How can you maintain a good student-life balance?

1. Prioritize sleep
2. Make time for your relationships
3. Study more effectively

Students of international colleges in the Philippines usually complain about not having a perfect student-life balance. They feel that studies occupy so much of both their weekdays and weekends, to the point of lacking time for family, friends, and sleep. They focus so much on being a good student that there is a tendency to forget and enjoy the important aspects of life. You miss out on meeting your loved ones. You become tired from losing sleep over school requirements. When you neglect these activities, you also become less efficient as a student. Therefore, it is important for people in business management courses and other majors to manage their time better for school and life. These are tips people can follow to have a good student-life balance:

Prioritize Sleep

As students, we have days when we are able to rest after days of stress and little sleep. These may be a weekend or a Friday night right after a whole week of exams and report submission. Most people think that self-care means watching Netflix morning to night or hanging out with friends until late in the evening. While these are all enjoyable, most students tend not to take advantage of these days to make up for lost sleep. Sleep should be one of the activities every smart student should prioritize.

Sadly, research shows that students are getting less and less sleep due to several factors such as all-nighters and electronic use at night. Some may be losing rest time due to needing to study and work at the same time. Most students will go through to the day with 5-6 hours every week, and research shows that they will perform poorly as someone who hasn’t slept in 2 days. If you have been sleeping throughout your 8 am classes for 4 days in a row, maybe it’s apt for you to find more time to sleep at night. Therefore, people in business management courses and other courses should shut their eyes for at least 7 hours so that they achieve better grades.

Sleep not only helps us to be smarter, it also helps to be more emotionally balanced and healthy.

When you crammed the night before, do you ever notice that you seem grumpier the next day?  Everyone and everything seems to blow your fuse. Believe or not, there is scientific research about your brain to explain your grumpiness. Cognitive Reappraisal (CRA) is the brain’s way of managing your emotional reactions to events and to manage their personal impact on you. It is especially important when you are feeling negative emotions because of certain events such as stressful ones. When you lack sleep, the brain’s ability to do CRA gets negatively affected and life events tend to emotionally impact you more than usual.

If you don’t want to start unnecessary emotional drama in your life, then sleep better.

Make Time for Your Relationships

Your romantic partner, family, and friends are people you should not neglect. Students sacrifice time with them for organizations and school work in international colleges in the Philippines, and this is, in fact, necessary. But, focusing so much on one pursuit can also be unhealthy. It’s not only school that tends to restrain us from pursuing the company of our loved ones. Social media and other websites make us look at the phone more than actual people.

Meaningful and healthy relationships have several benefits. Friends can improve the quality of our life by reducing stress and motivate us to make more positive decisions. Furthermore, they will be there when life has knocked you down. In business management courses, you will usually struggle with gaining loyal customers and earning revenue when you start selling in senior year. These problems can make anyone feel worthless or even isolated.

Your friends are important factors in living a healthy life. You may eat healthily and exercise, but friendships also play a big role in making you live longer. Older people with more friends are 22 percent less likely to die than those without.

Lastly, the lessons you learn from friendship are the foundations of what you would be looking for in a committed marriage.

Study More Effectively

People study in different ways. Most people will usually just read a written work and highlight, and while this is not wrong, there are better ways of absorbing and memorizing information faster. When you do, school won’t take so much of time.

• Take down notes with a pen, rather than a laptop. According to the encoding hypothesis, your brain is processing information as you write because you have to usually summarize or paraphrase lessons in your professor’s presentation due to lack of time

• Read your notes every night for a few hours, instead of cramming them before an exam and sacrificing sleep

• Do not study straight, instead, take a 15-minute break after 30 minutes of studying. You can insert naps, exercise, and meditation during your break times. These activities are better ways of making the most out of time, instead of just using social media.

Key Takeaway

If people in college want to be good students, then they should learn how to balance time between studying and enjoying life. You are not meant to only work. You also need to meet people and sleep, and you can do this by studying more efficiently.