Tag Archives: wellness

Advice/How To, School Life

Easy ways to make your school morning better

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By: Alice Rapacz

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Do your mornings feel chaotic and like you’re in a rush? Well, today you will learn easy ways to make your morning better, so that your start to the day isn’t chaotic.

Having a morning routine helps you manage your time better so that you don’t end up forgetting things in the rush of the morning. It can help you stay calm and organized, helping you show up to school ready to learn. Sticking to the same routine helps build health habits that can also help you with many other things. One more big thing that having a morning routine adds is not having to waste time on small things, which allows you to use your time and energy for more important tasks.

Now, let’s get into what you can do to improve your mornings. A good morning starts with the night before. Doing as much as you can the night before sets you up to have less to do in the morning making it less busy.

Lay your clothes out:

The night before, pick your outfit out. This gives you time to make sure you like it and so that you don’t have to scrabble in the morning to find something from the dark depths of your drawer.

Pack your backpack:

Put all your homework, notebooks, books, and other necessities in your backpack and don’t forget to charge your iPad! Doing this helps to make sure that you don’t forget that important homework assignment that is due the next day or other important items.

Prep your meals:

Make your lunch if you take one the night before. This makes sure your not standing in front of the fridge in the morning unsure what to pack and not packing one because you need to catch the bus.

Breakfast is such an important meal of the day. It gives you energy to tackle your first classes before lunch. There are many meals that you can prepare ahead of time that you can quickly take out and eat in the morning. Some are overnight oats or yogurt parfaits that you can customize to your liking. Breakfast doesn’t need to be hard, it just needs to fuel you for the day. So quick breakfasts that you can make in the morning are: a piece of toast with peanut butter and banana, oatmeal with fruit, a hard boiled egg and a piece of toast, and so much more.

Keep it consistent:

Setting an alarm in the morning and sticking to it. Getting the routine of not snoozing the alarm makes it easier to wake up after a while. Keep the alarm at the same time, the more you wake up at one time, the more you adjust.

When going to bed, wind down by reading a book before bed or doing something off a screen. I know it can be hard to put down the phone or turn off the TV, but it makes it easier to fall asleep. Go to bed at the same time each night. Having a consistent bedtime makes sticking to the routine easier in the morning.

These are a few easy ways to make your morning better so that you can have a good start to the day instead of a chaotic one. Remember, keep it consistent with everything you do. Make it a long term effort, doing it for one day won’t help. Now get out there and have a great morning.

Advice/How To

The importance of hygiene

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By: Jooney Freddieson & Aalovely Lor

Generated by Canva AI 

Introduction 

Good hygiene is essential for both your physical and mental wellbeing. It holds multiple practices, starting from handwashing to brushing your teeth. 

Hygiene helps prevent spreading harmful bacteria, infections, and viruses. That makes it the best and easiest disease prevention technique.

Without proper hygiene, people become susceptible to widespread health issues. This could be the common cold or more serious illnesses like the flu. 

Dental Hygiene

Dental hygiene is one of the key factors to keeping good hygiene. 

This begins with brushing your teeth at least twice a day, both morning and night. Along with brushing comes flossing and mouthwash to help remove plaque and prevent gum infections. 

Poor dental hygiene leads to cavities, gum infections, and in serious cases heart conditions. 

Having regular checkups and cleanings with dentists play a crucial role in your dental hygiene because even if you can’t feel it, you never truly know what’s going on in your mouth. 

Body Hygiene 

Body hygiene is keeping the body clean. 

The most important aspect of body hygiene is bathing or showering regularly. This helps remove the dirt, excess oils, and sweat you’ve built up over the previous days. 

Showering and changing into clean clothes daily help reduce the risk of skin infections, including acne or fungal infections.

Proper body hygiene also builds confidence and comfort in your wellbeing. Feeling fresh and clean positively impacts your interactions with others. 

Hand hygiene 

Hand hygiene is one of the most effective methods to prevent the spread of diseases and illnesses. 

Washing your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds already helps remove disease, dirt, and viruses that could cause illness. 

Using this method is really important after using the bathroom, handling food, or being in public areas. 

Throughout the day you touch many infected surfaces such as your phone, toilets, doorknobs, and tables. These surfaces have harmful bacteria that could be washed off with soap and water. 

Nail Hygiene 

Nail Hygiene is very important but it is an overlooked part of personal hygiene. 

It involves keeping your fingernails and toenails trimmed, clean, and strong. Nails should be free from bacteria and dirt.

Nails can easily trap germs that you pick up from everyday activities if they’re not cleaned regularly. These germs can enter your body through eating/drinking or when touching your face. They can also enter through cuts and wounds. 

Poor nail hygiene can lead to infections like, stomach aches, paronychia, and buildups of bacteria. 

Cleaning and trimming your nails regularly helps prevent issues like infections or stomach aches, and also helps your nails grow strong and healthy. 

Clothing Hygiene

Clothing hygiene means wearing, cleaning, and changing clothes regularly. After sweating from physical activities our clothes absorb our sweat and oil from our skin including dirt and dust throughout the day. 

If you continue to wear unwashed clothes regularly, not only will it give you a bad odor it will also lead to skin irritations and or bacterial infections. 

Clean clothes help prevent health problems but they also help with boosting self esteem and presenting a positive image to others. 

Ear Hygiene 

Ear hygiene focuses on cleaning, managing earwax build ups, and cleaning the outer part of our ears. 

Wiping the outside of our ears with a damp cloth or paper towel helps remove dirt and excess wax. Doing this regularly prevents itchy buildups and helps keep our ears clean. 

