Unit 2 Reflection

Health is the measure of our body's efficiency and over-all well-being. There are three different aspects of health, mental, physical, and social. In order to be healthy, you must make sure these aspects and your 5 pillars of health, nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, and social, are balanced. I would say I am fairly healthy, although there are some aspects of my health that I need to work on. The areas I need work on are sleep and stress. As a full time student I am under a lot of stress and often stay up late working on school or college applications. In turn, I am sometimes not able to get able a lot of sleep. Here at Saratoga, the majority of the students are battling the same problems I am. Just from talking to people, I know a lot of students are sleep deprived and constantly stressed by all the pressure put on us by ourselves, parents, or peers. In order to promote greater wellness and health on campus, students should try to manage their time well and make sure they are balancing their pillars equally. Some of the essential understandings for this unit had to do with understanding how nutrients effect our physiology, why sleep is important, the physiological effects of stress to name a few. In this unit I learned how important your mental and social health is. People may often neglect their mental and social health, believing that physical health is the most important. I learned that making sure you get enough sleep, engage in social activities, and try to limit and control your stress can be just as important as exercising and eating nutritiously. In the next unit, I will make sure to gather a clear understanding from each section as I learn them and will be able to relate them to real life occurrences. In the sleep TED talk, it talked about how important it was to make sure you get enough sleep. That without enough sleep, your body will not be able to function like it normally does or should be able to. This just reinforces what we learned in the sleep lecture about just how important sleep is. How without sleep, it is hard to focus and do every day activities like driving.

My health goals are to eat a well balanced and nutrient filled meal, get at least some sort of daily exercise, as well as trying to manage my stress and making sure I get enough sleep.
Action I will take are trying to walk and go on runs as much as I can. In addition, I will try to be smart with my time and manage all my school work. Really putting in the effort not to get behind.
A healthy life is important to me because I want to make sure I am in good health and and live a long life.
I know I will have reached my goals when I feel like I have balanced out my 5 pillars of health.