By: Caelyn Hippen

As many of you know, stretching is a very important element when it comes to physical activity and working out. But maybe you don’t know all of the benefits of it. Stretching has more of an impact on your body than many of us know. Here are some examples of stretching benefits.

First off, there are many types of stretching, such as:

• Dynamic Stretching – active movements and are done to prepare your muscles for movement and exercise.
• Ballistic – bouncing movement; less popular and has been proven to be bad for your muscles.
• Passive stretching – done after your workout and with equipment.
• Static stretching – this stretch is when you hold a certain pose for up to 30 seconds. This stretch is usually performed after a workout.

Here are some benefits before a workout:

• Increased blood flow
• Reduced fatigue
• Increased flexibility and range of motion
• Improved performance in workout

Benefits of stretching after a workout:

• Reduces muscle pain and risk of injury
• Gradual relaxation
• Immediate muscle repair – goes back to lowering your risk of injury, stretching after you workout, especially static stretching, can help you by avoiding muscle cramping and tightness.

Overall benefits stretching has on your body:

• Improves posture – helps your posture as you are stretching new muscles, and strengthening new muscles.
• Helps to heal and reduce back pain – like I said before, stretching increases your range of motion. This comes into play again with stretching your back. Stretching helps release tension in muscles around your back and spine. These tense muscles can cause further pain and can build up as time goes on.
• Calming – did you know that stretching applies to all muscles, including arm muscles, leg muscles, and brain muscles? Meditation and mindfulness is also a type of stretching, like yoga. Mindfulness and meditation exercises are just as important as stretching before a workout.

Tips to a successful stretch:

• To be successful when stretching, it is so important not to overdo it or go past your point of comfort. Stretching should be a relaxing, positive experience. And while after a workout, you do want to stretch your muscles to avoid injury, stretching too far can hurt your muscles just as much as if you didn’t stretch at all.
• Another important thing about stretching to keep in mind is to not go into your stretches cold. It is important to do a warmup activity, such as 50 jumping jacks, before you stretch. This is important because it will help your muscles stretch even farther.
• One more thing, remember that stretching isn’t a one time thing. You need to remember that stretching isn’t something you are good at, it’s just supposed to be fun and calming. Say you have a goal to get your splits, this isn’t necessarily a goal you can set a time limit on. You can tell yourself to stretch everyday, but you can’t push yourself too far or you will get injured and hurt your muscles.

By: Grace Blumer-Lamotte

Yoga is the practice of your physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. It is a physical form of exercise moving your body through various positions. Yoga comes in many different forms. Yoga can be physical exercises, such as vinyasa classes, which boost your heart rate with movement. It can also be mindfulness practice. Another form of yoga is breathing exercises.

Yoga can benefit your mental health. If you are suffering from depression, anxiety, PTSD, eating disorders, or other psychiatric disorders, yoga could help improve it. 

The connection between yoga and your mental health is this: It creates a safe, quiet, and still place for your body and mind. It can also create a space for you to express yourself.

According to Dai Manuel, a fitness speaker, these are 7 effective ways to improve your mental health with regular yoga practice: Increase your self-confidence, improve your level of concentration, make you physically fit, avoid stress, good posture, peaceful mind, and increase the quality of your sleep.

The way yoga increases your self confidence is by giving you a peaceful and private space for yourself to heal and learn from past mistakes.

Yoga can improve your level of concentration by focusing on an object or staring at a long distance view. This can enhance your level of concentration. Each pose takes concentration on what you are doing and where it is going on.

Yoga can also make you physically fit by practicing exercise regularly and putting in the effort.

It can help you avoid stress by having good yoga postures. According to Dai Manuel, “When you practice yoga 2 times a day (it’s enough at least you spare half an hour a day) it makes you feel relaxed and puts you away from your level of stress and helps you to become more healthy and successful in life.”

Good posture can also come from practicing yoga. Yoga can help your body maintain its position and relieve stress and inner pains. 

When you first start yoga, it is difficult to find the inner peaceful mind. When you practice yoga more and more you will soon feel and achieve what a peaceful mind feels like. Yoga is poses and breathing practice. Focusing on your breathing can help your brain find your inner peace.

