How Sports Can Impact Your Productivity at College
Stereotypes tell us that sports success and study success are mutually exclusive. There are countless comedies about football players and cheerleaders, but the point is sports (or at least physical activity) helps us to become more productive and study more effectively. Moreover, it has several ways to do so. Let’s learn what these ways are.
Sports increase your energy level
Our logic says that not moving may save us energy and moving will exhaust it faster. But actually when we don’t move our body switches to the power saving mode, just as our laptops do. The energy is spent much slower, and all the processes in our body (including thinking) run slower too. To wake our body up, we have to do some reasonable exercises every day. Our blood starts circulating faster, our heartbeat and oxygen saturation also rise and all it prepares our brain for productive work.
You don’t have to run marathons though. Good old morning exercises or running around the block will do perfectly. Even jumping inside your living room or actively cleaning it may wake you up on a cellular level. This way, reading essays on https://paperap.com/literature/ for your assignment would be easier and you’ll be more productive.
Sports help us focus
Our ancestors ran and jumped for a reason. To engage in such an energy-wasting activity, they had to have either a mammoth before them or a sabertooth tiger behind them. So, our body still thinks of rapid activity increase as a kind of extreme situation. Such a situation demands our body to react fast and adapt to potentially dangerous surroundings. That’s why physical exercises help us to stay focused for several hours after them. It is also a good way to reduce stress by “burning” it with physical activity.
The long-term consequences include lower chances to have Alzheimer disease and slow down the brain ageing. Our brains have the treat called neuroplasty – the ability of neurons to create new connections and change the existing one. Experiencing “mini-stresses” caused by physical activity keeps our brain fit as much as the body, helping the neural cells to stay plastic and still adjust to the new information.
Sports make us happy
Another hormonal trick from our cave ancestors is the mood enhancement. As we said before, the physical activity works like mini stress that is controlled by us. But stress conditions also trigger a complicated hormonal mechanism that makes us alert, aware and… a bit happier. The work of our muscles makes our body produce small amounts of endorphins. Endorphins are hormones that make us feel excited and happy. It helps our body to suppress muscle pain and feel rewarded for something we’ve just done, e.g. escaped the sabertooth tiger or caught a mammoth.
Don’t rely on sports only, happiness is a complicated state that depends on many subjective and objective factors. But still, a small amount of daily exercise may make you a bit more comfortable with other things going on around you. Sports help you regain contact with your body. This is the key component of psychological stability and psychological resource that allows you to concentrate on study and feel better because of it. Dancing, stretching or just jumping wildly across your room – it doesn’t matter. The main thing is to feel your body moving, to see that you are controlling it to a full extent. In our virtual worlds with e-study, e-jobs and e-parties, we are prone to forget it and become dissociated from our body. We can’t feel it (mostly), but it still has an impact on our psychics. It is really important to return into our bodies once in a while.
It isn’t necessary to become an athlete of the Olympic level to cope with study better. But a healthy dose of exercises will truly enhance your mind and body, helping you to get into shape for study and learn new things with less effort and less frustration. Choose your own training program and remember – small but consistent exercises may not be counted as training programs by some professional coaches, but they may be just good enough for you. This is the main point: you have to benefit from doing this!