Engaging in a Healthy Lifestyle

The whole chapter compresses to four words: nutrients in, toxins out. Aim to make half your plate vegetables and fruit — around eight servings a day, more vegetables than fruit — with whole grains and healthy protein filling most of the rest, and choose whole foods (anything not processed, packaged, or altered) as often as you can, since the average American gets 62 percent of their daily calories from processed food. Treat the front of a package as an advertisement and the label on the back as the facts: check the serving size first, then sugar (12 grams is nearly 2.5 teaspoons), sodium, and saturated fat, avoid trans fats, look for higher fiber, and remember that a shorter ingredient list is usually a better one. Water matters more than most people think — it makes up 60 to 80 percent of your body mass, you are already dehydrated by the time you feel thirsty, and losing as little as 1 to 2 percent of your body water can measurably impair how well you think. Aim for about eight glasses a day, or half your body weight in ounces, and carry a refillable bottle; go easy on soda and store-bought juice, since a 12-ounce glass of orange juice can carry about as much sugar as a can of Coke. Move your body about 150 minutes a week across the three types of exercise — flexibility (stretching, yoga, Tai Chi), strength (weights, push-ups, squats, lunges), and cardiovascular (jogging, swimming, biking, HIIT) — and know that aerobic exercise supports memory and cognition, so a jog before you study is not time stolen from studying. The best exercise is genuinely the one you will actually do.

A review of hundreds of sleep studies concluded that most adults need around eight hours — some do fine on seven, some need closer to nine — and both quantity and quality count. Sleep is not downtime: while you are out, your body repairs damaged tissue, processes and eliminates toxins, restocks the hormones that handle growth and appetite, restores energy, and supports your immune system, and cutting it short means that work does not finish. The costs show up fast: even one night under six hours dulls your thinking the next day; being tired makes you three times more likely to be in a car crash, and driving after 20 hours awake is roughly equivalent to driving at the 0.08 legal limit; the emotional part of your brain can be about 60 percent more reactive, so everything feels bigger than it is; and people who sleep less eat more fat and refined carbohydrates and fewer vegetables. Falling asleep is partly a chemistry problem you can help solve: your pineal gland releases melatonin in response to darkness, so screens and lights convince your brain it is still daytime, and violent or action-packed shows before bed release cortisol, the stress hormone. What works is unglamorous — the same sleep and wake times each day, a cool (around 65 degrees), dark, quiet room, no food within two hours of bed, no caffeine after lunch, and an hour of winding down with reading, music, journaling, or 4-7-8 breathing. Alcohol makes you drowsy but keeps you out of the deep repairing stages and often wakes you a few hours later, while 30 minutes of daily exercise helps you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. If you are doing all of this and still cannot sleep, that is worth a conversation with a doctor rather than a personal failing.

Not all stress is bad. Small amounts help you meet daily challenges and can push you to focus during exam weeks, and the fight-or-flight response exists for good reasons. The problem is chronic stress — stress that hangs around for weeks or months — which wears down your concentration, makes you more accident-prone, disrupts your sleep, weakens your immune system, and leaves you fatigued. You do not need a checklist to spot it — if work will not come together, headaches keep showing up, your fuse is shorter than usual, or you keep getting sick, that is usually stress asking for a different approach rather than more effort. One of the most useful tools costs nothing, and that is perspective: when something spikes, ask yourself on a scale of 1 to 100 how stressful this actually is and whether you will remember it in three years, because how you frame what is happening can intensify it or shrink it. Then keep a few concrete tools ready for different situations — mindfulness, which just means being present with your thoughts, feelings, and surroundings without judging them, whether that is slowing down a routine task, walking while noticing what is around you, or sitting still for a few minutes, which alone can lower heart rate and blood pressure. Two more that are easy to start: 2-4-6-8 breathing, where you exhale quickly to a count of 2, inhale through your nose for 4, hold for 6, and exhale slowly for 8, repeated for a few rounds; and gratitude, which research supports — in a UC Berkeley study, people who wrote a weekly gratitude letter for three weeks reported significantly better mental health for up to 12 weeks after the writing stopped.

Mental health is your level of psychological well-being — functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioral adjustment — and like physical health, everybody has it and it moves around over time. A mental health condition is almost never the result of one event; it usually comes from several overlapping causes, including your environment, your lifestyle, genetic predisposition, stressful or traumatic experiences, and brain biochemistry. These conditions are common: roughly one in four adults experiences a diagnosable mental health condition in any given year. What stands out is that more than half never seek treatment, and the leading reason is not cost or access — it is shame and fear of being judged by friends, family, and coworkers. That stigma is the part worth pushing back on, both in how you talk about your own hard stretches and in how you respond when a friend mentions theirs. Practically, that means learning what your campus health and counseling services offer before you need them, since starting college is a big transition; when something is beyond what a college counseling program handles, your health center can refer you to resources off campus, and organizations like NAMI and OK2TALK offer online, text, and phone support no matter where you go to school.

Relationships are not a side dish to health: in the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the people with the best health outcomes were the ones who leaned into relationships with family, friends, and community. A healthy relationship has mutual respect and trust, support when things are hard, shared celebration when things are good, and communication that feels easy and honest; the warning signs are the reverse — conversations that are tense or strained, confidences that get broken, and not feeling listened to, appreciated, or valued. If a relationship is unhealthy, try to improve it or end it, and do not stay for the wrong reasons like fear of being alone or guilt; if someone pressures you sexually, hurts you physically, or is verbally abusive, believing that they love you does not make up for the harm, and the advice is simply to end it. Healthy relationships also start with you: self-care is any activity that genuinely nurtures and refuels you, and it includes self-forgiveness, because a misstep is not the end of the world. Community counts too — students with a stronger sense of belonging and more involvement on campus are more successful, and students in extracurricular, volunteer, or part-time work commitments under about 20 hours a week earn higher grades than students who do nothing outside class. If you feel lonely right now, you are in the majority: over a 12-month period, 63 percent of college students reported feeling very lonely, and joining a group built around something you actually care about is one of the most reliable ways through it. On sexual health, the practical version is short: talk with a partner ahead of time about preventing STIs and pregnancy, get tested and know each other’s status, use condoms, and treat consent and respect as non-negotiable.

Being safety conscious means staying aware of your surroundings and being deliberate about alcohol and drugs rather than drifting into decisions. The numbers from college students are worth knowing: 32 percent of those who drank reported doing something they later regretted and 27 percent could not remember where they were or what they did, and binge drinking is generally defined as about four drinks for women or five for men within two hours. You do not have to be an alcoholic for drinking to derail a semester through missed classes, poor exams, and late work, and if your use of anything is interfering with your health, school, relationships, or money, the student health center and campus counselors are the place to start. For everyday safety: speak up when a friend seems in trouble or something looks wrong, and get an RA or campus authority involved; learn your campus emergency system and save the campus safety contact in your phone; never leave a drink unattended or accept one from someone you do not trust; keep your phone charged, avoid dark and empty areas, and go out and come back with a group. Find out whether your school offers a safety escort or another late-night option, check that a rideshare car matches the license plate in the app, and tell your roommates your plans and when you expect to be back. If something does happen, get to a safe, well-lit place, call 911 or have someone call for you, contact a person you trust, and give yourself time to heal, since campus mental health services can help with recovery. Your school has legal obligations here too: under Title IX, sexual harassment and sexual violence are prohibited forms of gender discrimination, and schools must stop it, prevent it from recurring, address its effects, and protect people who report from retaliation, while the Clery Act requires colleges to notify survivors of counseling resources, reporting options, and accommodations such as changing dorms or classes.