Everyone knows that increasing your quality of sleep is difficult. Again, Dai Manuel has some thoughts on this: “At the end of your day try to spare around 15 minutes for you to recollect all your day memories and sit in your yoga position, try to concentrate on your breathing, which helps you to enter into a state of relaxation, overcoming your day’s hurdle.”

By: Liv MIller

We all know that water is one of the most beneficial contributions to all living things. Plants need water to grow, animals need water to survive, and as humans, so do we.

Not only does water help grow plants that provide food for us to eat, and in turn help us survive, but the human body also needs water to survive as well. I’m sure everyone knows the importance of water and how it keeps us alive, so I don’t need to go into great detail about that. But the amount of water a person drinks significantly affects that person’s health.

Growing up, everyone’s parents told us that we need to drink lots and lots of water if we wanted to be healthy. And even now, doctors and health professionals are constantly advising us to drink more water daily. But why does this help us? If I’m drinking enough water to keep me alive I shouldn’t need more right? Well, this is what most people struggle to understand.

There are many health benefits that occur by drinking as much water as one can during the day. Even drinking just a little bit more water than usual can benefit you, because according to Healthline.com, “Dehydration can have a noticeable effect if you lose as little as 2% of your body’s water content”. Why is this so important? Well, the effects that dehydration has on your body are not fun. As Healthline.com also states, “Your brain is strongly influenced by your hydration status. Studies show that even mild dehydration, such as the loss of 1–3% of body weight, can impair many aspects of brain function”. What can happen is that it can impair your mood and concentration; it can also cause you to be more prone to headaches.

Maybe the risks of not drinking enough water won’t convince you to stay hydrated, so let’s talk about how it can improve your way of life. Again, according to Healthline.com, drinking water can help with weight loss. This happens because drinking water improves your metabolism, which increases the number of calories you burn in a day.

Drinking water can also improve your physical performance. If you are an athlete, staying hydrated is very important if you want to stay at the top of your game. When you sweat you lose 6-10% of your water weight which causes serious dehydration, which as we talked about before, isn’t good.

Some other benefits drinking water can have on your body is that it can prevent constipation and even treat kidney stones.

The benefits that drinking water has on your body is endless. So, why not take the extra effort to make sure your getting the proper hydration you need?

By: Ella Sutherland

Let’s be honest, everyone loves plants. Plants just bring a good feel to your surroundings. I think they give your house an even more homey feeling.

There are so many benefits of having plants in your house. First, they improve your mood. Something about them creates a soothing environment and makes you feel more relaxed and safe. Some plants, like ornamental plants, raise levels of positive energy around your home. Also, if you are constantly looking at, and being around, plants, it actually helps people feel more calm and relaxed, which then decreases levels of anxiety.

Second, plants reduce your stress levels by a lot. During photosynthesis, one of the products is oxygen; having more clean oxygen promotes healthier air quality. If you are working in an indoor environment, which lots of people are working from home because of the pandemic, then you will see that breathing in indoor fumes and toxins will make your mental health go down and you can get anxiety or depression, but plants will make sure that you’re not breathing in unhealthy air. Also, having something to care for, like plants, can reduce physiological and psychological stress.

Third, plants increase alertness and your memory. If you are around plants, either at home or at work, plants can help improve your memory and your attention and concentration span by 20 percent. It also increases concentration by making it easier for you to focus for longer periods of time. It makes your productivity level higher. There are studies that show that employees are much more productive when some common house plants were added to the place they worked at.

Overall, I think after reading this article you can really think about, and put in perspective, how good plants really are for you and your mental health. It doesn’t cost a lot to just put a couple plants in your home, and I guarantee you will end up feeling so much better.

By: Sumaya Noor

What is personality typology?

Personality typology refers to distinguishing or categorizing people and animals due to their behavioral traits. It is an umbrella term that includes Myers-Briggs, Carl Jung, Enneagrams, and more.

Typology is claimed to be very accurate to the majority, and can either be studied for fun or to deeply understand one’s self or others. People’s behavior, beliefs and attitudes towards both their inner and outer world are analyzed and placed into many categories of personality types. For example, Myers-Briggs is one of the most famous personality type systems. Created by American author Isabel Briggs Myers, this type indicator is based on theories of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.