Inserting cotton swabs/q-tips or fingers into our ears can push the wax in further leading to an uncomfortable buildup and ear infections. It can also damage our hearing if pushed further. 

It is recommended by doctors to use an earwax remover tool to remove ear wax build ups. The tool is in the shape of a tiny spoon which helps safely remove earwax and not push the wax forward. 

Maintaining good ear hygiene prevents discomfort, infections, and hearing problems. 

Overall, good hygiene is essential for preventing the spread of illness, staying healthy, and keeping a better image. Making these habits a regular part of your daily life and routine will improve your physical and mental wellbeing. 

Getting To Know/History, Music/Concerts

The impact of music on mental health

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By: Kate Tabor

Image created using ChatGPT

We all love music, and it turns out that it’s for a good reason. Many studies have shown that music can have a positive impact on your mental health (and even your physical health, if only by a bit). Here’s how.

Music helps distract us from our thoughts and lowers our stress. Listening to music can lower stress hormones, as well as blood sugar and heart rate, both of which are things that spike when you’re stressed. If you want to block out the world and forget about whatever problems you’re dealing with at the moment, listening to songs that share a different story is a good way to do that.

Not only can it help with stress, it can help you name your emotions, and manage them better. If you’re feeling off, but don’t know why, try listening to classical music. It sounds silly, but hearing a melody without lyrics helps you project your own feelings onto the music, without the music already having a feeling or meaning.

Even without classical music, songs can often help us figure out what we’re feeling as well. I can’t count how many times I turn on one of my favorite songs casually, and even though I’ve heard it a million times before, a lyric sticks out to me and I just think wow, where are the cameras hidden? Music can help you place your feelings, and also feel seen in those feelings.

Music builds community. It brings people together. Music festivals, radio shows, Spotify playlists, etc. A popular app around my age group a bit ago was an app called Airbuds Widget, where you can share what you’re listening to with your friends. I’ve made so many friends based on just recognizing that we both listen to the same artist.

Music can also boost your mood when you’re feeling down, which I find to be especially true. Everyday, I hop in my car after school and turn my favorite playlist on, and I immediately feel better.

Even just half an hour ago, I was unmotivated to start writing this article, but I sat down, put my airpods in, and got to work. Music has a huge impact on me, and I’m sure many others, on how motivated I feel.

Music can be a great tool, even when we don’t realize it.

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Advice/How To

Quality of sleep

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By: Gabriella Bell

As you lie down in bed after a tiring day, maybe from being at school, sports, work, or fundraising, has it ever been more difficult to fall asleep than after a casual day where you’ve stayed home and simply just laid on the couch, watching your favorite television show? Maybe there’s a lot on your mind. Maybe your brain isn’t as tired as you’d like it to be yet. As you stay there, lying in bed and contemplating your day, you finally fall asleep.

Sleep is one of, if not the most, important bodily function, and it plays a major role in the overall health and well-being of the human body. With an excessive lack of sleep it can have several severe negative impacts on one’s physical and mental health.

Depending on the quality of sleep you receive, it can also have effects on cognitive performance, this commonly includes difficulties in concentration, making decisions (regardless if they’re important or not), reaction times, and your memory retention throughout the day. While sleep is important to improving and keeping up your physical health and cognitive performance, these things can also be heavily dependent on other aspects such as a proper and balanced nutritional intake, hydration, and physical activity.

Throughout your day, you may experience difficulties in concentration and organization of important information. While being asleep, your brain arranges and rearranges this information accordingly, which helps memorization and clear thinking. Without proper sleep, this could prove to be more difficult, and may have certain damaging effects. If you’re a student, or in a line of work where constant learning and improvement is especially important, this could most likely severely impact your productivity throughout the day, therefore leading to the possibility of not passing classes or losing that occupation in life.

Through looking into the effects on a person’s physical health and the overall impacts sleep has on it, a necessary part it plays is through hormonal regulations. This primarily relates to hormones that are produced that are designed in order to control the metabolism along with appetite. These hormones send the message of the body being hungry or full, which could lead to over or under eating. Several of these studies have further shown that poor quality of sleep can often be linked back to the development, and later diagnosis, of diabetes or obesity.

Another important thing that could be affected are the regenerative processes proceeding throughout the body, such as tissue and muscle reparation, which can help to explain how cuts, scratches, or bruises progressively heal over time. Along with this, without proper sleep, it can also prove to have negative impacts on the immune system over time, as your body may not have enough energy as it used to in order to properly distribute it and upkeep these bodily functions. Which can ultimately lead to contracting illnesses more often, or developing infections more easily.

Lack of sleep can also reflect upon the stress levels and hormones, which can interact with the emotional stability of a person while helping to reduce that stress along with regulations of mood changes. Many sleep disorders that lead to chronic sleep deprivation are commonly linked back to mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. This can also be reversed, though as some people with depression and/or anxiety often experience changes regarding their quality of sleep, which can lead to the development of insomnia or other sleeping disorders. This disruption in sleep can affect the production of the hormone, melatonin. With that in mind, cases also tend to differ between people, as some with depression experience a surplus in their melatonin production, leading to oversleeping, while others may experience a decline in their melatonin levels, resulting in lack of sleeping. 

Along with all of this, without proper sleep it can create a generally irritable or exhausted mood that can result in long term impacts on your mental health and relationships within day-to-day lives (including friends, romantic partners, parents, siblings, coworkers, etc.) 

Sleep is a very fundamental human function that controls and contributes to so many aspects of our bodies and impacts us so much throughout our days. Regardless, if we recognize the beneficial impacts provided to us through sleep, by going on to recognize the importance of healthy sleeping habits and routines, this can further improve the overall quality of our lives.

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