Five Daily Habits to Keep You Focused and Healthy at College

Are you struggling to stay focused this semester? There is always something going on for college students, including school projects, time spent with friends, and extracurricular activities. Below are five essential daily habits that can keep you going strong at college.

Express Gratitude

One of the keys to happiness is to express gratitude for the things you have already accomplished. Things as small as enjoying delicious food with your friends and having access to higher education can be your starting points for this powerful daily habit. 【小题1】

Get Enough Sleep

Sufficient sleep is a great way to maintain a focused and healthy lifestyle. Just like you set an alarm to wake up in the morning, try setting an alarm for yourself to go to sleep at night. One of my friends tried this. 【小题2】 Try it and reap the benefits of improving your memory, creativity, and stamina.

Exercise

To boost your mental and physical strength, you should have a short workout every morning. 【小题3】 But a 15- to 45-minute daily workout will make a huge difference in your life. It is the key to starting a productive day. Workouts also help your sleep by promoting deeper and longer sleep.

Set Social Media Limits

【小题4】 However, excessive use of these can lead to depression. According to the BBC, recent research has found that young people who spend more than two hours on social media every day are more likely to report poor mental health. You should schedule a certain time each day to check your feed.

Take Control of Your Finances

You must gain control over your money. To cut costs, I recommend buying secondhand textbooks, cutting out junk food from your diet, and avoiding eating out at restaurants as much as possible. 【小题5】 Besides, think about getting an on-campus job to earn some extra money.

I grew up in New Orleans where hurricane preparations were as common as school fire drills. Every time there was a drill, we could pack a few bags and drive to Houston, where we had relatives, and staved for a few days before returning home. But when Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, things no longer operated like a fire drill.

The schools were closed. My family set out to find me a new school. We were fortunate to find a top school in Houston that generously offered me scholarships to complete the year. It was a private international school, with students from over seventy countries and a dozen languages being spoken as you walked through the hallway. It was a place with a totally different cultural atmosphere.

I was uncertain about the transition before entering the new school. I was granted the good future, however, to enter this new school environment at the beginning of the school team's soccer season. And at an international school, the soccer team was the most important team around.

The day I stepped into my new school, soccer gave me a team. I did not need to speak the same language as my teammates to pass them the ball. I did not need to share the same nationality as my teammates in order to celebrate a goal with them. I made some of my closest friends on that team.

I loved soccer and had dreams of becoming a professional, making a living from playing in one of the top leagues in Europe. I often dreamed of the places this game would take me, but I could have never expected that it would serve as the cornerstone of the bridge between different languages and cultures in the new school.

I had introduced the octopus award early in the school year.【小题1】 The class was curious as I called him forward. I was holding a paper in one hand and an octopus in the other.

I said, “You did very well on this math test. For showing so much improvement, you’ve earned the very first octopus award. But there’s one more thing.” Not being sure what this was all about, he asked,“ What?” I held out his paper and added, “【小题2】” It meant there was no paper to take home to show his parents. Instead, he would have the admiration of his classmates as the first winner of this world.

By the end of the year, only the quiet little girl had not won an octopus. I knew I couldn’t make up a reason to reward her.【小题3】

One Friday afternoon, I gave a simple assignment. “Draw any picture of your choice.【小题4】” I collected their papers and took them home to review. When I saw the little girl’s paper, I got excited. She had drawn a simple blue sky and green grass by a pond. On a path nearby were three people side by side. One was using crutches, one was in a wheelchair, and one had no obvious physical need.

Above her drawing she had written: “The sky is blue. The grass is green. And all the people are different.” Bingo! I couldn’t wait to get to class to make a trade —an octopus for this drawing. The look of joy when I called her forward was worth the wait.

【小题5】What has remained is her simple wisdom, treasured in my heart. It helped me develop a variety of relationships that I enjoy, just because “all the people are different.”