How do you determine your personality type?

There are many ways to find out your personality type. For people who want to do it for fun, there are plenty of assessments to take online or physically. After answering a series of questions based on your individual preferences, beliefs and morals, you would be given one of the 16 4 letter types. “I” standing for “Introvert”, “E” for “Extrovert”, “N” for “Intuitive”, “S” for “Sensing”, “T” for “Thinking”, “P” for “Perceiving”, and finally “J” for “Judging”. Each of these traits will be determined by your results.

For those who are serious about studying typology, there is a very extensive research on cognitive functions, which is a mental process that one uses throughout their life. Created by Carl Jung, these functions can be used to analyze a person’s thinking, choices, and feelings when faced with different situations.

They can also be used to better understand one’s self, as the system has been deemed very accurate. In an article by Christian Roseler, “These significant changes are reached by Jungian therapy with an average of 90 sessions, which makes Jungian psychotherapy an effective and cost-effective method. Process studies support Jungian theories on psychodynamics and elements of change in the therapeutic process. So finally, Jungian psychotherapy has reached the point where it can be called an empirically proven, effective method.”

Where can I test my personality type?

There are a variety of tests, but popular ones are:

• Keys2Cognition http://www.keys2cognition.com/
• 16 Personalities https://www.16personalities.com/

Please do note that these tests are not 100% accurate and are for fun.

By: Fatima Mohamud & Sumaya Noor

Not only can drinking and driving put a person at risk, it can also put other people at risk and potentially end many lives. On average, drinking and driving kills about 10,000 Americans per year. According to Nhtsa.gov, about 28 Americans die per day, which is about one person per hour. This is preventable, but over the years it’s been getting worse.

Consuming alcohol can affect the human brain in many ways, but here are some common effects: altered speech, losing judgement, losing track of time, losing sense of balance, altered mood, feeling hyper, and losing sense of direction. Losing a sense of direction is a big part of why many lives are lost to drunk driving, as an individual may not be able to tell where they are turning or how fast they are going.

Even though it’s very illegal, people still tend to somehow let it happen. They can face charges, spend time in jail and this also goes on their record for all future jobs and activities can see.

An individual may have an accident with a price that’s too much to pay, or even have to deal with insurance not being able to cover it.

Here are some ways to help stop drunk driving from happening:

1. Stop drinking: Drinking is something millions of people do, and it’s normal if you’re over 21, although not healthy to have too much. If an individual keeps it at a moderate level it’s fine, but it can lead to heart or liver diseases and cancer.
2. Drink at home: If someone is drinking at home, they can spend less time being on the road to get to places, rather than being at a bar and having to drive home.
3. Ask a friend or family member to drive: this can ensure their safety as well as others.

For more information, please visit:

• https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving

By: Ella Sutherland

Journaling is an amazing way to spend some of your free time. There are so many great benefits of journaling and everything you can do.

Journaling is a great way to keep organized. Lists are a way to use your journal to stay organized. To-do lists can help you because you can use them to write down what you have going on in your week or even just what you have going on in that one day. You can mark what you do throughout the day and then cross it off once it’s done.

Another great way to use your journal is to write down your feelings. Writing down what you are feeling is a great way to take a weight off your shoulders and minimize your stress level. You can write daily entries or just write something every once in a while. If you just express what you are feeling and be honest with yourself it can be really refreshing and just a great way to wind down before bed or school.

Journaling is also a great place to write down your goals and ambitions. Whenever you are feeling like there is something in your life or about yourself that you could improve, you can write it down. Writing it down and seeing it in front of you will give you more motivation to actually go out and do it. It will also be more satisfying when you get to cross it off once you’ve actually accomplished it.

Self-reflecting is one of the most important things you can do. Everyone’s life is super hectic right now; for most people they are just coming back into school or work after having a year and a half off. Everything is moving very fast and sometimes we need to take a second to slow down and reflect on what’s been going on.

For more information, please visit:

• https://journey.cloud/journaling-benefits/