least it’s going to be easier than your gym session in the morning.

Now we can’t remove stress from our lives. It’s part of the human experience to wake up and feel a bit of pressure to do something. But we can change how we handle the stress of being a human. By doing this we have to do hard things daily. To give ourselves something to be proud of and something to achieve. Using healthy ways to relieve the stress of the human existence is going to be very important in sustaining a healthy life

How do you implement exercise into your routine?

Next time when you sit down, and look at your schedule for the week, look at when you have time out. Times that you normally would be just checking your phone, watching movies, or doing less meaningful things. 

This could either be in the morning, at lunchtime or around dinner. Schedule 30 minutes to an hour a day with vigorous exercise. You don’t have to start off by doing it every day maybe every second day at first, but eventually, a routine where you allow yourself to work out every day. 

This workout will give you time and space away from your stressful life and let you think and work on a different part of yourself. A part of you that will make you more confident in the long run and help your stress levels. 

Doing this in university is very important as it sets great habits for yourself as a young adult. Lots of young adults normally don’t feel the need to exercise because it doesn’t hurt their bodies yet and they feel invincible. But we all know that that doesn’t last forever so find a way to work out and get out of your mind and into your body!