Why Student Well-being is Important and Why It Shouldn’t Be Overlooked

As we all know, student well-being has emerged to be a crucial aspect of modern education. That’s because as a student, your mental, emotional, and physical health directly impacts your academic performance, social development, and overall happiness. Furthermore, as you navigate the pressures of academic workloads, social interactions, and personal development, it becomes even more important to address student health and wellness.

So, to help you understand the nuances of student mental health and wellness, its significance, the consequences of overlooking it, and its role in promoting student well-being, we’ve shared our findings and insights below. Take a look to learn more! 

The Significance of Student Wellbeing

In our attempts to understand student well-being, let’s begin with understating its significance first. 

1. Enhanced Academic Performance

First and foremost, incorporating mental well-being for students plays a significant role in aiding and improving your academic success. You’ll be pleased to know that students who feel supported and have a healthy emotional state tend to perform better at school than their peers.

It happens because they become resilient against stress, anxiety, and depression; which is known to impair concentration, memory, and your ability to learn.

2. Emotional Resilience and Mental Health

In addition to making you resilient against mental inhibitors like stress, mental health wellness also helps you ward away negative emotional influences. Warding them off is particularly important because even a hint of negative influence on your mind can take you down a rabbit hole, returning from which is going to take a lot of time and energy.

Also, some emotional support increases the secretion of the neurochemical oxytocin, which is considered to be one of the best for your brain’s health.

3. Social Development and Positive Relationships

Thirdly, your mental health and wellness also significantly influence your ability to build and maintain relationships. Again, this happens because when you connect with yourself through self-inquiry or therapy, you start to accept your flaws, and in doing so, you start to love yourself more.

This love then translates into you accepting people as they are, hence helping you steer away from judgment, which in turn helps you build rapport faster. Once that rapport is established, that’s when lasting friendships take root; be it in your academic or professional environment.

4. Physical Health and Wellbeing

Now, many of us unfortunately seem to ignore how important physical activities are in our overall student well-being. You see, at a time when our lifestyle has become so stagnant, moving your body a bit tends to solve the majority of your health problems. A bit of movement keeps the blood circulation mechanism in good shape.

This circulation supplies your organs with the macro and micronutrients, keeping them nourished and well functioning. This functioning in the results in you feeling stronger and happier inside your body and mind.  

Consequences of Overlooking Student Wellbeing

Now that we’ve understood the significance of student well-being, it’s time that we shed some light on the consequences too. Let’s dive in:

1. Academic Underachievement

Firstly, the most obvious consequence of overlooking student well-being is that it hinders your academic performance greatly. The reason is pretty simple for this one. If you neglect your well-being in any way, then your mind loses its capacity to concentrate and focus on a thing, thereby resulting in very poor retention of what you’ve learned. Such a scenario eventually leads to poor test or examination results.

2. Mental Health Crises

Furthermore, when you neglect your mental health and wellness, it can lead to a widespread mental crisis. In the sense that when you lack a sense of peace inside your mind, your manners and conversations tend to reflect the inner turmoil. When this happens, the person observing you or interacting with you subconsciously picks that up and responds similarly. This contagion then takes the shape of a circle of friends who haven’t been taking care of their student's mental health and well-being, leading to a mass lack of a sense of mental and psychological safety. 

3. Disengagement and Dropout Rates

Adding up to the previous points we learned about, ignoring student well-being leads to losing interest in almost everything, especially your social interactions and your academics. Cause think about it, when you are already drained mentally, you’ll be drained physically and psychologically too. This essentially won’t allow you to have the same kind of enthusiasm for things that are worth pursuing. Having such a state for a long enough time kills the positivity inside you, thereby creating disenchantment. 

4. Long-term Implications

This disenchantment mixed with a circle of people who are going through the same will create an echo chamber of dissatisfaction, keeping you and the people around you from doing difficult things; because in doing what’s difficult, you must move out of your comfort zone, and that’s not going to happen if you’re in a zone that’s troubling you and hampering your peace of mind.

The Role of Universities in Promoting Student Wellbeing

Now, in the last section talking about student well-being, it’s finally time that we get to the core of how your educational institutions, especially your universities can help you and your peers in ensuring student well-being.

1. Creating a Supportive Environment

Firstly, we feel that ensuring student well-being at your institutions starts with making efforts to foster a judgment-free environment. That’s because well-being at its very core is about vulnerability. If that’s not allowed then what’s even the point, right? In saying that, we’d also like to tell you that creating such an environment is not very difficult. You just start by conveying the importance of well-being and the pitfalls of not having any.

2. Integrating Wellbeing into the Curriculum

In addition to conveying, you can also try to convince your alumni to include well-being into your curriculum. You can start by organising public speeches to raise some awareness, and trust us, people who are brave enough to make a difference will be happy to join in with you. Only, you must remember that there will be a host of people you might have to deal with, a lot of ego sometimes. That’s fine though, because gory is in doing things that are difficult and that have the power to make this world a better place to live in.

3. Teacher Involvement and Training

The next step would be to involve your teachers and reason with them about the curriculum, telling them that without their involvement and guidance, bringing any positive change would be an incomplete effort. You can also add that it's only with their guidance and experience that you can truly persuade a group of people who require change. It’s their nurture and care that will be the biggest difference maker.

4. Parental Involvement

Last but not least, bringing your parents along for this endeavour will work like magic for your well-being. The reason is that your parents in most cases know a lot about you, and in some cases, more than you know about yourself. So, in such a case taking their help will be like holding the same hand you found safety at when you were a child. Such a feeling is truly irreplaceable.

So, to sum all of it up, we’d say that upholding student well-being and nurturing your inner state of being comes down to making an effort to do things that rid your inner self of negative emotions and replace them with positive ones. Yes, this won’t come easy; nothing that’s worth pursuing is easy, right? In doing the difficult thing, you’ll realise the best version of yourself. The version that is a brave contributor to society and life’s magnificence, cause in the end that’s all that matters.